---
name: writer-trial-commission
description: Use when hiring a freelance writer and portfolio samples are not telling you whether they can do your work.
---

# Run a Paid Writer Trial

Portfolios show a writer at their best after somebody else edited them, which is why hires that look strong on samples file drafts that need rewriting. Unpaid test pieces select for people with spare time rather than skill, and requests for free samples are correctly refused by the writers you most want. The test that works is a small paid commission on a real backlog topic, briefed exactly as you brief live work, scored against criteria written before the draft lands.

## What you need first

- a real topic from your backlog that you would publish anyway, not an invented test subject
- the same brief you would hand an existing writer, proprietary facts included
- budget to pay the commission at your normal rate
- scoring criteria written and agreed before you read a word of the draft

## Method

1. Pick a live topic of ordinary difficulty. A deliberately hard topic tests nothing you need to know and a trivial one is passed by every candidate.
2. Brief them exactly as you brief current writers, supplying the proprietary material. Withholding it to see whether they cope tests their guessing, not their writing.
3. Write the score sheet before the deadline: does it answer the reader decision, were the supplied facts used, was the format constraint followed, how much editing would it need. Criteria written after reading always rationalise a first impression.
4. Score editing effort in minutes rather than rating quality. Minutes to publishable is the number that decides whether the relationship is affordable at your rate.
5. Send one round of genuine edit notes and read what comes back. Response to editing predicts the working relationship far better than any first draft.
6. Ask where anything you did not supply came from. A writer who cannot name a source for a statistic will cost you a correction later.
7. Pay for the piece whichever way you decide, and publish it if it is good. A paid trial you go on to use is simply a commission, and it keeps you hireable in a small market.

## What this produces

A scored trial commission carrying a minutes-to-publishable figure, a note on edit response, and a hire or decline decision.

## Where this goes wrong

- Testing on a topic nobody intended to publish, which spends the budget and gives the writer no reason to take it seriously
- Deciding on the first draft alone, when the post-notes second draft is what you will actually live with every week
- Scoring prose polish while ignoring whether the brief was followed, which hires a stylist who needs managing on every piece

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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/writer-trial-commission