Harry Ashbridge is the content style guide author and senior writing lead at Monzo, an online bank founded in 2015. In this episode, we talk about Monzo Bank: what it is, how it works, and why it’s different from your old-school bank.
Harry Ashbridge is the content style guide author and senior writing lead at Monzo, an online bank founded in 2015.
Harry is a writer, trainer, and language strategist. He believes in the power of writing to measurably improve every aspect of a business — from top to bottom — and spends his days trying to prove it.
In this episode, we talked about Monzo Bank: what it is, how it works, and why it’s different from your old-school bank.
Listen to this episode to learn:
— How Monzo started and how they train their staff to care about language
— Finding and making opportunities as a UX writer or content designer
— Making sure people care about what you write
— The challenges and rewards of writing for FinTech
Join our free UX writing course:
https://course.uxwritinghub.com/free_course
Learn more about Harry’s’ work here:
https://sonderandtell.com/2019/07/harry-ashbridge/
https://monzo.com/tone-of-voice/
This is Writers InTech, a podcast where today's top content strategists, UX writers and content designers share their well-kept industry secrets.
First of all, how are you?
Yeah, I am okay. It's been an interesting year, of course, for everyone. And we've had an interesting year at Monzo. It's been really busy ups and downs, but the last few weeks especially feel pretty nice and yeah, just kind of used to working from home now. Used to, you know, this kind of everything from the sofa type lifestyle. So I doing alright. How are you.
I'm good. I'm good. It's really busy. And all I'm trying to keep myself busy because life is really stressful right now in Israel it's like a lot of politics going on.
Yeah.
And a lack of trust in government. And you don't know if it's the pandemic or political stuff and morale is down for many people. And I can see it with my friends. Also, a lot of unemployment. And it's kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy. I was actually supposed to fly to see you speaking content by design conference.
I had a ticket.
Oh, right. Right, right. Yeah.
And they're bought it, I think, in like February or March. And then, like, how do you answer that? Because, yeah, you can fly anyway. I'm not sure if it even happened.
But no, they postpone till next year. That was kind of a truncated version with a few different speakers from, you know, from their sofas. But the actual conference is going to go be in twenty, twenty one, in theory will see.
Hopefully. Hopefully.
Exactly.
And I hope I could fly and see your talk and that I think to do. My introduction first. And they would have very heavy Ashbridge from a very excited about it from Monzo Bank, and Monzo Bank it's a mail bank and he's going to tell us in a few minutes what is a mail bank even.
Sure.
And yeah I was very excited to speak with him and to reach out to him. And there was waiting really excitingly to this conversation. So welcome. How are you?
Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm good. It's been a while. We spoke about this a while ago and it took a little bit of time to arrange. But I'm glad we're finally here.
I'm also glad I'm very happy that we made this happen. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is what is there among the bank and how is it different from a banking app of my old school bank?
Sure, sure. So, yeah, Monzo, we are I guess you could still call us the startup bank. We've been around for about five years now and had a full banking license, which makes us the bank in the UK in the same way that Barclays or Lloyds or NatWest is for coming up on three years now. And in many ways, we're not different from those banks in terms of if you put your money with us, you get your salary paid in those protections. We're regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, which is the banking regulator in UK and all the other, you know, things that keep customers in the banking system safe. What makes us different is that kind of the founding reason that we exist is that the people who started Monzo in the first place were just feeling like the banking system. Finance in general is a bit of a closed shop. You know, most banks have been around for a very long time to be doing things the same way for a very long time. I think it's fair to say that they're not seen as being very customer centric. It doesn't feel like traditional banking exists to serve and solve problems for customers. That seems like traditional banking exist to sell products to customers over the lifetime of being a customer. So you get a junior account and then you get your overdraft when you're a student and then you get your mortgage and then you get your pension and it's you know, you're hooked into a system that doesn't really revolve around you. And basically Monzo exist to go. Okay. The issues with money are overly complex. Your money should just be easy. It should work for you. It shouldn't be a hassle. You shouldn't have to deal with systems that aren't built for you. You shouldn't have to deal with language especially, which obviously we're going to talk about. That doesn't really work for you. It's overly complex. It's overly opaque. It doesn't really feel like it's for the people it's supposed to serve. And so a few people had that mad idea to start a bank and try and turn that around. And we are now four and a half million customers while in the UK we are the last time out. We were the second most popular brand in the country. We were first last year. And then this year we've dropped one place, which is shame. And that's not banking. That's brand overall. So clearly people have this kind of feeling that something needed to change with finance. And Monzo is one of the companies come along and kind of trying to fill that need for people.
I still feel like, you know, we're not there yet. In a way that I'm saying to an old school bank and they definitely didn't know what to do with the Covid-19 stuff. So,.
Right.
I was actually going to the bank physically to take care of something that I really didn't want to go to the bank because nobody want to go to the bank. You want to just take care of it and the Internet or something to do with your app. And then while I'm there. They told me we can't treat you right now because you need to book an appointment. So they sent me to a phone. So I ring the bank and I'm calling them on the phone. And then they ask me, what's my secret number? I told them, I don't know my secret number. They told me. OK. So we need to file a request from the app. So I'm closing my phone, I'm filing request from the app just so they I could pick up the phone just so I could book an appointment while I'm there. And then I booked a report on the app of the bank and then they told me, please wait for two more days and then we could reach out back to you. And since then, I just didn't solve my financial stuff because I'm a massive but also because, like, it's really problematic to handle this kind of like dinosaurs system. So I'm happy there is a company like Monzo and I hope that they will operate in Israel through it.
[00:05:45] Yeah, hopefully. I mean, the plan is to be global. Eventually it's going to take some time. But that would be nice. Yeah. This is the thing about starting from scratch five years ago is that all the technology is also new. Those legacy systems the banks have, none of them were designed to not work together or to be slow or to be inefficient. But when you build one thing and then 20 years later, you build another one. Funnily enough, they don't communicate very well. All of Monzo's technology is built in-house, pretty much, and it's built around, going to experience for the customer should be good. What does that look like? And you get to do that from the ground up. And surprisingly, people like it more.
Of course. And one of the things the first time I ever exposed to Monzo was from the voice and tone started so that while I was really well written, I put it also in the show notes. And so the fact that you have some kind of a style guide and that's, you know, make the experience consistent for all app. And it's really written. You know, the more genius and the value is it was really well-written, better.
Is it something that you've been working on?
Yeah, that was my baby. That was pretty much the first thing I did when I went to Monzo.
Good job.
Thank you. Thank you. I'm just going to sit here and take the compliments. Thank you. Yeah. Part of the reason why I joined Monzo in the first place was that it felt from the outside like they had an innate sense of style and they had a commitment to transparency. And their language was not that of traditional banking. And they were very open about what they were doing and why. And it had the kind of values that I believed in. And so I pitched to them the idea that somebody needs to look after this because it won't grow with you at scale unless you tend it properly. You have to have a team of people that will look after this. They were two hundred people at the time when I joined. That's fine. You can have a few people who care and they go around doing kind of a careful language job. Off the side of their desk. And it's not their main role. But if you want to have this last 1000 people or two thousand people or in 20 countries, you need a team. And they said, okay, good idea, you can have that job, which is great. And so my job is to I was then and still is now to look after all of the writing that Monzo does internally, externally. So it's certainly like what you can see us writing in the app and on the website. But it's broader. It's all of the communication. All of the written communication that one does to itself and to customers. And the first step of that is going. Okay, well, let's have an agreed set of principles. And that's what that tone of voice guidelines is about. It's step one, point one in having a tone of voice that people actually adhere to and use and has some value. But it was the first thing that I did, because if you don't have that agreed set of this is what we believe in. You can't do it if the other stuff that needs to come on top.
And how do we make sure that the people would actually use it in their organization?
Yeah, that's fine. Well, writing it doesn't do that. Like most companies have a tone of voice guy. Some of them are beautifully written and everyone goes, oh, brilliant. And then they put the tone of voice in a drawer and then they close the drawer and then they never look at it again. Training. It's the main thing that we do. So in my previous life as a writing consultant, we did big tone of voice programs and created tone of voice guidelines. But the main thing that we did that was differentiating from other companies was training. So writing, training for every single person in the business. So I have run and continue to run training sessions for everyone at Monzo. Whether you're a backend engineer or whether you're in the legal team, whether you're a designer, whether you're a customer service, tone of voice, training, writing, training. Partly it's about getting people consistent with the brand and understanding how we communicate, but also partly it's because every person part of their job, a big part of their job is writing. Everybody is a writer, whether they think of themselves as one or not. And if you as a writer in a business, want to be able to create good, consistent writing around the business, you need to buy in off the legal team. You need to buy in of the engineers. You need to buy in if the product managers and also they will all be better at their jobs if they write better. If a product manager writes a better proposal, they will be more likely to get their products off the ground. If an engineer writes better, you know, commit messages and get hub. Engineers are going to find it easier to come along and review their code like everybody is better at their job if they're better at writing. And so that is why if you want people to buy into a tone of voice, you say to the festival, here's how to do it practically. That's what the training is. But also, if you care about this and you'll get it writing, you will be better at your job as well. And if you give them both of those things, then people tend to pay attention.
Amazing. Is it like one training for the developers and completely different training for the product managers? Or you have like one type of training for all of them?
Yes, good question. So there's onboarding. Training for everyone comes into Monzo, which is kind of two parts therapy, one part practical because people especially who aren't writers by background, have ideas about professionalism in writing and, you know, full vitality and seriousness and how those are supposedly the same. And we're a bank. And so we have to sound a certain way. So you have to kind of unpick those ideas gently with the first day of training. And then we do have some specific stuff. So we have product writing, trading, which is essentially UX writing training, which is for engineers, product designers, user researchers, product marketers, those people who are mainly interacting with copy in the app and on the website. I've also run Training for Risk and Compliance, which is about how to write risk controls in a way that is clear and easy for other people to understand how to write reports for the regulator, which get read through the hiring team on how to write job ads that are going to be more enticing and more representative of what you really want and get the candidates that you want down the line. So there is some specialism, but it all starts from a foundation which is which is very similar, which is about writing matters. Here's why. And here's how to do the basic stuff that we all need to do to just be better at our jobs and representing Monzo in the right way.
It's amazing how many trainings do run. Would you have like book the training every week or every day or every month?
At the minute. It's a lot less than it was because we're not hiring as much at times. Last year we were doing for onboarding sessions a week because we are hiring so many people. All of this used to be face to face to face, face to face. Training is the best kind. I think still that now we have digital versions which are video through like a learning management system that we have. We still do some like Zoom Google Hangout calls like this occasionally at the minute. It's probably like maybe one session every couple of weeks and then some specific training for specific teams. But the onboarding stuff is a much less regular cadence minute. But basically, every time 10 people join, we're going to run a session for those people because that's the onboarding stuff and other stuff is ad hoc.
So if I understood quickly, the onboarding stuff is whenever we are hiring a new person, we want to teach them how this organization writes and probably introducing to them the voice and tone starger, the far organization and dos and don'ts of from our emails to internal communication, stuff like that.
Yeah. Yeah. The onboarding stuff is really kind of media neutral. Like in the room you will have a risk and compliance advisor and you'll have a back end engineer and you'll have someone from the hiring team. So I don't just want to talk about emails because it's relevant. And if people it's really about going if you want to do good writing, you need to care about your audience. Who is your audience. That is different for all of you. But they will have some things in common, which is they're busy. They've got better things to do. It's hard to get their attention, you know, right. For them. What does that mean for you? And here's how to do that practically. And then everyone goes away from it with something they can take to their job, even though their jobs are different things. And the other thing that the training does is it introduces the idea of, you know, if you want people to trust you, you need to communicate better. If you want people to do the things that you're asking them, you need to communicate better. You need to be able to write well. And so it just has this kind of game. You have to think about the brand customer centricity, whether your customers are people with a monzo or literal banking customers. The same principles apply. People are busy. They have a lot on their plate. They've got other things to be doing. And so if you want to grab their attention to get them to do something. Here are some basic principles that can apply no matter what writing you're doing or who it's for.
It's an amazing thing. And so I want to step back a little bit, and you said that you brought to the table the fact that, OK, we need to create this kind of voice in tones down when so originally you were hired to do it or it was after you were hired that you brought this idea to the table.
Yeah. So there was no there was no job at for a writer and Monzo in the sense of what I do. I kind of sneaked my way in by terms with people. And I pitched in, said. What you have here is really good. And to maintain it, you need somebody who will come in and maintain and build a team out that can maintain it. One of those things will be creating a formalized tone of voice. One of those things will be training. One of those things will be getting involved in processes. So I'm involved in the hiring tests that we use to hire internal comms people and designers and product marketers so that they have the right kind of writing skills at the point we hire them. Right. So it's a compounding effect. So it's it's people, processes, systems or that kind of stuff. One of which is it's the guidelines that the public bit, but they are just one factor in the whole kind of deal.
I love the fact that you kind of told them that, you know, reached out and told them that they need to have that kind of position and from the you expanding community in general. There's a lot of education that we need to do to the market for people to understand, hey, you need it. OK? Some people don't know that they even need it. And that's creating like huge boundaries between people that want to get into the field. And companies that needs it. But there's a lot of you know, there is like a wall in between. So if you're just reaching out to these companies, showing them what you've got and maybe present them different ideas of how you could help them, I think it's a really cool way to, you know, to find your first opportunity in a company as a UX writer.
Yeah. Well, I mean, so, you know, I know where the UX writing has been talking a lot about your writing. I certainly don't consider myself a UX writer. We actually don't have any UX writers, although our writers do do a lot of Ux writing. Eventually, a scale bigger than ours, we might want to look at specialist writers who would focus on narrow things. But the role of a writer, as I've seen it at once, though, is to empower other people to do better writing as much as to do good writing ourselves. And so the profile of people that we've looked at are people who can do a broad range of writing and can really hone in on the training side as well. So, for example, if we'd hired three UX writers and put them in product squads, those three product squads individually would do great writing. But I wanted to hire a couple of people who could oversee those three squads and train them and also then work with the legal compliance team that advises those squads on what the T's and C's say or think about the design system at a higher level that can influence. Okay, what kind of components are we using here? How does that tie in with the ACA that we do on the website? How does that tie in with our brand positioning? Like, what's our messaging strategy for this product in a way that traditionally, as I've seen at your X, right. Is like you say, there's kind of a wall up. I want to take those wheels down and get people thinking holistically about all of the writing that I do. Internal comes as much as customer comes. You know, how do engineers actually write proposals that they can get turned into code? Can designers understand that? Do they understand the tradeoff that engineers are making? How can we get those two groups, people talking better together? Well, writing is the medium that they use. And so a writer shouldn't just be at one end of that process. They should be all the way through influencing how these people think about their jobs, making them both better, explaining what they need and what their dependencies are, because that leads to a better product at the other end.
I think that's a very smart way to look at it. And I've heard about more companies are trying to, you know, even UX writers that are dedicated to squads, they still have like office hours and they trying to do this kind of training realistically through all the organization. So I think gets a very smart idea. Yeah. What if it should be the way the ratio between writers and designers and.
Yeah, it's a very good question. It's a very good question. Honestly, I don't know. I think it depends on the size of the business. And I think it depends on. How the rest of the business outside the writing function thinks about writing. So for us, we have way more designers than writers. And that is a conscious choice because the writers that we've like to hire are people specifically with the ability to influence those designers, thinking train them support materials and also in the designer hiring process. We optimize for people who are good writers, like that's part of the criteria. Not all companies will do that. If you're in a company where the designers are gonna go, no, we just want designers and it's all about the pixels. You need more writers to balance that out. But in a company where there's a kind of a culture of care for language more broadly, which is what we've tried to do at Monzo, I think you can get away with fewer writers at a higher level who have a broader influence and have a kind of a more consultative relationship where they don't literally write every word. Having said that, there is a benefit to their being a researcher and a writer and a designer at every step of the process all the way through. And if you can afford that amazing go nuts. But if you're making a tradeoff, I think that you don't necessarily need a one to one ratio of designers and writers. And a designer is a writer and a writer is a designer. And so you can balance those things off depending on what your priorities are elsewhere. I don't know that as a company that's that's nailed this ratio. I haven't seen I've seen it done very differently and work very well in different ways. It depends on what else is going on in the business. I think.
Right, I think that many, many, many companies are trying to figure it out right now. Have very big companies that are hiring many writers right now. When you have the companies that looking at that, if there with more realistically and we will know in the next few years what would be probably the sweet spot when they write your own product theme. My guess is going to change between different products and stuff like that.
Exactly. Yeah.
They said that I'm sure that we're going to have also product that they're going to be so much more language oriented that we might even have more writers and visual designers.
Yeah, exactly. One thing I would say is that if you have an issue with writing and the quality of your writing is a business, the answer is probably not to just hire more writers like there's likely to be a more fundamental issue about, okay, what's making people not care about this stuff? What's making designers produce copy that doesn't match what you want it to? What's making product managers not optimized for the quality of the copy in your product? If you just hire a writer, are they gonna have the same barriers? Is it about how these people think about language? Have you not made the case well enough in the business to why writing is important and what the business impacts they can have? You might need more writers or you might just need to formalize the processes around what you produce in a way that gets better writing done at the source. You know, there's other ways to approach it.
What would be a tip to make sure that the people will care about what you write?
So the way that I did it, the Trojan horse is training. You know, I was a writer in a company of 200 people that they all kind of roughly cared about writing and they got the importance of it. But because I was running training sessions, you had 10 to 15 people coming in and sitting in a room with me for two hours where all I did was ask them about language and talk to me about language and show them research and evidence and stats that prove that whatever they're doing, they would be better at it. And customers would like it more if the language was better. And if you do that for everyone for two and a half years, it starts that, you know, embeds into the culture. Obviously, if you're in a bigger company and you're trying to make an impact for a thing that's already at scale, you want like quick wins of proof that language make a difference, like tone of voice. I see a bunch of articles recently, people saying his tone of voice dead is tone of voice guarded. Like, I think what they're getting at is that when you talk about tone of voice, a lot people's eyes just glaze over because they think of it as some kind of a fluffy brand thing. And I'm not really interested in tone of voice. I'm interested in if you are better at using words, you'll be better at your job and the business will benefit as a result. And so how do you prove that and say you get evidence that if we change this, the conversion is that and if we change this, you get more people signing up here. And if you change, there's people like us more. You can measure that if you are focused and if you have the right kind of processes in place to let you track the difference that language can make. And, you know, especially in fintech tech companies in general, they want data. You can find data that proves that language makes an impact. And if you start doing that, it becomes very hard to ignore or consider language, a fluffy brand thing that kind of gets relegated to. Can you just tone of voice this or can we just polish the words here? Like, no, it's it's a fundamental part of the process. And if you think about it, that when you can prove it that way, that's what gets people to take it more seriously.
And what kind of data points do you get when trying to prove the value of content impact?
Yeah, so for some examples. You know, when I was in my previous job, two months, I used to go and pitch to clients and we had hundreds of case studies of just changing words, make an impact. We had one great one for a big old client of ours with Beatty, British Telecom. We did tone of voice training for them. And out of one of those training sessions, somebody in the customer service team, they had a call center team that later after and they had scripts that they used for that call center. And they went away and they looked at that script and they said, you know, this is a little bit formal. It's a bit overcomplicated. Customers don't really understand it. So they rewrote the scripts to be clearer, more customer centric, to follow less jargon. And in the process of doing that, they cut the length of the script by 13 seconds and then they compounded that cut across all of the calls that a company the size of Beatty handles. And it turned out that over a couple of years saved them about six and a half million pounds. Well, and all they did was rewrite the script and I cut maybe a 200 words out of that script. And you think, okay, well, how much did that cost and all that is this careful language, right? If they care enough about the language and really that it's just for customers, if you care enough about customers to care about your language, the business benefits of these, you know.
And this is also without even going into the actual content itself. We're just talking about, like editing stuff out.
Exactly. That's just. Even if you care about the very most basic element of can this language be clearer for people if you're being a bit, you know, cleverer for an example of on months, I don't come home page for a while. It said Bank of the Future. I think it might say Bank of the Future again. Now we've run tests. We changed. It wants to say at the time it was forty thousand people a week are opening a Monzo account.
Now, it says banking made easy, which I love by the way.
Banking made easy. Right, there you go.
I love it, love it.
Yeah, it said it said something like 40000 people a week opening a Monzo account to manage their money better or something like that. And when we change that, 15 percent more people download, the months are up. And that was when we changed 50. So we changed 15 percent. Yeah, we didn't change the design. The website performed at the same rate. Nothing else apart from those words. We've had similar kind of conversion changes from wedding and the app around overdrafts, around loans, around, you know, anything. And obviously you can compound that by changing. Does the website load faster? You know, do we have better ratios? So we rank high? Do we get better design that draws people to the right things? But you can isolate words and you can prove that words alone have a, I think, disproportionately large impact to what people expect outside the U.S. community anyway, inside it. We all know what difference it can make. But if you need to make that case outside, there are ways to get it.
And better when you're looking into that you can definitely know if it's people that sign up from the on page. And not because of an article or something that can translate to to go for it is that they understand that it's only like this small change. But more vergence, that's pretty cool and pretty amazing. And I wanted to ask you also. OK. So we're talking about a banking app now in Israel. Also have this. We don't have Neo banks yet, but we have banks that are doing pretty cool banking apps. You know what I mean? Like, really intuitive. Nice, like the higher like big design grounds. And they're doing pretty cool apps. We don't have that kind of neo bank app. And it's really been do I really want to have a bank that I don't need to go to physically? So what are the challenges when creating a FinTech, when writing for a FinTech app? I know that your background is not in FinTech, right?
Yeah, yeah. No, not at all. I in my old life as a consultant, I had a lot banking clients and they would you know, they would all certainly think of themselves as digital businesses, but they're also very big old legacy banks. So not really to flip that around a little bit. What makes writing for money so relatively easy is that genuinely. We care about the right things, like the products are built in such a way that it is customer centric. And so there is no challenge to right around about process or explain why. If you could go into the branch, you have to then go and sit on a phone to then download the thing to your app to then get a letter four days later. That doesn't happen because the process is designed in the right way. Also, there is a commitment to transparency. That means that genuinely we are open about what we're doing and why we're doing it. So it's easy to write about what we're doing, why we're doing it, because it's for customers. It's for the right reasons. If you're a big bank that adds, you know, a markup to the foreign exchange rate when people go and spend abroad and that's hidden. How are you going to write about that unless you want to be open that you're essentially ripping people off. And so. It's harder if the values aren't really there in the first place and there are a lot of big legacy institutions at the moment which are, you know, doing innovative product things in terms of the apps and what they're launching and pain design agencies and all that kind of stuff. I don't know. But how deep does that commitment to being customer centric really go? Are they genuinely changing how they function as a business and what they reward people for and how they build what they do? Or are they going? Let's have a nice app, because if it's the latter, you'll have a lot harder time as a writer making that come true for people because they're not going to buy into it, because consistency is what really matters in the experience for customers. Right. People often ask your question around what makes Monzo stand out in terms of the tone of voice. We don't have a standout tone of voice. Like, I've never intended for us to be distinctive. I know for a fact that lots of big banks in the UK have a very similar tone of voice set of guidelines to us because the company I worked for wrote them. I worked on that. I know what they say and it's not different. It's using all the language that people can understand to be open and honest, explain what matters to people and care about where they are when they receive this information. And if you do that, you've got pretty good writing. What makes us different is that we really genuinely try and do it everywhere all the time. And I think if you have a fintech bank, you know, a neo bank with an app and the app is nice and slick and smooth and really easy and customer centric. But then somebody goes and looks at their Ts and CS and those Ts and CS and ninety thousand words. Lumb and you can't understand a word of it. They're going to go, Oh, OK. So the app is just a marketing tool. It's just a brand thing. And actually, deep down, this is what they think of me because they're trying to scare me off with legalist. I come and stand and actually artisan seeds are about fifteen hundred words, long and real easy to understand because we care about that consistency of experience. And so the quality of your writing is about the distance between your best writing and your worst writing. And if that's narrow, you're pretty good. Whereas if you just have a really nice, you know, sign-up flow, that's good. But that's not your customer experience. Your customer experiences is if I can't afford to repay this loan, how are you going to treat me? You know, if I'm on hold to customer service, what's the IVR like? How do they funnel me through that? You know? Can I actually talk to somebody here if I have a problem with my app and I need to go and find a help article? Is that help article useful? Do they care about the help articles? Do they maintain that stuff like that's that's the customer experience. And so that question about, you know, what does a fintech app need to do? The app is part of the deal. It's not the whole deal. And if the business doesn't genuinely care about customers, then it will be very, very hard to get consistent good writing because you have to care about customers to get that stuff.
This was a really good answer. Thank you for that.
Thanks.
We're getting to our last question. So we have many listeners that want to work in startup companies as writers. They want to get into the feel of your writing or writing in general for the companies and have that kind of influence and responsibility. Some of them are doing transition from technical writing. Few of them are at work as journalists or copyright roles. And what kind of tips are going to get into the field like the first step that you can do landed first gig, get paid for being a writer in the InTech?
Yeah, I mean, the thing that has served me best and I look for in writers that I would ever want to hire is the ability to. Break down what you're doing and why you're doing it and why it's better. So I see a lot of writers who have great portfolios and they can write well and they have the innate ability to balance my sentence. So I understand these kind of economies of writing on an app screen. But then you say, okay, but why is this choice? But in that choice or what's the tone of voice that you followed here? What are the practical principles? And they have a harder time unpicking like what it is that they they're doing and why it's better, you know, the ability to say, okay, the tone of voice is this okay? We're transparent. What does that mean in writing? What does it mean to be transparent in writing? Well, in practical terms, it means not using the passive voice. It means avoiding jargon. It means shorter sentences. It means not using metaphors because they don't translate very well. Like really being able to unpick what you're doing a way and forensically examining your writing so that it flows well, for sure. But why does it flow? Well, what does that mean? To be able to explain that to somebody who wants to hire you is really good because that's what I'm looking for. But also being able to unpick why writing works well to people who aren't writers. It's crucial, especially if you're gonna be in a minority, as in a small writing team at a bigger company that doesn't really know or care about writing. So for me, coming into Monzo is really important. I could sit in a room with product managers and engineers and say language is connected to trust. And if you write clearly, it makes you seem more human. And that has this impact and these are the benefits. And if I just said this writing is nicer, they'd go that writing is nicer, but it's not going to have the same compounding benefits. So I would focus on people's ability to. Show your working basically, right? Why is your writing good? How do you know that you're a good writer? Like, how do you know that your writing is good is the question I ask most commonly. And I like a screening call or an interview. And it's amazing how often that stumps people, partly because they don't want to seem boastful. And that's great. But if you can't measure or know that your writing is good, then how can you know that you're doing a good job for the people you're trying to serve? And so really investing in that side of things is really important. There's a ton of research and evidence out there that supports why writing is effective. Being able to pull on those research and evidence and anecdotes and stuff is really good as well for making the case for better writing. I personally don't look at portfolios when I'm hiring. I know lots of companies do. If you're going to write a portfolio, make sure that it shows that working and the evidence of the impact that it had, because I think that is really important. It sets you apart as well. I.
Always show impact. Always show impact.
Yeah Exactly.
Not just present your writing. But show like how impact through writing credits for the business or company that you worked for.
Yeah. Yeah. And also I would encourage anyone to think about the connectedness of any writing that they do in any role that they do. This is again why we don't have specific you X writers or content writers in that way, because if the words in the app are great. And you make sure the words in the app are always great, but you've never thought about the Ts and CS and how they read or the contract the people have to sign when they take out whatever it is they're taken out, then your user experience is incomplete and keep thinking broadly about the writing that you do. Helping people to see those dependencies and connect that stuff up is going to make you more useful to the business. It's gonna make you more appealing to hiring managers. I think it also just makes you a better writer all around as well.
I understand the system better.
Exactly.
Joe said that you're not looking at a portfolio, so you know that many writers right now want to get into the field. So they sit around on their portfolio for like months and months and months. Sometimes they say to them, and just pick up your left one that he was proud of. Put it in a Google dog or PDA. Just send it over and push for more opportunities. So what would be a screening process for those people? That's right. Now, knowing their home and they're a little bit concerned, they're not sure how to do that first step.
Yeah, I'm in a minority. I think on the portfolio, I think I know lots and lots of very reputable companies and very good writers, much more experienced than me do look a portfolio. So I'm not saying they do. The reason that I haven't focused on them in in our hiring process is for writers is one that you never know what the brief really was. So you can never know if the bit of writing in front of you really solves that problem. Most portfolios don't include impacts, like you say. I think they definitely should, but most don't. And also, what did you, as the writer there, do a nice bit of writing, or did you solve the underlying problem? Like, often the underlying problem is not solved by addressing the brief. This is why I start liking agencies. You get a break from an agency, from a client that would say, we want you to go away and look at these. Rewrite these emails. These five emails, we say, okay, so what's the problem? And they say, well, you know, we send out these emails and now we're comeback's on the website and we say, okay, well, let's look at the website. And I say, oh, no, no, no, because that's a different budget. That's someone else's thing like the underlying problem. It's hard to know if that solved by one bit of writing. So our hiring process focuses on making sure that people can ask the right questions and explain their thinking properly. So I ask these questions around how do you know that you're a good writer? What I'm looking for people to be able to say, well, because I look at data points and, you know, I look at custards, I look at the end process and I understand the system that my writing is in and how it interacts with all the other parts of the system. And then I want to say, have you ever tried to go and get involved in the other parts of the system? Do you push to change things at a more fundamental level? Do you dig right down into the base of the problem? And then we do tests. We do a short test, which I'm increasingly thinking that we should pay people to do, but we haven't in the past. That's an oversight on our part. I think we should do that. You should pay people for their time. And if we start hiring again, we will. And that test is basically a bit of the kind of writing that you would expect that person to do. But it's more about then being able to ask questions afterwards, if I can. Why did you do it this way and what problems did you encounter? Show me your thinking. It's much less about the actual words on the page, because if you're at that point already being interviewed, I've seen that you can write because your cover letter is good and your website is good and you know, you've. That's not the issue. It's can you explain the thinking that so much more important. And again, that's why the portfolio. It's not as important to me.
Thank you. Great answer. I hope more people could, you know from now on, explain better why they did what they did and how it impacted business as whole and not as a small, you know, follower sequence inside of their organization because it is really important. You need to have the full context. What was the team that was working on? A lot of dirt. And I hope it will inspire many people to to reach out and find the next writing opportunity. So thank you for that.
Welcome. Welcome.
All right. Cool. So thank you so much for your time. It was a great pleasure to have you today.
Thanks very much, pal. Great chat.
Of course. Of course. And See you later, ciao.
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