Hiring a technical writer starts with the reader. Decide whether the audience is developers or end users, request writing samples in that exact genre, then run a short documentation exercise from a real specification. The most reliable signal is the quality of the questions they ask engineers, not the polish of their prose.
Look adjacent to engineering rather than to marketing. Support engineers, testers and solutions consultants who write well already understand the product and the reader, and they often welcome the move. Open-source contributors are unusually easy to assess, because documentation pull requests are public and show exactly how someone structures information and responds to review. Communities built around documentation practice attract career writers who care about information architecture and docs-as-code workflows. Contract writers hired for one release frequently convert to permanent roles once value is obvious. Technical communication programs at universities supply juniors who need domain training but arrive with solid structure. Direct outreach through [candidate sourcing tools](/candidate-sourcing-software) reaches practitioners who are not actively applying anywhere.
Name the audience and the genres. Writing an API reference is a different craft from writing an onboarding tutorial, release notes, in-product help or an administrator guide, and few writers are equally strong across all of them. State the toolchain explicitly, because a docs-as-code environment using version control and static site generators demands different comfort than a traditional help authoring tool. Say whether the writer owns information architecture or contributes pages to someone else's structure. Describe how much engineering access they get, since writers judge employers on whether engineers answer questions. Mention whether they will edit others' contributions. Adapt the responsibilities from the [technical writer job description](/job-descriptions/technical-writer) and be specific about the product domain.
Read for the reader, not for elegance. Take a sample procedure and try to follow it as a newcomer: are prerequisites stated, is each step verifiable, is there any point where you must already know the answer to continue? That test exposes more than any stylistic judgment. Look for structural signals: consistent terminology, sensible headings, examples that actually run, and no unexplained jargon on first use. Ask which parts of a sample they wrote versus edited, and whether they built the page structure or inherited it. Then ask about deletion, since pruning outdated pages is a core part of maintaining documentation. Writers who have never removed anything usually leave sprawling sites nobody can search.
Test information extraction, because that is the daily bottleneck. Give a real but sanitized specification or endpoint definition and thirty minutes with an engineer who is deliberately terse, then ask for a short documented output. Score the questions as heavily as the writing. Add an editing exercise: hand over a confusing paragraph written by an engineer and ask for a rewrite plus an explanation of what was wrong with it. Include an information architecture task, such as restructuring a messy help section, if the role owns structure. Finish with the engineering team, since writers who cannot build rapport there end up guessing. Use the [technical writer interview questions](/interview-questions/technical-writer) to keep evaluation consistent.
Experienced developer-documentation writers are genuinely scarce, so expect a slower search than for general content roles and be prepared to consider adjacent backgrounds. What attracts them is unglamorous but consistent: being included before a feature ships rather than after, having engineers who respond to questions, owning the toolchain, and working somewhere documentation is treated as part of the product. Say those things concretely in the process. Show the current documentation honestly, including the bad parts, because writers want to know what they are inheriting. Remote work is widely expected in this discipline. Keeping the process short and communicative matters; a shared [hiring platform](/hiring-software) helps when engineers are involved in the panel.
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