Tips for Hiring a Good Freelance Writer

Everyone knows that content is king. But content doesn’t come free. Even though a Japanese artificial intelligence program nearly won a literary prize for creating a novel better than nearly all the books written by humans last year, for the most part you still need human beings to produce high quality content. Since fewer publications have the budget to hire a large enough full time staff to produce all of the content that they need, editors and publishers know that hiring freelance writers is the most efficient way to fill the bottomless desire for content characteristic of the internet age.

But how do you hire a good freelance writer?

Experts say that there are a few tips that will help to make sure that you’re using the very best freelance writers when you need content.

Review Their Records

The most important place to start is with the writer’s experience. Does this writer have experience writing articles like the kind you need? If not, this isn’t the best writer to choose. If so, ask to see clips to make sure that the writer’s style, research skills, and quality match what you’re looking for. But just as importantly, a writer’s clips let you evaluate whether that writer has any problems with plagiarism, copying, and other issues that can cause headaches for your publication.

In the internet era, plagiarism has never been easier thanks to the ability to copy and paste from the internet. Indeed, whole websites have raised plagiarism to an art form by copying and pasting material into click-bait traps designed to game Google and lure readers away from the originating pages.

But the ethos of click-bait copying has infected an unusually high number of writers. Many new writers or less scrupulous ones don’t think twice about copying quotations from other reporters’ work without giving proper citation.

When you evaluate a new freelance writer, it’s important to be able to review their clips. Run them through plagiarism-detecting software, or try paste phrases into a search engine to look for matches. While a truly dedicated plagiarizer won’t give you clips that showcase plagiarism, this method will help you catch weak writers who don’t know any better.

It’s also a good idea to check out their personal web pages or social media accounts, which might link to you to pieces that they didn’t provide in their clip file.

Give Them a Test

Giving a writer a test is also an important way of judging their skills. Anyone can provide a curated clip file that highlights their very best work, but you also need to see how they perform under pressure on an assigned task. Assign a writer a sample piece to produce so you can judge how well that writer works on a topic and timeline that you can control. By reviewing the writer’s work, you can get a sense of how well this writer will fit into your publication’s culture and how well the writer can meet your deadlines.

Verify the Writer’s Background

This one is a little tricky, but it’s important for keeping your publication’s “voice” intact. In today’s online world, it’s not unusual for a writer to claim to be a native English speaker or even a native of a specific area of the country even if that writer is from another part of the world altogether. They hope you’ll never know. But even the most educated speaker from another country will have different experiences with the English language and will write using different rhythms, cadences, and style, and they will be likely to use different phrases and wording than your readers are used to. Verifying the writer’s actual background can help you to anticipate these potential issues and discover when you need to employ writers in a different capacity.

Overall, hiring a good freelance writer isn’t very different from hiring any other type of employee. Vetting and interviewing are important, but the key difference is that writers don’t just report to you but also write for your audience. As a result, taking extra care in matching a writer to the content you need will be a boon when it comes to attracting and keeping readers for years to come.