We always advise first having a skype call with every candidate before making a hiring decision. The call simply validates who they are.
You don’t want to end up in a situation where a person or company is outsourcing the writing work to another writer.
Once we were happy with how the candidates spoke over the call we then made them an offer on that same call. The offer was for a 3 month freelance writing position. We fielded any questions the candidate had on the call, and once all of these had been answered we ended the call by agreeing to send them a freelance employment contract.
We then sent the candidate the employment contract and once they signed and returned it we moved them into our onboarding stage.
The onboarding stage is another critical element in the entire outsourcing process. It is your chance put in place the operating procedures that all writers need to follow when writing and submitting work. Having a robust on-boarding process will ensure all the writers you hire will produce the most consistent and high quality work possible.
We created one simple onboarding email which had different sections to it covering key topics like writing guidelines, how manage workflows, and invoicing & payments. All of these sections pointed to files and folders in our Google Drive which we would give each writer access to.
The files and folders formed part of the standard operating procedures that we will explore in more detail in the next chapter.
Once a writer was successfully onboarded our project manager would then issue them with their first writing project.