A little secret: The UX writer job description is your best friend.
It tells you everything the hiring manager is looking for on a silver platter.
Don’t just use it as a way to decide if the UX writing job is a good fit for you — use it to optimize your UX writing job search.
By combing through the UX writer job description, you can pick out pieces of gold to optimize your:
Your UX writer resume and cover letter are two of the very first impressions you’ll make to the hiring team.
They work the best when they’re highly relevant and optimally concise. And there’s no better way to achieve those standards than optimizing them with the UX writer job description for the role.
And here’s exactly how to do it…
First things first, comb through the UX writer job description
Let’s use this job description as an example throughout this post:
We’re going to use this job description to make our existing resume and cover letter more relevant to this particular job.
Read the job description, and make a list of highlights. Highlights could be relevant skills they’re looking for, areas of expertise, tools they want someone to know, etc.
For our example job description, here are the highlights I picked out:
What they’re looking for:
- UX Writer to support our growing portfolio of products – including a completely new product to be launched in the next year
- Tackle complex financial problems
They value:
- Simple, elegant written solutions
- Write clear, concise, and conversational copy
- Qualitative and quantitative research
Responsibilities:
- Apply our voice, tone, copy style, and accessibility guidelines
- Working directly with our UX designers, researchers and product managers
- Evolve the brand voice and keep it consistent
Personality traits:
- Fast learner and can hit the ground running
- Curiosity about the world around you, near and far
- Comfortable working autonomously
Tools & processes:
- Experience with Figma
- Familiarity with agile development processes
Using the UX writer job description to optimize your UX writer resume
Now, we’re going to look for areas of my template resume to incorporate keywords from these highlights.
If you’re not sure how to design the right kind of template resume, go steal my 3 UX writer resume secrets. BTW, by “template resume,” I mean a baseline resume you edit to make it relevant to each job description.
Here’s my template resume that we’re going to optimize for this job description:
When it comes to optimizing your UX writer resume with the job description, you’re going to look for easily editable places where you can plug and play the UX writer job description.
For example, we can take the highlights “Simple, elegant written solutions” and “Tackle complex financial problems” and rewrite my current role description to make it highly relevant:
Also, since the company is looking for someone who knows agile, and I don’t have that on my template UX writer resume, I can add that to my “Tools” section:
Do this in 3 – 5 places in your UX writer resume, and you’ll be golden.
Using the UX writer job description to optimize your UX writer cover letter
A similar process applies to making your cover letter hyper-relevant to the job description: Look at the highlight list, look at your template cover letter, and find places to adjust the wording.
Here’s my template UX writer cover letter we’ll optimize using the UX writer job description:
Similarly to my UX writer resume, we’re going to look for places where we can plug and play copy from the UX writer job description.
For example, we can take the highlight “Write clear, concise, and conversational copy” to make the “Who I am” section more relevant:
And we can use the “Curiosity about the world around you, near and far” highlight to make the “How I do it” section more relevant:
Is this going to be too on the nose?
You might think so, but here’s the thing — the hiring manager writes the UX writer job description once as a reflection of their values. They haven’t memorized it, and they aren’t comparing your application against the UX writer job description.
If you’re really concerned, just don’t use the UX writer job description word-for-word.
Do I really have to do this for every UX writing job?
That’s up to you. It’ll make each application 10x more relevant, but I know it’s a lot of work.
So this application strategy doesn’t take over your life, I’d recommend spending the same amount of time you spend applying right now, just to fewer jobs.
Your hit rate will be higher the more relevant your application is, so it’s just a shift in how you’re spending your time.
Is there any reason why this strategy wouldn’t work?
Unfortunately, yes.
If you don’t have a UX writing portfolio or samples of UX writing work, you’re not going to be able to land a UX writing job yet.
It’s an unfortunate catch-22 that you need experience to get experience.
If you’re looking for ways to get UX writing work samples, I have something in the works… So stay tuned for that.
Relevancy wins
At the end of the day, if you don’t have 3 – 5 years of UX writing experience, but your application is incredibly relevant to what the company is looking for, you’re gonna land the UX writing job.
I’m proof of this — this is the exact strategy I used to land UX writing jobs at companies like Netflix, Fitbit, Afterpay, and more.
Happy UX writing đź––
