Why Job Seekers Should Write
I’d always thought of Writing as a single skill. Either you’re good at it or you’re not. Either you can do it or you can’t. It wasn’t until I started trying to write articles for others to read online that I realized there is far more to writing quality content than just one comprehensive skill, that there’s an entire skillset required to produce pieces that others will actually read and enjoy.
As I sit and struggle to write articles, I attempt to break down Writing into its parts and connect them with what I know. With this exercise, I’ve found more and more parallels between the components of Good Writing and the types of communication found in everyday life. As a job seeker, I’m constantly on the hunt for more ways to sell myself, and the lessons I’ve learned while writing online have taught me things I believe all job seekers can benefit from.
Good Writing is so much more than having an idea. Throughout graduate school, my projects were my ideas; my ideas, my projects. I think of myself as a good and conscientious speaker who values story much more than perfect technical understanding. I’ve written several academic papers. I have opinions, thoughts, and ideas today that I think could be of value to others. Yet, I still struggle to assemble a Medium article that will draw in readers and get my points across in a comprehensible and compelling way.
Having a grasp on basic grammar, I figured the Idea was one of the most important parts of connecting with others through writing. But really, there’s so much more. Refining my style, word choices, attention-getting leads, structure, and so many other components of a quality article is still a work in progress. Presenting content with a good narrative requires a lot more than an interesting topic.
Good Writing is influential. Writers of quality articles know how to ensure their words “succeed” or make an impact, while taking the feelings and humanity of their readers into consideration. They know how to make words their greatest tool and written communication their greatest asset.
This has been an important lesson for me in job interviews. Writing for others requires including a certain level of detail, which translates directly to giving a thoughtful and realistic response to an interview question about past experiences. Telling an engaging story about a past experience brings the interviewer to the scene, allows them to feel the full impact of your contributions and the full strength of your abilities and character.
The ability to communicate clearly, concisely, and empathetically is, and always will be, extremely important for job seekers. In fact, LinkedIn analyzed their data and found that creativity, persuasion, and collaboration are the top three soft skills desired by employers in 2019.
Good Writing is written for others, not for yourself. Take a presentation as an example. Presentations are often made to convey some information about a product, process, or set of findings to a particular audience, whether they’re team members, stake holders, or clients. Without consideration for your audience, the result is a bad presentation, guaranteed. The information needs to be useful, understandable, and relatable to the audience. They need to know why the topic of the presentation is important and what the take-aways should be.
The same goes for correspondences like email, code review, editorial notes, and other types of feedback. It’s easy to tell someone in text that “section two needs to be completely redone,” but that completely misses the mark on both narrative and consideration for the reader. Questions quickly arise like, “What’s wrong with section two? Can’t any of the hard work put in be salvaged, rather than scrapping it all to start again?”
The first of my curated articles on Medium was the result of an event in my life. I had a story to tell and a lesson to share. The words flowed quickly and easily, and I barely edited. It was my story, as I wanted to tell it, so I hit Publish and hoped that someone might sort of like it. In reality, though, I know now that I wrote the piece for myself, and it showed in the story’s stats.
Looking outside myself to see events through the eyes of an outsider has been essential to writing compelling prose based on my experience. A strong sense of empathy for others develops through reading because of the attention and care put in by authors to reveal the characters’ inner-most thoughts and feelings. The ability to perceive a topic as an outsider is useful not only for communication but also for innovation, user/client/customer experience, and so much more.
Most importantly, Good Writing is indispensable. The skills learned through writing for others are valuable and surprisingly challenging to develop. Having ideas, a solid grasp on grammar, and a sizable vocabulary aren’t enough to get noticed by readers, and they certainly aren’t enough to get noticed as a job seeker. Developing the skills that make up Good Writing amounts to obtaining some of the most desired soft skills by employers, and refining the ability to present key information, like relevant experience, in a persuasive and captivating way. I’ve found the lessons learned from writing for others to be useful in showing employers that I know how to reach an audience, make an argument, and drive others to a response. I hope other job seekers will, too.
Lindsey Hiltner is a writer, thinker, and dweller-on of topics in philosophy, personal growth, self, and others. She graduated with a PhD in math in 2018 from the University of Minnesota. Find her at lindseyhiltner.com.
