Hiring a software developer is relatively straightforward.
You know whether you need a front-end developer, a back-end developer, a mobile developer or a DevOps engineer.
The same is true for accountants, electricians and mechanical engineers. Each profession has recognised specialisms that make it easier to define a role.
Technical authoring is different.
The title “Technical Author” covers a broad range of skills, industries and responsibilities. Two candidates with the same job title may have completely different experience, while two people doing almost identical work may have completely different titles.
That’s one reason hiring technical authors can be surprisingly difficult.
The job title doesn’t tell you enough
A technical author might spend their day:
- writing API documentation
- creating maintenance manuals
- building online help systems
- designing information architecture
- maintaining a knowledge base
- producing regulatory documentation
- documenting business processes
All of these fall under the same profession, yet they require different experience, different tools and different industry knowledge.
A job title alone doesn’t tell you whether someone is the right fit.
Years of experience can be misleading
Many job descriptions specify a minimum number of years’ experience.
While experience is important, it doesn’t always reflect capability.
For example, someone with five years’ experience in a fast-moving software company may have worked with documentation-as-code, Git, APIs, analytics, content governance and single-source authoring.
Another person with fifteen years’ experience may have spent their career producing printed manuals for a single product line.
Neither background is better or worse. They’re simply different.
The better question is whether a candidate has solved problems similar to the ones your organisation faces.
Industry experience isn’t everything
Many employers ask for experience in a specific industry.
In some sectors, such as healthcare, defence or aviation, this can be essential because of regulations and specialist terminology.
In many cases, however, the ability to learn quickly is more valuable than existing product knowledge.
An experienced technical author knows how to interview subject matter experts, understand complex systems and organise information effectively.
Those skills transfer surprisingly well between industries.
You’re hiring someone to solve a problem
One of the biggest hiring mistakes is focusing on tasks instead of outcomes.
Instead of asking:
“Can they write user guides?”
Ask:
“What problem are we trying to solve?”
For example, do you need someone to:
- reduce support tickets?
- improve customer onboarding?
- migrate documentation to a new platform?
- introduce single-source authoring?
- improve search and navigation?
- create API documentation?
- establish documentation standards?
Once the problem is clear, it becomes much easier to identify the skills your technical author needs.
Technical knowledge and documentation expertise are different
A common assumption is that the person with the deepest technical knowledge will produce the best documentation.
In reality, technical authors and subject matter experts bring different strengths.
Subject matter experts provide the knowledge.
Technical authors organise, structure and communicate that knowledge so that other people can understand and use it.
The best documentation combines both.
Look beyond the CV
A CV tells you where someone has worked.
It doesn’t always tell you how they think.
During interviews, consider asking questions such as:
- How would you approach documenting a completely unfamiliar product?
- How do you identify gaps in existing documentation?
- How do you decide how content should be organised?
- Tell us about a time you improved documentation rather than simply writing it.
- How do you measure whether documentation is successful?
The answers will often reveal far more than a list of previous employers.
Hire for the future, not just today’s project
Good documentation isn’t static.
Products evolve. Customers change. Teams grow.
A strong technical author doesn’t just produce documentation for today’s release. They build documentation that can grow alongside your product.
That means thinking about information architecture, content reuse, governance, maintenance and long-term sustainability from the very beginning.
The right technical author is the one who solves your problem
There is no single definition of a technical author.
There are specialists in software, engineering, healthcare, manufacturing, defence and many other industries.
Some excel at API documentation. Others specialise in knowledge bases, maintenance manuals or documentation strategy.
The key is understanding what your business needs before you begin recruiting.
Once you define the problem you’re trying to solve, finding the right technical author becomes much easier.