Hiring is one critical topic that employers need to take seriously. It could make or break your company. Simply because a candidate said they can write does not qualify him/her for the position. The reason is pretty simple. Writing is not just typing whatever comes into your head. It has more to do with good and effective communication. You have to know what to write, omit, edit and eventually publish for your target audience. In fact, good writing is one skill that employers look for during the hiring process. The National Association of Colleges and Employers report that 73.4% of employers look for written communication skills during hiring. Quite some statistics, huh! Let’s take a look at how to hire that exceptional writer for your company.
Carry Out a Writing Exercise[/b]
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This is the best and perhaps the only way you can be sure of how good of a writer your candidate might be. Besides the normal attachments required during interviews, it’s good to give your candidates some kind of a test. You can do this as part of the preliminary interview process. Let this be related to their job descriptions. For example, if it’s a content marketer, let them write a SEO or social media marketing piece that you can judge them with. As such you can easily identify their strengths or weaknesses in that specific area.
Ideally, the exercise should allow picturing the applicants writing for you. If they have some grammatical errors, any spelling mistakes and present some poorly researched exercise, don’t expect them to improve in a day or two. They will repeat the same mistakes when you hire them. The writing exercise should also help you determine if they’re open enough, can respond to tight job schedules (their turnaround time) and of course the basic written communication skills. How flexible they can be in the voices used can also be a huge factor to consider them for the job offer. The exercise will save you a great ton of time and expenses later on. If you’re right about the hiring process, you won’t have to go through improperly written, poorly researched and incorrectly spelt pieces later on.
Request for Portfolio[/b]
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Let the candidate present you with a piece they’ve worked on before. Not that the world if full of doubting Thomases, but showcasing some evidence won’t hurt either way. It’s more convincing when some candidate presents something they’ve worked on before. Honestly, spare them the dilemma-moment of wondering whether to carry a portfolio or not by just requesting for one. Anyways, gone are the days when office-job candidates were never required to carry around a portfolio to support their suitability for certain jobs. A portfolio will help you screen the right candidate for the job by giving you an exact picture of who you’re dealing with. Eventually, it will save you lots of money and time too. At the end of it all, you want to know how their writing styles, tone, voices and such parameters can match with your business/ job offer.
Always Ask Writing-Related Questions[/b]
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Although pretty obvious, I had to list this one down. It’s expected for any interviewer to ask the job-related questions. These questions give the interviewer a clue of how much the candidate knows themselves. I recently read somewhere that failure to know our limits, weaknesses and capabilities is failure itself. These will guide you in knowing what kind of a person you’re dealing with. You could always ask about their experience, turnaround time and so on. Here are some important questions you can ask.
How fast can you work on a piece?
In your years of experience, what’s the best piece you’ve ever worked on?
What’s the worst?
Can you work in strict schedules?
What do you need from me before writing a piece?
What do you know about our company/ job?
How do you determine the style, tone and voice used in all your writings?
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Some of these are the typical questions asked in any interview and they still apply here. Don’t ignore them. There’s a reason why they’re asked any ways. These questions will help scrutinize the strong from the weak writers.
Their Corrections Policy[/b]
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In as much as we expect the writer to be somehow perfect at what they do, we all have to agree that we’re humans. And humans make mistakes. They might make a mistake on their end or you might as well make one on your end. What happens then, when the earlier terms have been disputed? How do you resolve this issue? At some point this is bound to happen. It’s therefore imperative that you establish the relations from the word go. Let the candidates tell you what they expect when let’s say you request for a piece earlier than you had before. Some might charge you extra cash for this. The idea here is to see how flexible they can be and how to approach such a situation.