Many folks dread interviews. It may surprise you to learn that most hiring managers don’t exactly love them either. From the hiring manager’s point of view, interviews can be draining ordeals that require high levels of concentration. They may be conducting many interviews in a single day—and not just for a single role. Managers know they’ve got an hour or less to understand how well you can write, empathize with your audience, work well with others, and stay consistent in your editing. As a candidate, they’re a great opportunity for you to showcase not just your accomplishments and technical skills, but also your soft skills.

So how does it work? Technical writer interviews usually consist of at least one interview (phone, video, or in person) and often include a writing test as well. A short, more informal interview process, which may happen if you’ve been personally recommended by a trusted colleague, usually involves a single interview with the hiring manager.

A longer, more formal interview process may involve an initial interview with a recruiter, an interview with the hiring manager or a panel of multiple interviewers, and a chance to meet the rest of the team you’d be working with. This also gives them a chance to meet you and provide feedback to your manager on whether they think you’re a good fit for the team.

Interviews for technical writers focus on both soft skills and hard skills. Common questions include:

• What does a successful technical document look like?
• How would you keep your audience engaged?
• Imagine you’re about to document a new product or feature. What does that process look like?
• Tell me about a time you handled conflict in a school, work, or other group setting.
• What is the purpose of a style guide?

Following a successful interview process and a job offer, you and the organization will have to agree on employment terms. Salaries can vary widely depending on the industry, your technical skills, and your level of experience. If you’re a newbie, you may not have much bargaining power. Location also matters. For example, even within the United States, the cost of labor in Silicon Valley is not the cost of labor in Kansas City. For more information about salary, see the Write the Docs Salary Surveys.¹

Tip

Build Confidence by Rehearsing Your Answers It’s very easy to get flustered during an interview, particularly if the interviewer throws a curveball question at you that you weren’t expecting. The last thing you want to do is dissolve into a puddle of “uhms” and “ahhs” in the middle of a session. To avoid this, grab a list of potential interview questions and rehearse your answers to them until you’re confident that you can respond to them. You don’t need to recite the answers verbatim in the interview, so repeat them just enough times that the key points readily spring to your mind.

Voice of Practitioner

Dina Role: Senior Technical Writer with 25-plus years’ experience in technical writing, technical documentation management, and information architecture Location: Quebec, Canada Expertise: Software, process and procedure, hardware documentation “What I look for when I interview someone for a tech writing role is extreme curiosity: someone who’s not going to give up when the SME says ‘That’s not important.’ I’m looking for someone who truly cares. I’ve hired support people because I’ve seen the amazing documentation they’ve written for themselves. They’ve used no tools, but they have this desire to figure out a solution to save the user some time. You can teach a person who’s smart and motivated and willing to learn anything, but you have to have this thing in your head that won’t rest until you have an answer to your problem. It’s the people who stay up at night trying to solve a problem that I hire in a heartbeat because they’re always going to be improving, always getting better. That’s an innate skill that you can’t teach. You can be great technically, but if you don’t care figuring out how to get something, you’re always going to be ‘just ok.’”

Writing Tests During the Interview Process

So, you’ve gotten an interview for that coveted technical writing role…and they’ve told you that you’ll have to do a test. Don’t panic! Try and think of the writing test as an opportunity for you to showcase your excellent skills and in doing so stand out from the competition, rather than as an ordeal to be endured.

It helps to understand why hiring managers and recruiters use writing tests. Here are the key reasons:

• A writing test shows how you actually work under pressure vs. your writing samples, which showcase your best work that you’ve had the opportunity to finesse at your leisure. The writing test will demonstrate the typical volume and quality of work you can be expected to produce within a certain time.
• It tends to weed out the pretenders pretty quickly. These are the folks that lie on their résumé about having extensive experience or skills that they don’t—or those who didn’t create their own portfolio samples themselves.
• Finally, writing tests show how well you can follow instructions. Your potential employers will be assessing not just your communication ability, but also how well you listened to them. The ability to listen to stakeholders (including your boss) and pay close attention is an absolutely essential technical writer skill.

A typical writing test takes between one and two hours and tests your writing and editing skills. The hiring manager is looking for consistent, error-free work that demonstrates an understanding of technical writing principles.

1. Salary surveys. (n.d.). Write the Docs. https://www.writethedocs.org/surveys/ ↩︎