How do you deal with TERRIBLE Writers ?!

I have found that every writer thinks he's a great/ or at least a very decent writer,
After going through a bit over 100 writers during the past 12months & Providing Full outlines for every article & Having extensive guidelines that have been polished up to be brief but cover everything to deliver an Excellent article.

6% can Actually Follow guidelines extremely well/do excellent research and Completely Nail even the first article that you give them.
4% can Deliver very good Content for the 1st piece & after a bit of feedback join the 1st group of Truly Excellent Writers that you want to keep.
15% Can Deliver Mediocre Content that can still be used after polishing it up/improving slightly.

The rest..well...You are probably already aware...

________
The question is, How do you Weed out the Remaining 75% as Fast as possible while wasting as little time/resources/effort?

The 80/20 rule totally applies here as well, 20% of the writers will end up delivering 80% of the content and they will barely require any hand-holding or guidance.

My bottleneck is wasting 80% of the time on the writers that will deliver 20% of the content that also will be of extremely poor quality.
What's your process like?

I'm hiring at a rate of around 20 writers a month at the momemt, from those, only 1 or 2 becomes full-time writers for me that are great to work with and procudes excellent content.

After the initial quick screening, I will send a smaller non-crucial article to everyone & see what I get back.
This is where I often get stuck as I'm trying to make it work and help the most terrible writers that won't even spend the time to read/follow what is required & start writing something offtopic

Or help someone I can very well see will ditch me very soon or has taken 3weeks to deliver an article that can be done in 2hours. Those are really the worst,not only the content will suck but they are also terrible to deal with & will do nothing but waste your time and give fake promises.

I always try to be a ''nice guy''and try to make it work so they can at least deliver something usable for the 1st articles, I even say ''ok'' to those who get ''sick'' and have to take 2weeks off before they can deliver the 1st article, it takes insane amounts of time to provide feedback to them/explain stuff/write back& Forth..

In the end. I have found it to be a massive waste of time as they won't even go through the instructions/guidelines ,there are some that will even get extremely angry... The worst thing is ,rarely will they even deliver the next article to you..

So you just wasted 1-2hours providing extensive feedback ,writing back & forth & going through a terrible article that you will have to throw away anyway/will have to completely re-do yourself.
Lately after receiving the 1st article & If it's absolute crap and I can see they have barely followed anything in the guidelines & the content is absolute junk I don't even bother explaining and just pay them something to get rid of them..

I guess it's ''cheaper'' that way...

The thing is.. I still HATE paying for something where I wasted 2hours of my time and waited for 2weeks to end up with nothing

It sounds like you guys are wasting a lot of hours. Perhaps if you just wrote all the articles yourselves you would save a lot of time and money?

Are you providing writing services? If not, I'd go with the content writing provider rather than an individual writer.

How much were you offering the writers?

really simple answer here, its all about accounting for variables.

Give each writer a standard prompt designed to test their skills. 1000-1500 words, outlined, on a medium difficulty topic. the key is to give each writer the SAME prompt. You can only compare apples to apples.

You save tons of time and effort by filtering this way, sure you dont get any usable content, but you weed out the bad ones quite quickly.

(also ask for past work, this could save you the effort of having to even do this)

It would help if you mention the rate per 100 words for all 3 categories you mentioned.

Have you tried using an agency? It’s a bit more expensive of course but you don’t have to deal with the drama.

Well, most of the things you say happen if you pay a penny to the writers you hire. I have hired and managed up to 10 writers in my team this year and they are all fantastic.

I'm going through the same right now.
I had 114 people apply to my job post and only found one decent writer of it.

I'm considering hiring an agency but they either seem to be too expensive or lazy.
I can't really justify spending more than $20/1000 words right now and most decent agencies seem to charge at least $40/1000 words.

The two agencies that were in my price range both took about 1 week to send me samples of their work. I don't even want to imagine what happens if you ask for something more specific.

If anyone can suggest me a good agency in my price range (about $20/1000 words) I'd be more than grateful!

if you want a job well done do it yourself. Alternatively you are forced to choose writers with a paid test article

SEO-Bear said:

I'm going through the same right now.
I had 114 people apply to my job post and only found one decent writer of it.

I'm considering hiring an agency but they either seem to be too expensive or lazy.
I can't really justify spending more than $20/1000 words right now and most decent agencies seem to charge at least $40/1000 words.

The two agencies that were in my price range both took about 1 week to send me samples of their work. I don't even want to imagine what happens if you ask for something more specific.

If anyone can suggest me a good agency in my price range (about $20/1000 words) I'd be more than grateful!I

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I think the problem is your budget...When the demand is higher than your budget. Try hiring individual writers, while hiring a content manager or editor to oversee the whole stuff

How much are you paying the writers and where are you finding them?

There are plenty of great writers around, but they can be costly. When you're looking at a budget at the lower end you'll struggle to find actual native English-speaking writers.

I ask for a sample, start with a small order, see if the writer is open to revisions and then I don’t change much. I have found some awesome writers here so its A trial and error thing. Also if the writer is too bad ask for a refund

SEO-Bear said:

I'm going through the same right now.
I had 114 people apply to my job post and only found one decent writer of it.

I'm considering hiring an agency but they either seem to be too expensive or lazy.
I can't really justify spending more than $20/1000 words right now and most decent agencies seem to charge at least $40/1000 words.

The two agencies that were in my price range both took about 1 week to send me samples of their work. I don't even want to imagine what happens if you ask for something more specific.

If anyone can suggest me a good agency in my price range (about $20/1000 words) I'd be more than grateful!

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I've had good experience with ranking articles, but for your budget you can't really get native writers.
I think their non-native writers are very good for the price, and within your range.

Op it would be useful to know what you pay for content and what you consider good or not?

You could just get the content of content provider which would probably solve your issues I suspect.

danno said:

How much are you paying the writers and where are you finding them?

There are plenty of great writers around, but they can be costly. When you're looking at a budget at the lower end you'll struggle to find actual native English-speaking writers.

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Do you really expect the $hit writers will also NOT apply Just because you are offering $100/1k?
Heck.. there will be even more of them to try their luck

It's not the budget, It barely even matters once you go past a certain level.
I already have a small team of excellent writers that I'm always looking to expand, but as I said, to get to them you also have to go through a lot of shit ones.
a Monster Budget won't discourage the Shit writers to apply...

I'm Just wasting too much time weeding out the bad ones..

Why not assign one of your good writers or managers to do the vetting/weeding process for good writers. Why do it yourself?

rampzeus said:

Why not assign one of your good writers or managers to do the vetting/weeding process for good writers. Why do it yourself?

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Exactly, if it's taking up his time. He should get someone to do that for him.

It is like managing a football team. You train them, some will follow the rules, some will argue with you and the good ones will leave the team eventually.

I use Trello to manage my content writing team. I create new cards which contain the brief and then assign the appropriate writer that I think matches the job best.

This is one example of a board that I share with one writer (not a shared board with multiple writers)


Once the writer starts the job, he/she will move the card to "in progress". Once the job is done, the card will be moved to "ready for review". I will leave my feedback in the comment field. If the article needs revision, I move the card to "revision".

The cards are open to anyone on the board which means that all writers can read my comments to the other writers. They can also help each other and exchange ideas.

When I hire a new writer, I want them to read the Google review guidelines https://searchengineland.com/google-product-reviews-algorithm-update-347568

P.s.: I do believe that you can find good quality writers for 0.02 cents per word. And instead of asking for free trial articles, I would have a longer chat with them on Skype.