“When you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B-grade work.”
– Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple
When you think about how to hire a content writer, what’s the most important thing you focus on? For many, it’s usually the quality of the writer. A good content writer is self-motivated to produce the highest quality of content. But wait, there are also other (dare I say better) criteria to consider while hiring a content writer.
Let me explain using Ukti’s hiring process.
As a content writing agency, hiring the best content writers has always been a top priority – we’re always looking out for individuals with a strong grasp of the written word and keen ears and eyes for content marketing. But apart from the writer’s roster of technical skills, we also like to look at their overall attitude towards learning, improving, and excelling at work.
Unfortunately, finding such gems today is more challenging than ever. Since the barrier to entry is low, many candidates take up content writing only as a side hustle. Most even end up finding innovative ways to use AI tools like ChatGPT to manipulate the hiring processes, especially when hiring happens on virtual platforms.
In our own experience, ChatGPT has been a big nuisance. The number of times we’ve read the “…as an AI language model” sentence in the candidates’ responses have been as irritating as disappointing. It’s making recruitment harder and harder each month.
To overcome such challenges and get the best talent onboard, Ukti has a rigorous approach to evaluating candidates. It consists of three rounds to filter out unserious and non-fit candidates at the beginning itself.
In brief, the three assessment rounds cover the following:
- Basic writing skills
- B2B SaaS expertise
- Personality and attitude
The first two rounds are writing assessments, while the third one is a personal interview. In the last round, we look for traits like curiosity, originality, openness to feedback, inquisitiveness, and efficiency, which play an important role in helping us pick the right candidate for the position.
At last, if everything aligns with our requirements, we onboard the writer and provide them with a training period of 2 to 3 months.
Unlike other vocations like engineering, where they have higher education for 3-4 years, there is no formal training to become a content writer. At Ukti, we believe ‘anybody from any background can be an excellent content writer if they have a few important fundamental skills.’
And this is the basis of our hiring process. We don’t make it a qualifying criterion to be from English literature or journalism background. If you meet our basic parameters, we at Ukti encourage you to join our content writing team.
Let’s get into more detail about all these steps.
What Do We Look for in a Candidate?
Here are some essential requirements that we look for in a candidate:
- Excellent command of the English language: You must possess a comprehensive understanding of the English language. We will evaluate your communication skills, written as well as verbal. You must think in English, which will naturally reflect how you write and speak in English. A complete grasp of the English language is the primary criterion.
- Creativity and critical thinking: As a writer who writes different types of content for various brands, it is essential to have a creative mind with critical thinking. You should be able to communicate with a variety of tones and styles of writing. And finally, you must find creative ways to build arguments and keep the reader hooked from beginning to end.
- Curiosity in the blood: By that, we mean you should naturally be a curious person who likes reading and exploring new trends, ideas, and topics from the industry. You should have a never quenching thirst to know everything in and out about what you write. For that, you must consume a lot of content.
Testing the Writing Competence – Technical Round
We have a couple of technical rounds of assessments to check how well are the candidate’s writing skills. We keep changing its format, context, and criteria per the latest industry trends, our current clients, and future scope to make these assessments as relevant as possible.
We check the candidate for:
- Understanding of the brief
- Ability to follow the guidelines given in the brief
- Meeting the deadlines given to them
- Ability to communicate their ideas clearly to the target audience
- Capability to grasp new concepts – mostly the complex ones related to the tech space
- The authenticity of the written content – the presence of AI written content
All these aspects are essential for the role of a content writer to excel in Ukti.
Interview Round – The Final Check
“There are two elements to nailing a job interview: form and substance. ‘Form’ describes the outer layer of your character – your manners, demeanour, and social skills. ‘Substance’ describes the inner core of your character – your intellect, your empathy, your creativity.”
– Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Warby Parker
During the interview, we want to know how committed and sincere a candidate is towards their work. It is one of the top traits we look for when making a new hire.
We assess how they speak about their personal background, education, and previous work. We try to understand how motivated and deeply interested they were in their professional journey and how proud they are of their achievements. These traits are fundamental to the candidate and likely to remain constant throughout their career.
And so, we value and appreciate people who display characteristics like commitment, sincerity, and motivation.
We also try to understand their work ethics and how honest they are towards their work and their limitations. After all, it is human to err. But how honestly you accept your mistakes and correct them is something we would like to see in the candidate.
Here are a few essential qualities we check during the interview:
- Professionalism: We check how professionally they come for the interview regarding their attire and the overall process.
- Punctuality: We observe if the candidate has come on time for the interview, especially during the remote/virtual interview, as there is no scope for traffic jams or inability to find the venue. 99% of the candidates who come late for the interview, we don’t hire them simply because it reflects on their attitude towards work and professional commitments.
- Problem-solving: This is one of the most important traits we value in Ukti. We are a small team that is growing fast, and we expect that the candidate should be inclined to solve their problems independently. We want our employees to find innovative solutions to problems, no matter how small or big they are.
Based on these evaluations, we find the right fit for Ukti and select the best candidates. We offer them an initial training period of 2-3 months, during which we induct them to different clients and the work we do for them. Besides work, we also integrate them into our culture and orient them towards how things work at Ukti.
As a feedback-driven team, we regularly provide writers with extensive feedback to promote their growth and sponsor content writing courses for independent learning. We also have weekly/fortnightly/monthly review sessions to discuss how they are doing, their challenges, and the best ways to help them improve.
Once their training period ends, we do the final review based on the feedback from the editors, managers, and peers. If they qualify on each parameter, we confirm their employment with Ukti.
At Ukti, we strongly believe in what Nolan Bushnell, Cofounder of Atari Inc., said –
“Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything.”
Would you like to work with such a passionate team of content writers?
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