News And Article Writers Interview Preparation Guide

Download PDF

Although content writers aren’t supposed to know much about SEO but if they do it’s a added bonus because writing and SEO go hand-in-hand and website popularity depends on the right balance between the two and not just one of them. Obviously if you have mentioned SEO as one of your skills then be prepared for some searching SEO questions from the interviewer. Even if you mention SEO as a separate skill as distinct from SEO content writing, mention it after your writing skill and not before that. But handle all SEO related questions with tact. If the interviewer just has some basic SEO knowledge then you can convince him/her quite easily by talking about on-page and off-page optimization but if the interviewer has in depth knowledge then you will need more than just SEO basics. So it’s advisable to state upfront your comfort level with all things SEO.

It is imperative to know about the basic qualification of the person you intend to hire. If he/she is a graduate in English literature don’t be too happy about it because they might not be able to write creative contents. Read through their resume and find out if they have been involved in writing or editing their work related documents. Sometimes this skill will help to know that they would be accurate in pinpointing grammatical errors. Besides, they would have an eye for reading each sentence word by word. Anyway, it is best if the writer is a graduate and has worked for few years.

While making selection for skilled writer, you would be willing to have someone in your team who takes feedback in a positive way. As most of the content work is a collaborative work, making the right changes to the content is based on way the writers incorporate the feedback into the articles. A writer who defends their work or not open to suggestions would be difficult to handle as it would cause lot of headaches. Especially when you are looking for content writers for marketing purpose you would need to be careful in hiring the right candidates. They need to be open to suggestions and positive in their approach, willing to make changes as per needs.

☛ Why it’s important to ask this: Your content marketer will need to express a unique voice and opinion in their work. However, they also need to adapt their own style as a function of your company’s needs, the audience, format of the content, person they’re writing for, and so on.
☛ What to look out for: Look and ask for specific examples of how they modified their style, as well as asking them to identify why this is important.

☛ Why it’s important to ask this: What drives a person to invest their time and effort into creating content? Is it anecdotal insight such as a hallway conversation with a sales person—which may be a good place to begin investigating an idea, but not the final driver for its execution? Or is creation more data-driven, such as through Google Analytics or insight from a content marketing platform?
☛ What to look out for: Be wary if your candidate indicates their past content development was primarily driven by what their boss told them to write about; or they have no understanding of what goes into content strategy. A follow-up question could be: “Describe your company’s content strategy, including key steps in its development.”

Mediocre Responses:
☛ I publish my content on WordPress, and then tweet it out as well.

Great Responses:
☛ I publish the post on our blog using WordPress.
☛ I then schedule a minimum of four tweets at different times of the day in HootSuite.
☛ I email coworkers to retweet and share my post as well.
☛ I ask the demand generation team to include it in the next email newsletter to our database.

This is perhaps the most important question, because if their writing skills aren’t up to snuff, your content writer might succeed in driving people away from your site, not to it. While reading previous work will give you great insight into their writing level (they need to know the difference between “there,” “they’re” and “their,” for one thing), also ask questions specific to online writing, such as Can you explain technical content without using meaningless buzzwords?

Probably not the first question that comes to mind, but an important one nonetheless. The old saying goes that if you keep doing the same thing, you're bound to get the same results. There's a reason you're hiring someone else: you want a different perspective, a different voice, right?
This question can be answered by asking what blogs, books or magazines they read, who would play them in the movie version of their life or what profession they would choose if they could start all over. You might be surprised by the answers, but what you're really looking for is to be entertained by their responses and understand their personality.

As you look through a prospective writer’s “clips” or writing samples, select one to ask about in detail during the interview. The goal is to get an idea of how they go about getting to the final product.

The answer here should jive with the sort of working relationship your marketing team wants to have with its content marketing writer. If you want to be the ones coming up with ideas, then you need a writer who is happy to take assignments as they come. If you don’t have the time or inclination to come up with ideas, then you need a writer who is happy to take on that task. When there is a mismatch here, it will cause frustration on both ends of the working relationship.