some tech writing job hunting tips, from a hiring manager

March 13, 2026

I recently hired a human technical writer to work on my team. Although I have so much I want to say about the process of hiring, I have to keep things professional and appropriately vague. What I can do, however, is give you some high-level insider tips (now that I've seen inside the applicant tracking system (ATS) machine).

This advice is not a magic spell that will get you a job. Tech writing is a varied field and what works in one corner of one industry may not work elsewhere. There's a reason I don't work in aerospace or defense (it's my personality).

the tips

1. Make a portfolio site. Write some blog posts. When you write about your field and your craft (even your hobbies), it signals to me that you actually like writing, have a lot to say, and that you're going to want to develop your own career. My team values creativity and drive, and a blog on a personal website signals that you have both of those things right out of the gate. The site is the portfolio, BTW.
2. If you are sending out links to a knowledge base article online from a company you haven't worked at in 3 years, try something else. As a hiring manager, I have no way of knowing whether that has been updated in the three years since you left or not. It's not doing you any good. I can't realistically gauge your skills from a single doc (especially if it's behind a login), so when another applicant has a shiny portfolio site with self-contained examples you're working from a deficit already.
3. Proofread your resume. This is a writing job.
4. Write a cover letter. This is your chance to tell me how you can solve my problem/fill my need. The way the ATS is set up, the cover letter is the easiest first thing to look at, and it might be the only thing a hiring manager ever sees.
5. Put hyperlinks to your LinkedIn, GitHub, and website in the header of your resume. The ATS presents the resume as an iFramed PDF with clickable links, which makes it MILES easier to check out your stuff and move you to the recruiter screen pile (and to ask you relevant questions during the interview).
6. I know this makes people groan, but figure out how to make a version of your resume that applies to the actual job. Some folks have an impressive breadth of experience from developer docs to UI microcopy. But if you have experience doing everything, make sure you put the relevant stuff on the resume. There were a lot of folks who I had to reject who had incredible resumes, just because they didn't list any experience relevant to what I was hiring for. Contrary to popular belief -- developer docs is not the "ultimate" role in technical writing, it's just one track of the craft. So if you have a ton of experience doing dev docs, but are applying for a conceptual and product docs role, you aren't gonna look like a great fit unless your resume tells me that you spent 4 years documenting a web app for end users. Have a few different versions of your resume that put your different skillsets on display in the correct context.

An additional example for #6: For a role that explicitly required git experience, I got a lot of applications that didn't list git experience. If you list docs-as-code on your resume, I can infer that you likely know git, but no recruiter is ever going to take the additional 15 seconds to follow up on that. Also the ATS might have already sorted you out and sent an auto-rejection email (because you didn't include the magic git keyword).

make it happen

Generative AI can help with all of these points now. You can have a new website up within a few hours. If you don't know what to blog about, ask an LLM to give you a list of potential blog posts, and then start working on that. You can build yourself a "bespoke resume generator" with Claude in like 10 minutes. Feed it your complete work history and all your skills. Then, as you apply for jobs, dump in a job description and have it spit out a PDF of a version of your resume that's tailored for that role (your audience). I'm not suggesting that you lie, I'm telling you that you have to make the value your skills will bring to the role obvious.

Don't expect the hiring manager to jump through hoops to figure it out -- or to put in a tech writer's terms -- don't add to your reader's cognitive load. Know your audience and bring them what they need.

what I learned from hiring

Before, I thought recruiters arbitrarily turned on keyword filtering so they didn't have to give folks a fair chance. Now I realize that recruiting/applying/hiring is also suffering from enshittification. It really feels like an arms race. The bad job market, job site scrapers, and ez-apply tools that help you fill out hundreds of applications in a day mean that more people are applying for fewer positions. And so many of those applications are low-effort or straight up scam applications. I understand now why some folks use a preliminary sorting. Everything is worse, and it's worse faster.

Charles Cook at PostHog made a great post about this a few years ago, and I'd encourage you to go read that. It's all true.

Look, I know it's mostly a numbers game. I know you're tired. But if you are applying for a technical writing position, and your application deliverables are half-hearted, I'm going to choose someone who appears to have put effort into it -- they will be a better fit for the role (and might be a real human). I will never fault you for protecting your energy though, so do whatever you want with this information.