How to hire a writer

Just for kicks, I recently put up a job post to find a writer/editor on Upwork.

After getting about a dozen proposals, I quickly compiled a list of the first sentence of each one. (Click here to see them all.)

Why?

Well. If any writer is worth their salt, they’re going to write just as good a proposal as any form of content I could assign them.

Which means that, if I’m going to evaluate them on their writing ability (which is what you should do when hiring a writer), the best thing I can do is evaluate them based on how well written their proposal is.

Assuming the Pareto Principle applies (which it most likely does), I could just as well take any sentence from their proposal to gauge how well written their entire piece might be.

As long as I take the same sentence for each writer, and evaluate them based on that sentence alone, I have a pretty good method to use when comparing them.

And it’s efficient too. Incredibly so. Because all I have to do is rank 12 sentences.

…

Lots of folks might argue that I need to read more from each writer to get a better impression of each. The thing is, not only does this take too long, it’s also not as effective. You can’t possibly compare a dozen 250, or 500, or 1,000 word pieces. In fact, this strategy is more biased, because unless you have an abundantly clear winner (unless you find a obvious choice) you’ll be so exhausted, you’ll likely pick the one you remember as being the best. (Causing you to rely on your somewhat spotty short-term memory.) It might be better to pick a better sentence (say, the third or the last) or, even better, to identify the top 3 writers based on my ‘single sentence strategy,’ and then rank them based on their full piece. In either case, its a more effective (and certainly a more efficient) strategy than doing it the old-fashioned way.

Of course, if you’re merely looking for the cheapest writer you can afford, that’s another story.