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Jack MolisaniFinding the right job in the content strategy field has always been a challenge, and it’s getting harder as computers take over more of the applicant screening process.
Changes in the industry – especially the convergence of technical and marketing communication duties – also mean that you you have to be proactive about managing your career, even if you aren’t job hunting.
Jack Molisani knows how to navigate this challenging landscape. He is both the principal of a staffing agency that focuses on content talent and the organizer of the LavaCon content strategy conference.
We talked about:
- the origin story of the LavaCon conference
- the content management and publishing systems used to execute omnichannel strategy
- the convergence of marketing communication and technical communication
- what content professionals need to know to prepare for emerging trends in content practice
- the importance of speaking to senior management in their language
- how to deal with applicant tracking systems when you are preparing and submitting your resume
- how to completely skirt the automated job application world by working your professional network and improving your visibility
Jack’s bio
Jack Molisani is the president of ProSpring Technical Staffing, an employment agency specializing in content professionals.
He’s the author of Be The Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement, which hit #5 on Amazon’s Career and Resume Best Seller list.
Jack also produces the LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management, to be held in virtually 24-27 October 2021.
Connect with Jack on social media
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 107. As marketing communication and technical communication slowly begin to converge around omnichannel distribution strategies, content professionals need to stay on their toes. Both the details of the work and the ways that employers seek out content talent are changing. Jack Molisani can help you navigate this new terrain. He runs both a content staffing agency and LavaCon, a big content strategy and technical communication conference.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 107 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to welcome back Jack Molisani. Jack, you may know, he does a lot of stuff. He’s runs ProSpring Technical Staffing, an agency that focuses on content professionals. He also organizes the LavaCon conference, which is … Well, tell us more about LavaCon, Jack, because that’s coming up pretty quick and you’ve been doing it how long now?
Jack:
This is our 19th annual conference. We’ve survived a dot-com crash, two recessions and a pandemic.
Larry:
Wow! Way to keep it going. That’s amazing. I just want to observe just for the folks who are listening, that I put on a Hawaiian shirt for this because the name LavaCon comes from … Well, tell the origin story real quick.
Jack:
The conference started in Hawaii back when there was STC region seven and eight. We had a combined conference in Hawaii in the year 2000 and everyone kept saying, “I can’t wait till year.” I’m going, “There is no next year. Hmmm. Maybe there’s an opportunity here, but what’s my niche?” Right? There’s the STC conference. There was Win Writers at the time. I said, “There’s not enough conferences with us, with a little gray in our temples.”
Jack:
I did a content strategy conference and content documentation management, and that worked and we had it in Hawaii. That’s why it’s called LavaCon. That worked until the market crash in 2008. After that, I brought the conference to mainland U.S. cities, but I wanted to keep that aloha spirit that we were known for. The local music, the local foods, and so we go to New Orleans and Portland and really fun places.
Larry:
Nice. I can’t wait till we’re doing that in person again. Hey, Jack, the reason I wanted to have you on today, you are an industry insider, you run a staffing agency. One thing we talked about a little while back was this, you’ve identified a convergence of marcom folks and techcom folks. Tell us a little bit about that. I’m super curious about how those fields are converging.
Jack:
Sure. For so long, we had what we called content silos, like grain silos, where marketing had their content, tech support had their content, tech writers had their content, training had their content and so on. Savvy customers started looking up user documentation before buying a product, right? I’ve done that recently myself. I was looking for a home security system, so I downloaded the user manual to see how hard or easy it would be to use that product.
Jack:
Then as marketing became more specialized and automated … I’ll give you an example. One of the cell phone carriers, when you log into their website, say to replace your phone battery, it knows who you are, so it sends an interact over to the marketing machine, which either displays on the same page going, “Hey, here’s a coupon to upgrade to the next phone.” Or sends you an email saying, “Hey, I see you are looking for a new battery. Here’s a coupon for a new phone.”
Jack:
Now they’re using that content as a business asset and then as a revenue growth platform, not just something that has to be there, like bubble wrap and a user manual.
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Larry:
Sorry. You’re getting into one of my favorite buzzwords now, which is omnichannel delivery. That’s the strategy I think that stitches that kind of thing together like, “Okay. We’re talking to them here. We’re going to help them in this channel, but we also have some other relevant information for them.” Tell me more about the … How much do you know about the technology and the business practices that stitch all that together that make that experience you just described possible?
Jack:
Sure. For those of you who have not heard the term omnichannel, take a company like Cisco Systems that has hundreds of products, each of which needs an ingredient list, a user guide, a promotional video, web support page, multiply that by the 27 languages they translate into worldwide. It would be absolutely impossible to keep all that content around in Microsoft Word.
Jack:
Some clever person will take all that content and put it into a database and you can spit out where you want, when you want, on the device that you want, in the language that you want. The person who does that is a content strategist. An interesting side effect of database publishing is that in traditional publishing, like in Word, you format as you go. You type something in H1, it’s this big and you indent that much.
Jack:
Well, in database publishing, the content is formatted when it’s output, not when it’s input. If I’m looking at say your document on a computer screen, I may get four columns of text. On a laptop, I may get three columns of text. On a tablet, two columns of text, and if I’m looking at a phone, one column of text. It’s responsive design. It knows something about you, the audience, and can format it appropriately.
Jack:
What’s cool about that is you’ll never be thrown off by the next big thing, right? It used to be, “iWatches are coming, oh, the sky is falling. We need to do micro-chunking for cell phones. What if we print this on a jumbotron? Well, we could format it for that too.” We’ve disassociated the formatting from the content delivery design itself.
Larry:
Yeah. I think that’s … I’ve had a lot of guests. We’ve talked about this before and I’ve had other guests talk about like, that’s just the future. That’s the increasing decoupling of content from its presentation. Just going to keep going. Well, tell me, I want to circle back to that convergence of marcom and techcom stuff. Tell me about, how does that manifest for the individual? Like maybe if you could talk about both scenarios.
Larry:
What does that imply for the practice of the technical communication person who’s migrating more towards needing to understand the marketing world? And vice versa, the marcom person migrating more or needing to understand the techcom world, how would you advise somebody to prepare for that? Yeah.
Jack:
The analogy I like to use is the United Nations of content, where you get a representative from every organization or division at the same table at the same time with equal footing. All right? You have marketing, but you also have techcom and training and onboarding and policies and procedures. You decide on a common terminology, a common vocabulary, a common word set, a common platform.
Jack:
Now, a lot of times IT is never going to give up their platform, marketing is not going to give up their platform, but there are tools now that will pull content out of each individual platform and share it regardless of where it’s stored. Now you can implement a unified content strategy across these silos without actually having to dig down and find out what database are they actually using.
Jack:
Another thing I tell people is so often the tech writer is the only person who sees every single piece of a system or a company, because one set of coders will be coding this and another set of coders will be coding that, and they’re not even calling it the same thing at the same time. Here’s my classic example of that. One year for my conference, one of our LCD projectors died.
Jack:
So I went to Best Buy to buy a new one and I used my Capital One credit card, but it was an unusual purchase in a city I’ve never been in and they declined the purchase. Now I just tell them I’m traveling so they’ll know where I’ll be, so I can use my credit cards. The problem is, if you go to their website, the option to do that is called “specify travel dates”. If you call their 800 number, the option is called “fraud management”.
Jack:
Now, first of all, I want to prevent fraud, not manage it, but two, they’re not even calling it the same thing in the same company, regardless of company to company to company. Clearly, the phone-tree people and the website people aren’t talking to each other, which is an example why you need to have a chief content officer, a chief content strategist who has interaction with all these departmentals and getting everybody on the same page.
Larry:
Yeah. One, it seems like there’s another opportunity, like kind of intermediate between the individual practitioners, that we all know, and that executive level, and this may be is at the strategy level like you were saying that like how to pull that together, because the techcom person, as much as they get their head around marketing, they’re still basically focused on that job and likewise with the marketing folks.
Larry:
Do you have a feel for that intermediate level? You just kind of described it. Who’s the person plucking the stuff from those different silos and making sure that there’s a unified experience for the end user?
Jack:
What’s interesting is that since marketing is perceived to generate revenue, it’s marketing, right? That’s where sales comes from. They’ll go, “Oh, let’s give money to the marketing people.” Whereas for a long time now, tech writers were seen as a cost center and we have to have a user manual. We have to have online help. Let’s do the very minimum we can do to get away with it.
Jack:
Now they’re saying, “No, we are part of the product development. We are part of the user interface. We are now writing UX writing, which is in the user interface and user experience. We’re part of the customer journey.” As clear as that may be to you and I, that may not be clear to somebody in upper management. Whose job is it to let upper management know the value we bring?
Jack:
That would be us, but so many content professionals are introverts and they don’t want to bang their own drum or they’ve been taught not to, or they don’t have the self-confidence. The first thing I tell people is to take a class in improv comedy.
Larry:
Nice.
Jack:
You will learn to be in the moment, you’ll be able to handle any question thrown at you that you weren’t expecting, and if you can make a room of 125 people laugh, I can do a presentation to a CEO. Start learning those soft skills that you need to promote what you can do to management. Another one of my favorite stories that I said in almost every interview is, It’s our job to seize the opportunity, not to wait for someone to give it to us.
Jack:
My favorite line is the seagulls from the movie Finding Nemo. When they see food, they go, “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.” When there’s a content opportunity, you go, “Wait a minute. I’m the content professional. We should be doing that. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.” Then you step in and you take control or ask to take control as the case may be, instead of letting that opportunity just float by.
Larry:
I love that. I’m not sure that I want to be the person to sell that persona to us as a discipline, but I love it. In fact, there’s a leftover container in our refrigerator right now that says, “Mine, mine, mine, mine.” I know it’s a Finding Nemo fan that did that. That’s interesting. I guess the top-level lesson there is take ownership of it. This is … And which is a perfect way to illustrate that.
Larry:
Then be a good steward of it and don’t just take it, but share it as well. I guess, let me ask you about that. You’ve taken ownership. You have that … And I love the attitude that you imply and everything you say, that take ownership, get out there, be an improv artist as you sell this, or however you do it. I guess, how else do you sell this to other folks?
Larry:
How else do you make those mid-level connections bust silos, get those marketing and technical people talking to each other better and speaking to … I think the most important thing might be speaking the same language that you talked about earlier. How do you align people around the language?
Jack:
Correct. I just wrote an article for the STC Intercom magazine about soft skills that you need to be successful as a techcom professional. One of the first things I’m suggesting is take a class in accounting. Accounting?
Larry:
Wow.
Jack:
Well, don’t forget anything that you sell to management, you have to specify in their terms. You need to understand cash flow and return on investment and cost avoidance, risk management. All these things that management is concerned about that they don’t teach tech writers. I never took a class in risk avoidance.
Jack:
You need to be able to speak CEO or speak middle management in order to sell the idea that you’ve got a content strategy that, if implemented, will cost this much, but will generate this much revenue or this much goodwill, or here’s a classic example. I’ll keep it a short story.
Jack:
Back when we were first moving to online sales and Target had created their website, populated with all the things they sold, except they failed to populate the metadata that readers for people who are site-impaired, the screen readers will actually describe what’s that product if they can’t see it. They didn’t populate that and the checkout icon was this little tiny checkout in the upper right-hand corner that me with my glasses on could barely see.
Jack:
The American Civil Liberties Union asked them to, “Can you please populate the metadata?” They went, “No.” They got sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act and went all the way to Supreme Court and they lost. It cost them in over, I think, $120 million in court fees alone and they still lost. I went, “Oh, wait a minute, because somebody didn’t want to spent, I don’t know, $10,000 for a tech writer to populate the description metadata that you lost $120 million?”
Jack:
This is where you have to say, “What is the cost of doing nothing?” A very similar story. An airline, not to be named, based out of Chicago had signed a contract with the U.S. Postal Service saying … And the postal service said, “You need to be able …” You know those little barcodes in the bottom of the mail? They wanted to scan each piece so they knew where it was in the system. The airline spent all this money on the barcode things, but no policies and procedures on how to do it.
Jack:
They came to us wanting four tech writers with air traffic control experience to go into these airports and document this. It failed because they couldn’t get funding for it. I waited and they said, “We’re going to cobble together some internal resources.” I called back, I said, “Bob, how’d that project go?” He goes, “It failed miserably.” There was a clause saying, “If you’re not barcode compliant by May 1st, you still have to carry the mail. We just don’t have to pay you.”
Jack:
It took them months to get this sorted out and in fact, they lost $20 million in lost revenue. I went, “Wait a minute, are you telling me you lost $20 million in lost revenue because you didn’t want to spend $20,000 on a tech writer or two?” He goes, “Yeah, but you need to realize that we were in bankruptcy at the time and it’s easier to explain away lost revenue than it is to get a PO approved.” My viewpoint on that was, he did not build a good enough business case when he pitched this to his management, right?
Larry:
Yhat makes perfect sense that like … And that kind of lines up … That whole little episode you just talked about kind of lines up too with the language stuff. If you can’t actually get everybody aligned around the language that you’re talking about, at least speak their language when you’re with each individual you’re interacting with. Hey, another thing I want to make sure, because I want to stay mindful of time and I want to make sure we get to this.
Larry:
One thing we also have talked about, this is going way upstream because we’re talking about people with jobs, trying to do cool fun stuff, but there’s also a further upstream. As you’re submitting resumes, there are these new evil … or maybe not evil, but troublesome, applicant tracking systems that you’ve said a couple times in just other conversations we’ve had, about how you see really good candidates not get considered because they haven’t … I guess, it’s like SEO. You have to cater to the search engines. In a job hunt, you have to cater to these ATSs. Tell me more about the details of that and how you can get around and how you can address it.
Jack:
The adjective I like to use is sinister.
Larry:
Nice.
Jack:
For those of you who don’t know, ATS is an applicant tracking system. In the old days, they were very benign and useful. It just was a way that employers or recruiters could tell where a candidate was in the interview process. It’s a way for us to like, “Oh, I’ve got a tech writing job in, in Des Moines. Let me look at my database and find a tech writer in Des Moines.”
Jack:
Well, with the advent of mobile, a lot of websites like Monster and Indeed put this feature in either, A, if you see a job you’re interested in just swipe and apply. Apply, apply, apply, apply, or worse, they set a box saying, “Hey, anytime a technical writer job opens in Los Angeles, submit me for it.” Suddenly companies are getting hundreds of resumes, 99.9% of which were not qualified for that job.
Jack:
Rather than waste a human’s time, reading them all, they just put in an artificial intelligence into their ATS that would automatically compare your resume to the job requirements and if they didn’t match, they would just automatically reject it. A human wouldn’t even see it. They only see the top X percent. Like you said, in search engine optimization, you have to make sure that your resume matches the job description or the job requirements.
Jack:
Well, just to show you how insidious this is. A friend of mine was a UI/UX developer, user interface, user experience, UI/UX developer, applying for a UI/UX developer job and was getting rejected. Come to find out there are websites, if you just search, “Is my resume ATS friendly?” You can paste in the job description you’re interested in, paste in your resume and that site will show whether or not you’re a good match and where.
Jack:
She did this and realized … Now, get this, she was a UI/UX developer, had that in the first line of her resume but the job she was applying for was a UX/UI developer and she was a UI/UX developer and the ATS said that doesn’t match. My viewpoint has been for years, stop applying for jobs by applicant tracking systems. Use your personal network. Find somebody who works at John Deere tractor and say, “Hey, if I give you my resume, will you pass it on?” Because they may get a bonus for finding you.
Jack:
Maybe the documentation manager’s on LinkedIn, if nothing else, the recruiter’s on LinkedIn. Say, “Hey, I see there’s an opening. May I send you my resume?” they may ignore you. They may say yes or they may say, “Apply for the job via the website, but I’ll keep an eye open for your resume.” Well, look at that. You’ve got a set of eyes, human eyes looking out for it. It can even pull you out of the junk bin if you get misrouted there. That’s my 10 seconds or less on how to avoid ATSs.
Larry:
How to avoid the ATS. I guess one thing I want to circle back to real quick, you mentioned a website where you can go and upload a job … or a link to a job description and upload your resume and it’ll say how … I would definitely love to link to that in this show notes. If you can send me that I’d appreciate it.
Jack:
Sure.
Larry:
Yeah.
Jack:
I know ziprecruiter.com does that, which is probably good if you’re applying for a job via ZipRecruiter.
Larry:
Yeah. No. Exactly. That kind of gets to … Well, I guess that’s kind of a binary. Like you make it or you don’t, or you make the cut or you don’t. Are there incremental ways along the way that you can improve your odds of making the cut? Just-
Jack:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Larry:
Yeah.
Jack:
First of all, put aside that really pretty resume you spent the past 10 years developing. For example, ATSs can’t read icons, they can’t read tables, they can’t parse long sentences. For example, if the job requirement is experience writing policies and procedures, and you say in your resume, “Experience writing a variety of things for end users and corporations, including user manuals, style guides, and policies and procedures.” An ATS would never parse that.
Jack:
If the requirement is “experience writing policies and procedures,” you say “experience writing policies and procedures”. You really have to tailor your resume for each job, for which you’re applying. Yeah, and-
Larry:
I got to say, that’s the kind of thing that drives a lot of content people nuts. They’re like, “Oh, great. I’m writing for a machine now.” But it sounds like this isn’t the most advanced artificial intelligence, if … You know? But understanding that is super important if you want to get in the door and make your case, right?
Jack:
One more thing I say, even better than finding a human to apply for the job, be so visible in your industry that people come to you, companies find you, right? You should be writing articles, doing blogs, doing interviews like this, where if I search for documentation manager in Milwaukee, I already know Molly Barrett. I’ve met Molly Barrett in STC conference or at LavaCon, my conference, right?
Jack:
Most jobs never get posted online because they know how much they’re going to get spammed. They’re going to work their network. Who do I know? Be visible. Have them ask you to go work for them, not the other way around. That way you don’t even have to deal with an ATS.
Larry:
Yeah. I love that. That’s the ultimate ATS hack, is don’t even put it in your way. Just work around it. That’s great.
Jack:
Bravo. Yep. Exactly.
Larry:
Yeah. Cool. I think as we talk about AI and the ATS, are there other practices like that? I think you’re absolutely … I would agree a thousand percent that working your personal network and developing your own platform in the industry is the way to go. Are there other tips that you offer to your job candidates? Like, “Hey, if you really want to stand out, here’s a couple more things you could do.” Or?
Jack:
I am going to give you a real life story of something I actually did as an example of things you can do, other than applying for a job through a website. I was working in Orange County as a technical writer and I picked out the top 10 high-tech companies in Orange County that I wanted to work for and I called the documentation managers there and says, “Hi, I’m writing an article for my STC newsletter on trends in hiring in techcom in OC. May I interview you?” Every single one of them said, “Sure.”
Jack:
I asked, “What are you looking for? When are you hiring them? What tools do you want?” By the end of this, I knew exactly who was hiring, when they were hiring, what they were looking for. Mind you, I did write the article, but then I asked the managers, “Would you like me to send you a copy of the article when it’s done?” “Yes, please.” “What’s your email address?” Then I said, “By the way, my contract is going to be ending in about two months, is it okay if I send you my resume?” They went, “Sure.”
Jack:
I’ll tell you, I’ve never been unemployed in Orange County. I did write the article. It did get published, but that’s how I became first-name basis with every single hiring manager in Orange County that I wanted to work for.
Jack:
That’s just a single example of something you can do or your audience could do. It’s-
Larry:
Yeah. I think anybody can think of a way they could do that. Something like that, that they could … And we’re all writers. I mean, that’s a logical one, writing an article or something like that. Hey, Jack, we’re coming up close to time. These conversations always go so quickly, but I want to make sure, is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind that you want to make sure we get to before we wrap up?
Jack:
I wasn’t going to do this until you asked, that it’s interesting, especially as a contractor, they’re going to want you to have the tools they’re looking for right off the bat. They don’t have time to train you on FrameMaker I have had people say, “Oh, I can learn FrameMaker on a weekend.” My answer is, “Well, then why haven’t you?” Again, I’ll give you a real-life example. I was applying for a contract that wanted conditional text in FrameMaker.
Jack:
It’s like a variable, the Mazda 626 and Ford Probe, are the exact same car. You just change the name. I got a copy of FrameMaker, taught it to myself and then I put out a note to my STC buddies going, “Hey, if anyone wants to learn this, meet me at Starbucks with your laptop on Saturday.” I taught everybody how to do conditional text and then got the interview. The manager said, “Can you do conditional texts in FrameMaker?”
Jack:
I went, “Do conditional text? I’ve taught conditional text in FrameMaker.” And got the job. Now, granted that might not work for everyone, but it worked for me. It’s that concept, being proactive, teach, lead a workshop, be visible. I would end with that. That, and I have a discount code for your followers if-
Larry:
Great. Do tell.
Jack:
Okay. I produced the LavaCon conference and content strategy, which is going to be virtual this year. It’s going to be in October and we’ve got speakers from Microsoft and Amazon and PayPal and NASA. It’s just amazing. If any of your listeners want to attend, use the referral code #TeamSwanson for a hundred dollars off tuition and you can go to lacavon.org and find out more.
Larry:
Thanks so much, Jack. Yeah. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. This episode should drop, I think October 14th is my scheduled pub date. That should-
Jack:
Plenty of time.
Larry:
There’ll still be plenty of time to register for the conference. Well, thanks. Hey, and one very last thing, what’s the best way for folks to stay in touch if they want to connect with you on social media or …
Jack:
LinkedIn. I am the only Jack Molisani on LinkedIn. It’s kind of hard to find me. Not hard to find me. Yeah. That’s the best place and then we could always make a connection from there.
Larry:
I’ll put that in the show notes as well. Well, thanks so much, Jack. Great to talk to you again.
Jack:
Larry, always a pleasure.
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