I arrived happily in my office this morning, ready to take on the day.  But then the phone rang and I received a most disturbing message: hurry up, produce more pages and don’t worry about the quality. This was a technical writer’s worst nightmare! We’ve been staying up late, working overtime documenting this very cool technology, and now all that work seems to have been for naught. The book will be just shoved into a drawer, never to see the light of day. No user will ever flip through its pages, no programmer will consult its coded diagrams. Will its cellophane wrapper ever even be removed? (Sigh…)

I beg you to rethink the whole purpose of expending precious resources to create useless content. But if for some reason you decide that you simply must create documentation that you have no intention of using or sharing, please don’t tell us. It just breaks our little technical writing hearts.

Let’s say you’re looking to hire a new technical writer for your team. At the very minimum, you probably want a graduate of a technical writing course and minimal level of competence with an authoring tool such as Author-it, Framemaker, Robohelp or whatever tool your company uses. You will most likely add a few more requirements to your job ad, probably something like “minimum 3 years of technical writing experience” or “experienced Word user” before sending your ad out to the job-boards and Linked-in groups.

Disappointed in your applicant pool? I’m not surprised. When it comes down to hiring great technical writers, my experience has shown time and time again that the level of expertise someone has with a tool and how long they’ve been on the job has exactly zero correlation with how well they actually do their job.

So what are the qualities that hiring managers should be looking for in a new technical writer?  Here’s my Top 10:

1.   Technical know-how:  This does not necessarily mean a PhD in electrical engineering, but education or on-the-job experience in programming, IT, engineering, etc. would mean a candidate has an understanding of basic technology and how stuff works. The tech in technical writer has serious value.

2.   High level of integrity:  A must for someone with access to your company’s highly secretive product information. You don’t want your technical writer tipping off the media or the competition, so make sure you hire someone you can trust.