What I learned applying for jobs

After 9 months of searching I’ve finally found a full-time job and I’m relieved and exhausted. My layoff was a total surprise and disappointment, so I wasn’t ready for the job search, but since then I’ve learned a lot. As of the night before my first day at my new job, here are some things that I learned applying for tech writing jobs this year:

• Yeah, it’s rough out there for people applying for technical writing jobs.

  I’ve missed out on several final rounds of jobs that I thought were a great match for me. It’s also been difficult to get the initial interview, and extra difficult to get interviews with established companies — I interviewed mostly with startups. So it seems to me that the job market is really down.

• However, people still see the value in technical writing. I base that on these things:

  • No one asked me “So why should we hire you instead of using ChatGPT?” or otherwise asked me about AI. Writers are afraid of AI taking over tech writing jobs; I’m just afraid that it will take the bottom off the market, meaning that small companies with tight budgets will decide that AI-written docs are good enough.
  • There are plenty of job postings out there; I never had a shortage of things to apply to on the Write the Docs slack, devrelcareers.com, LinkedIn, and otta.com.
  • There are still jobs out there that pay salaries that are appropriate for highly skilled tech writers, say $150K USD and up.

• People spend time tooling their resumes to be read by applicant tracking systems (ATSs) but I don’t think that many companies use that kind of system in that way.

  At first I thought lots of companies were using them because I’d get rejections from jobs I thought I was well-qualified for very quickly, within a few hours, and sometimes in the middle of the night. Turns out that most of the time, that’s harried HR workers paging through the flood of resumes and spending mere seconds on each one before swiping left or right. I had good results by getting in touch with people after the quick rejection and saying that I was interested but didn’t get a recruiter screen, and sometimes they’d say “Wow, we didn’t give you an interview? Something’s wrong.”

• Given that getting the first interview is essentially a Tinder swipe left/right situation, it’s more important than ever that your information provides some hooks to grab people’s interest.

  I had good results when I had a directly apropos portfolio example to point people to, maybe even before my resume. I wonder if a great portfolio example sticks in someone’s mind better than a list of generic job tasks in a resume when they’ve seen 200 of them today. So reduce friction to look at your information and provide unique and interesting things about you to give people a reason to put you in the “interview” pile.

• It does make sense to look at what your resume looks like to computers, though:

  Try selecting all and pasting your resume into a text box. I noticed problems like dashes coming in as strange characters and line breaks merging words. Ideally the different text boxes in the resume should come through in the correct reading order, but there’s often no way to control this.

• No one asks for references, but everyone asks for a LinkedIn account.

  I think this is because these days, references are just to prove that you are who you say you are, not that you are good at anything in particular, and LinkedIn is good enough at that. I’m going to continue managing my LinkedIn account and making sure I’ve got up to date connections there, and I may stop bothering to keep my reference sheet up to date.

• Interview preparation continues to be super important.

  The more you know about the company and its products, the easier it is to get past high-level questions and into the questions that will reveal what the job will really be like and provide info about how you would handle it. Install the company’s software, look up the interviewer on YouTube, definitely read their existing documentation, and work what you learned into the interview. I have a whole rubric for a prep sheet for interviews that I may post later.

• Everybody does things differently.

  I had some real WTF moments during interviews when people told me how documentation works at their companies. Sometimes I immediately knew that I wouldn’t want to work at a place. My trash may be your treasure, so look around at different companies to find something that might be a good fit for how you want to do things.

• Focus on stories.

  This has been good advice for a while, but it seemed more important this time around: Instead of prepping answers for every possible question, prep a few stories that describe how you do things and use those as answers to your questions. There is lots of info about this interviewing technique out there, and here are some notes from a session I went to on this technique: Notes from Dhaval’s presentation on behavioral interviews.