Applying for a Position as a UX Writer

I’m not a hiring manager these days, but almost every week, writers reach out to me to discuss their careers and interests in UX writing and how to prepare themselves to apply for a position as a UX writer. I enjoy these conversations and the chance to learn about people’s fascinating and diverse backgrounds. The people I speak with are invariably intelligent and skilled and ask great questions. I learn from them.

But recently it dawned on me that in most of these conversations, after discussing each person’s unique background and interests, I end up offering the same kinds of information about the hiring process, so I thought I’d write it down in case it’s helpful to anyone else looking for a UX writing position at a tech company.

Some of the information offered here may appear daunting, especially to folks who don’t have a great deal of experience in UX writing. But there’s more demand for UX writers than there are candidates with direct experience, so it’s a discipline that has room for all kinds of people with strong writing skills and an interest in making technology more intuitive and accessible.

Commonalities

The UX writing hiring process and the materials you need to prepare are surprisingly consistent at the places I’ve worked and at pretty much all the other tech companies I’m aware of. The particulars may differ, but the overall process is the same.

Don’t be surprised if the hiring manager and interviewers aren’t UX writers themselves. This is changing as the UX writing discipline matures, but it’s still common. The typical hiring panel includes designers, researchers, product managers, marketers, and managers or practitioners who are stakeholders on adjacent teams. Remember your audience: Nonwriters will inevitably evaluate you through their discipline’s lens, not through a UX writing lens. This may not seem fair, but it’s inevitable and human nature, so your materials should be artfully designed, and you should expect questions about your understanding of related disciplines.?

To be more specific, you’ll almost always be evaluated by designers (most UX writing roles are on design teams), so trade your editing skills with a designer friend, to help you create materials that meet the same high standards for design as you demonstrate in your writing.?

Preparing

Before you apply, you’ll need a resume and, at most companies, a portfolio of your writing samples. If you’re invited to interview, you’ll also need to build a presentation and be ready to answer questions about your work, your process, and the product areas and company where you’re applying.?

The key to all the materials you prepare is to ensure that they demonstrate your understanding of the UX writing discipline and draw a clear line from your skills to the requirements of the role. This is just as true for experienced UX writers as those with other backgrounds.?

Resume

Your resume is your first UX writing sample: It should demonstrate your UX writing skills and your understanding of UX writing best practices. The resume should fit on a single page, be scannable, make good use of white space and information hierarchy, use simple and clear language, employ progressive disclosure (invite inquiry), and generally help a busy writing manager quickly scan and understand the gist of your qualifications.

When you apply you’re typically shunted through the recruiting team. This means that your resume is disassembled and injected into a hiring database. If the recruiting team is staffed and capable (like most of the ones I’ve experienced), they’ll be able to reassemble a good sense of your qualifications. But you should also create a PDF that preserves the design of your original resume so you can include it with your application, in your samples, and so on.

No matter how skilled you are at writing and editing, be sure to get a friend whose editing skills you trust to review drafts and then proofread your final version.? We need to be able to deliver polished copy in our work, where we rarely have editorial support (don’t get me started), but you want a skilled set of eyes on the material you’ll spend too many hours staring at. My rule of thumb has been to overlook one typo or grammatical error in a resume (my father liked to say, to create something perfect is to invite the wrath of the gods), but more than one error suggests a lack of attention to detail most teams can’t afford.

Writing Samples / Portfolio

I don’t have anything to add to Jonathan Coleman’s article on this subject. Pure gold.??

First Contact

If the recruiter or writing manager thinks you might be a fit, based on your resume and portfolio, you’ll likely get an initial call. This tends to be informal. In addition to answering their questions with care, this is a good time to show your interest by asking some of your own questions about the team and the development environment it works in. Of course, it also helps if you’ve done your homework about the company, reached out to anyone you know (or even don’t know) on LinkedIn for an informal chat, and otherwise be prepared to show you know something about the company, its products, and market.

Writing Exercise

The manager may ask you to complete a writing exercise. The goal here is to see how you perform with a standard puzzle. This helps the hiring team compare your skills with other candidates and to get a sense of whether your writing samples are representative of your own skills and not those of others. (This is rarely due to outright theft: more often it’s the perfectly innocuous case where the applicant was part of a team that supported them more than they realize.)

Beyond simply doing your best to demonstrate your skills and how you think about approaching a project, you also might ask yourself some questions. Is the exercise long and burdensome? If so, this may indicate poor judgment on the part of the manager about workload or respect for people. Is it fun? If you find the time dragging, this is an interesting clue about whether you’ll enjoy the day-to-day work.

I was applying for a job once and it was going great. They asked me to complete a writing exercise. The premise was onboarding someone to the software that controlled a home irrigation system. I happen to know quite a bit about this topic. I brilliantly tore the premise apart, asked and, for the sake of the exercise, answered key questions, and delivered a great solution that simplified the product and showed off my talents with finely crafted copy. The recruiting process came to an abrupt halt. I suppose the lessons here are that in any recruiting process, things can go south for various and arbitrary reasons, and sometimes it’s better to learn early that your style isn’t compatible with a company’s culture. I suspect I wouldn’t have been happy with a culture that didn’t welcome such fundamental questions. I also might have been less arrogant and just completed the exercise they put me to.

Interview

If you’ve demonstrated that you’re a candidate who a company wants to get to know better, you’ll be invited for an interview.

Most interviews are in two parts: a presentation to the full hiring panel and then 1:1 or 2:1 conversations.

Time your presentation for 10 or 15 minutes shorter than the allotted time, so you can answer questions during and after. The presentation should tell the story of 2 or 3 projects you worked on, the closer to an actual UX writing project the better.??

You can introduce yourself in the presentation, but don’t spend more than a couple of minutes on that. Then walk the panel through each project. How did it start? What did you know at the beginning and what questions did you ask? Who was on the team? How was it to collaborate with people with different skills? Did you benefit from any insights from previous versions of the product? Did you get insights from research? Did you participate in research and in what capacity? What did you learn? What went wrong and what did you learn from it and how did you adjust your plans? What were there clear measurements of success and how did you plan to measure them? Was the product successful and either way, how did you know??

You wouldn’t be at the interview if the team didn’t think you had solid writing skills and an appropriate background, so that’s typically not really what they’re looking for. Instead they want to find out how well you tell and present your project (including how polished your deck is: remember the design audience and that presentations at most companies are essential tools for communicating). But the main thing most panels are looking for is your process: how did you address the kinds of questions described above.?

After the presentation, members of the panel will typically ask you about issues in your samples or presentation that raise the skills and other qualities that are important to them.?

The gotcha question is no longer common. View hostile questions or “how many ping-pong balls fit in a VW microbus” as red flags about the culture of the team.

You’ll get asked all sorts of questions, of course. Take your time answering, be calm and be honest. Ask for clarification and whether you’re addressing what the questioner was interested in. If you hadn’t thought of the question before, be honest and consider asking for more information and recognizing good insights (this shows you like to learn, are open to ideas, and aren’t difficult to collaborate with). If people find flaws, thank them and be ready to think about how you might have avoided or corrected them.?

If people are typing away during the interview, they’re rarely two-timing you on chat or email. Many companies rely on written notes for the evaluation process, so make room for that.

In-person exercises used to be more common, before the pandemic. I won’t dig too deeply into them here, but much of what I’ve described about samples and interviewing apply. At the risk of spoilers, your questions are more interesting to the interviewers than your writing.

Next Steps

You certainly can’t hurt yourself and you may earn points if you write a brief thank-you note to the hiring manager or recruiter and any other panel members you know how to contact. You can also ask the hiring manager or recruiter to pass on your thanks to the other members of the panel. If anyone on the panel invites you to get in touch if you have more questions, that’s a good sign, but those contacts are really more useful if you get an offer and need more information to decide whether to accept. These people deserve their own brief thank-you notes.

This is the point where the process is most different from company to company: how they decide whether to make an offer. Some teams are very casual and leave the decision mostly up to the hiring manager, who may not do much more than have a brief meeting with the panel to hear their opinions. Other companies have baroque processes stuffed with pseudo-science—it’s hard to imagine the complexity and frustration some companies put their hiring managers through.?

Here and, honestly, at all stages of this process, be prepared for periods of silence. Sometimes long periods. Of course it’s challenging, and it’s human nature to start filling the information vacuum with speculation, but it’s a mistake to read much into it. Some companies are quick, some take months. A manager may get overloaded with a work emergency, the budget may be on hold, there might have been a reorg: there are a thousand reasons why you may not hear anything for a while, and few of them pertain to you as a candidate.

Offer

You get an offer. Congratulations. Now particularly is the time to ask questions of the hiring manager about the role and how it fits into the broader team and to follow up with anyone who offered to chat. How is the team organized? Do they have standards? Training materials? What are the main challenges? How are they integrated into the broader product team? Does leadership understand and support the role? You have a good deal of leeway at this point, as long as your questions don’t come across as arrogant or excessive.

Salary

This is an area where I don’t have much advice: speak with others who are good at advocating for themselves. Negotiating is not one of my strengths.?

Do You Accept the Offer?

After all you’ve learned about the company and team, ask yourself: Tomorrow when you wake up, will you be excited and happy about your decision? Will you enjoy going to work at this company every day? Will you have the opportunity to learn and grow? In my experience, trying to divine answers to these kinds of questions about what is ultimately a leap into the unknown is difficult but important. Salary, title, stock, prestige, location, benefits, and other perks are certainly important and relevant, but they don’t mean much if you’re miserable as you leave the house each day.

One More Thing

While writing this article, I finished the section on resumes and took a break. As I was making coffee, I laughed out loud: a wall of text like this is exactly the opposite of what I’m recommending. Well, as I’ve said to writers on my teams over the years, never look to me as an example for anything.?