Historically hiring managers, including myself, have used writing samples and writing tests to evaluate candidates for jobs that have significant editorial responsibilities including content managers, public relations pros, copywriters, product marketers, etc.
Increasingly, I’m uncomfortable with these tools as good evaluators of writing talent for a couple reasons.
- Rarely do these tools provide the insight hiring managers need to evaluate candidates. Because there is no way to verify the provenance of a writing sample (Is this their work or ChatGPT’s?) or the editorial process used to create it, it is hard to understand whether it is a true reflection of the candidate’s abilities let alone a good predictor of what they will deliver for their new employer. Not only that, as a hiring manager, I have little insight into the intent behind the piece. What goals was the writer trying to achieve? Without those missing details, there is very little value to be gleaned.
- Similarly, writing tests don’t provide hiring managers with the insights they need on a candidate’s ability to move their business forward. The problem stems from the fact that candidates don’t really possess the knowledge of your company, it’s business goals and marketing objectives to produce content that will tell the hiring manager whether they will be a good fit moving forward. These tests often reveal only how closely a candidate can adopt your writing style and mimic your existing messaging. But great writers do much more than that. Great writers acquire a deep understanding of your business, your audiences and communication channels and then find new and creative ways to push your messaging forward in ways that drive your audiences to action. The content they produce with an outsider’s perspective will always be less revealing about what they might produce after they are hired because of that lack of knowledge. While the hiring manager could spend time to ensure candidates have sufficient background to produce something instructive, they rarely have such luxury.
- There is growing dissatisfaction among employees about the power dynamic between employers and themselves as evidenced by their reaction to return to office mandates, the rise of labor unions, and their general contempt for modern HR practices around hiring and layoffs. Candidates are in a much weaker position than hiring managers when it comes to dictating the terms of engagement during the candidate/ employer evaluation process as failure to land a job can have devastating economic consequences for them while failure to land a candidate is merely an inconvenience resulting in slightly less efficiency or small, short term decrease in revenue for the employer. Candidates, therefore, will go to great lengths to land a job and, as a result, employers can and do ask almost anything of them in the process. But, by doing so, employers create a foundation of mistrust and drive away the most sought after candidates. Asking for writing tests, for example, can be perceived as asking candidates to produce free work product, regardless of whether it is the employer’s intent to commercialize anything the candidate produces. And even if a candidate chooses to move forward, use of these tools subtly communicates to candidates that they will be valued merely for their production, not the value they deliver. Your new hire starts off viewing their role and relationship with the company as transactional and not as a strategic partnership.
What I’ve found to be a much more effective option in evaluating candidates is to ask them to select an existing piece of my company’s content – a blog post, a web page, a contributed article, a marketing email, etc. – and explain in a paragraph or two why they think it is effective or not.
I like this approach because it is less onerous on candidates, it engages them more strategically, it reveals their depth of knowledge about our market without needing a deep understanding of our business, it allows me to gauge how well suited they are to address go-forward challenges without having to share tremendous levels of detail with them.
The criteria I use to judge these efforts include:
- What piece of content did they choose?
- How did they critique it?
- Was their submission concise and well written?
- Are they a grammarian? Did they find any mistakes in our writing and/or make any in theirs?
- Did they challenge the strategic approach?
By doing this, I’m having more interesting conversations with candidates that reveals much more about how they would approach their work, integrate with the team and deliver value. And that, after all is said and done, is the goal of any hiring process.
