Content Writer’s Portfolio

The Context

Appointing a content writer, whether on a contract or as an employee, can be tricky and rather costly if not successful. Ideally, you want a newly appointed content writer to start adding value within weeks. Conversely, you would like to be as sure as you can, before you appoint them, that they will not add value. Even if the candidate has the requisite qualifications and industry experience and, the presented portfolio demonstrates the desired writing skills, you have little way of gauging the context. By context I mean the circumstances and environment within which the portfolio items were written. 

The Question

What can you do to be more confident? You can test them.

Heuristic 1: Create a copywriter test 

Ask them to perform a series of writing tasks within a specific time. A long article, short article and some posts for example.

Heuristic 2: Evaluate their work

What they produce will demonstrate their content generation prowess under ‘working’ conditions you have created and, how they approach the tasks will tell you something about tenacity and their ‘willingness to fail’.

Heuristic 3: Benchmark their work

You also will have a basis to meaningfully compare candidates and, if you have similar written work already produced, you also have a benchmark to evaluate against.