How to find great UX Content Strategy candidates

This article is Part 1 of 3 on finding great UX Content Strategists for your team!

A little over a year ago, I was brought on to build a UX Content Strategy team at Chegg®. Charting this course has required doing lots of project work, creating guidelines and process, and demonstrating the value of the role, but there is also the job of actually building a team.

Anyone hiring product-focused content strategists knows that strong candidates can be difficult to find.

In the last few weeks, I’ve seen job notices posted in a Content Strategists’ group on Facebook, for roles with Dropbox, Indeed, Tableau, Mailchimp, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Shopify in locations all over the country. And these are just the big companies, companies you think wouldn’t need to advertise.

That’s how hot this field is right now. While many of these companies are hiring their first content strategist, Facebook hired their first 9 years ago and has doubled the size of the team every year. That’s how new this field still is.

Companies are selecting candidates from journalism, PR and creative writing to fill job openings. And though more and more people with writing backgrounds are taking steps to position themselves for roles in UX Content Strategy, they don’t necessarily have the experience.

That means screening candidates with relatable skills and experience in order to determine whether they can do the job.

But what is the job of UX Content Strategy?

Content strategy for digital products uses three disciplines: User experience + content design + microcopy writing.

User experience is the foundation. This is essentially empathy, translated into actual experiences with a product. Does your candidate effortlessly think and feel from the users’ perspective? Can they articulate what makes a good user experience?

Content design is the most critical aspect. When done well, this is unseen but it’s the conversational structure of the user experience. Content strategists helps determine what the content is, in what order it appears, and where it’s placed in the design. Good content design can make or break user comprehension, conversion, and satisfaction.

Microcopy writing is the bread and butter. More editing than writing, we often need to convey information, feeling, and direction in just a few choice words. Determining the right words, making sure they’re consistent with the rest of the user experience, and being able to test and validate choices requires someone dedicated to the discipline.

In an ideal world, your word wizard would be an ace at all three, but it may not be possible. So it’s important to know your needs.

If your priority is innovation, look for a UX Content Strategist who’s quick with interesting ideas and has an instinct for what makes a great user experience. You want a writer who uses content to push design further.

But if you have a product with a ton of functionality and use cases, you might want to focus on someone with a strong showing in content design. “What happens every step of the way and do users have the information they need?” Your content strategist will also need to organize the copy for all the different states, including errors and confirmations. You want a person who lives their life by lists.

It’s important to know which skills you need most.

Here at Chegg, we serve students — mostly college students — and while they love cool and funny content, they are also stressed and need our help. It’s a privilege and a responsibility to make sure they have a great user experience.

Understanding what makes a great user experience and the role of content and copy is essential for success at Chegg. I also look for curiosity and a willingness to try new things, with the hope that my hire will help the team think out of the box and take risks with copy.

I’m looking for people who understand the role of content in a good user experience and who can communicate clearly and concisely.

To find out, I ask for responses to 3 questions in a written format.

Here are the questions:

1. What are 1–3 apps — phone or desktop — that you think have a good user experience and why?

It’s important that candidates use digital products daily and have plenty of experience booking and purchasing online, interacting on social media, and consuming digital content. We want people who think about user experience and can articulate what makes a good or bad user experience.

I look for references to specific functionality, copy, or design that delighted them, and maybe even ideas on how to improve. They don’t have to understand everything about how user experiences come together, but they need to understand what it looks like when it’s working.

2. What do you see as the purposes of content within the user experience of an app?

What I’m looking for here is twofold: 1) An acknowledgement that content isn’t just copy, and can be data, images, links, buttons, or navigation; 2) An understanding of the different functions of content which, on the most basic level, are to entice, inform, instruct, and inspire.

Sometimes, I’ll get a response that describes content as only words and as more of a narrative — like in brand or marketing copy. I won’t completely rule that candidate out if they show promise in other areas, but it is a bit of a red flag. If we just fill in words or think of content as a one-way narrative, we haven’t done our job.

3. What experience do you have writing microcopy? What experience do you have testing content in user research? What experience do you have defining or working with terms?

Writing microcopy is an art. As the famous quote goes, originated by philosopher Blaise Pasqual, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”

Choosing the right few words—simple enough to be understood by everyone, clear enough to prompt the right action, and phrased to elicit the appropriate feeling—is work and requires knowing when to write more, less, or use no copy at all. If candidates have written email, Facebook posts, or banner ads, they’ve probably worked with these concepts.

Relatable skills can also include getting direct feedback from users on copy and modifying it, or doing A/B testing on copy variations. Adhering to brand standards, getting legal approval, or using specific terms for SEO also demonstrates experience in choosing just the right words. The context might be different, but the skills are the same.

When I get thoughtful responses to these questions, I get really excited about what adding this person to my team could mean for Chegg. Now it’s my job to get them excited.

Check out Part 2 of 3 on finding great UX Content Strategists for your team!