Career Corner: Tips for a Successful Technical Communications Job Interview

By Adrienne Escoe, Escoe Bliss Communication, Inc.

You may have had dozens of job interviews in your life, or maybe you’re just starting out in your career, or job-hunting for the first time in years.

Whatever your situation, it’s important to your job chances to keep up to date with current employer expectations for interviews, especially in a field such as ours.

Here are my top ten tips for a successful job interview in the technical communications field:

Submit a flawless résumé and work samples:

1. Use correct and consistent spelling; hyphenation; capitalization; space between sentences; comma before last word in a series; size of dashes and spaces (if any) before and after; oblique (slash) and spaces (if any) before and after
2. Ensure your document’s Properties summary describes your document (not another) and has your name (not your previous company or another author)
3. Have work samples available in digital format (no hard copy that recruiters will have to scan)

Present a positive image at the interview:

1. Dress professionally (one step up from what the job requires)
2. Show energy and maintain eye contact (don’t look at your feet!)
3. Don’t do all the talking; listen!
4. Ask questions. When you ask a question, you demonstrate interest in the job. A good question is: 'What would be the greatest challenge for someone filling this position?' A bad question? 'Would I be working in a cubicle?'
5. Don’t burn bridges by bad-mouthing a current or former employer - the tech writing community is small, and recruiting companies talk!

Other important tips:

1. Keep in touch - even if you don’t get the job, check back in future in case another opportunity opens up
2. Update your skills: if your toolkit consists only of Microsoft Word, learn other software

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Dr. Adrienne Escoe is President of Escoe Bliss Communication, Inc. located in Irvine, California. Adrienne’s experience includes human resources, personnel training, documentation, quality assurance, plant services, and administration management at one of the world’s largest companies; senior editor at a national educational research and development laboratory, and university teaching.

She earned a doctoral degree at the University of Maryland, master’s degrees at Loyola College in Baltimore, and a bachelor’s degree cum laude at The City College of New York. Adrienne is the author of 'The Practical Guide to World-Class Documentation' and many other publications, and is a nationally recognized speaker and facilitator.

For information about her company, see www.escoebliss.com.