The best way to hire and test a freelance essay writer's abilities and credentials?

What is the best way to 'hire' freelance essay writers and check their abilities, education, and credentials? There are a couple of different approaches that students and research services can utilize to find the best match:

A. Ask a potential writer to send his/her resume and writing samples done for their previous clients.

ADVANTAGES: It's a quick and easy process.

DISADVANTAGES: Writing samples and/or resume may be fake (not written by the applying writer) and checking credentials is an uneasy and unproven process, prone to abuse too.

B. Ask a potential writer to do some kind of a writing / grammar test on a random topic within a limited period of time.

ADVANTAGES: It checks the writer's abilities well.

DISADVANTAGES: It cannot cover all research scenarios and may be a turn off for advanced writers. It's also prone to abuse (you don't really know if this is the exact person doing the writing or test, unless you have a live video chat installed).

C. Take a small risk and award a new writer a paid project to work on; if he/she is successful she or he may be considered a 'pass' for the test.

ADVANTAGES: This 'test' truly reflects the working scenarios and checks the writer's potential.

DISADVANTAGES: If the writer fails to deliver a good (and not plagiarized) paper, it may cause problems to the client and the company. But it may be offset by asking the writer to complete the project ahead of time so that there's still time to reassign it if needed. The project doesn't have to be for an actual client; you or your company may need some content to publish on your blog or website and in that case the risk is completely minimized because a real student/client will not receive the paper.

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What do the new and seasoned writers here think; which approach is best both for the writer, student, and the company?

You can just forget about A and B because "resumes" are totally irrelevant in this business. Plenty of people have great resumes but they can't write to save their lives. Some of them paid someone else to write both their resumes and all the writing assignments required for those impressive degrees on their resumes. If you ask any writer who actually does this work for a fulltime living to take some "test" for you, especially a "grammar test" that you're presumably going to judge, he'll laugh at you or just ignore your subsequent emails. There's no need for creativity here; just common sense.

Option C makes sense and it's no different from finding a trustworthy auto mechanic. Both industries are full of cheats and shoddy imposters pretending to be qualified professionals. Don't wait until you need a big, important and expensive piece of work in either realm to "try out" a new service for the first time. Try out a new mechanic with an oil change or some minor repair and try out a new writer with a short paper with a cushioned deadline on your end. That allows you to make sure a writer is honest and that you like his/her writing style/work quality before you sink much bigger money into a pre-paid project but without insulting or wasting the time of any writers who happen to be exactly what you're hoping to find: honest, experienced, very good at what they do, and already way too busy with their work to respond to nonsense like requests for grammar tests or unpaid custom drafts.

I also tend to agree point #C is the most relevant in the writing business, thanks.

or just ask them to provide you with a 2-3 page sample on your order details, tell them that you will place the order and will pay them in full if you like the quality, trust me this is the best way to judge and that is exactly what we do with our customer..

it depends on one's perspective. for writers, C-- there's no waste of time or money jumping thru hoops. but most companies have A, B, or A+B installed, to help cover their asses.

I agree that C is the best way, and really the only way. I will add that there is a lot of "sixth sense" involved. Americans have certain subtleties in the way they write emails, as do Brits, as do legitimate students from other countries, as do scammers from various places. You can tell a lot from the idioms the person uses.

I'm more than happy to send all the customers who want free pages to FreeWritingHelp or whoever else is offering pro bono work. Anybody but me! I'll stick with paying customers.

Every writer and company would want to go with C---

The sole purpose is to guarantee students satisfaction and quality before the pay.


We would love to assist them all the way through :))

By the way the name of the website is not freewritinghelp, please visit essaychat.com for further details ~

As FreelanceWriter said, A and B are not good options. Option A can simply be faked (and resumes are pointless), and Option B is something any decent writer wouldn't be wasting their time with--while I understand first-time customers' fears, I do not have the time to repeatedly perform "writing tests" to convince people that I'm good at what I do. Email discussions should provide enough evidence of language skills.

Option C, with customers placing small orders until trust has been earned and using reliable methods of payment, is the only way to approach most decent writers. I still don't know of a single writer/service that provides any work for free and is actually worth the cost, present company included.

There's also option #D - just set up a writer and hope for the best :--).

I'd like to add an option D myself: "Hire anyone and everyone who applies, and keep only the meekest victims who don't quit when you start fining them 3x their paycheck."

I think BrianJ was asking about clients rather than companies hiring writers, though your sarcasm does actually identify a real problem this time. If writers stopped working for these scam companies they'd be much harder pressed to keep plugging away as they do.

When you're a writer and you've just worked a 14-hour day -- producing essays for paying customers -- and somebody emails you wanting you to take a grammar test, you're going to hit that delete button, guaranteed.

Writer screening is extremely difficult to complete because of varying reasons. Choices A-C only work in Lalaland. If a client really wants to get to know the writer and his actual abilities, he has to first, do a verbal interview of the writer over a number of days. Call it contract negotiations. This is the best way to measure the intellect of the writer and his true English abilities. After that, if the client and writer come to an agreement regarding the order, the client should place the order, asking for specific draft percentage submissions, depending on the length of the paper. This way, revisions can be immediately implemented in required sections. This is the best method of assessing the writing abilities and credentials of the writers. He can make all the claims he wants in terms of the blurb on his ad, but his actual writing will tell a different story and that, is what the client should be on the lookout for. Pre-screening is hugely difficult to do and you won't find a writer who would be cooperative regarding any of those aspects of screening.

Knowing how the students have become more scrutinizing of the writers they hire these days, I found that one way that a writer can prove his worth is by posting a number of his writing samples on his website. For students who wish to measure the writing skills of the writer, the postings will help the student assess that. For students who want to be sure of a writer's familiarity with a topic, with any luck, the writer will have posted a related topic that the student can use to consider him for hiring. When it comes to providing sample work, this is something that the writer has to do of his own free will. It should not be a student's test of the writer's ability but rather, proof that the writer is highly confident of delivering the client's needs. In some instances, an altered student name and review can be posted alongside the partial sample posting of the writer.

Yep. I said "partial", no writer in his right mind would post the completed essays on the web. It should even be redacted in most instances to protect the student. The posted work should come from at least 4 academic years back in order to make sure that the students will be clear of the professor and university already. Just in case.

Scam writers perpetrate all sorts of complex fraudulent shenanigans; what's to prevent them from just posting a sample of fantastic writing that they didn't actually write? The only reliable way of "testing" a freelance writer if you don't know the writer is, simply, to order a very short project. A sample can also be useful in that regard, but if and only if you're already sure that you're dealing with someone legit, in the first place, who really delivers completed projects after payment and who really wrote whatever samples he's offering you.

There are many students averse to this form of test for various individual reasons.
But even if they went through with the test, it is still not foolproof. Assuming the innocent intention of the writer to deliver (and this is a big and risky assumption), one who can prepare a quick 2-page is not necessarily able to adequately deliver on a 50-page dissertation. The skill sets are not identical. This is just one of several factors rendering this test imperfect.

The only sure-fire way of utilizing this proposed test is to (redundantly) order a paper that matches the specifics of the actual piece needed. Students willing to go through this are rare


Then this makes the whole exercise of demanding a sample pointless, doesn't it?

There are many ways to test the abilities of any freelancer writer :
1. You can ask for a online grammar test.
2. Give any topic to write 2 or 3 papers on it.
3. Ask to write a resume or CV
Others options are also available you can opt for any of it.

Yes. That's what I was trying to explain. Anybody could have written the "sample" provided; so any sample is meaningless unless you already know that the writer in question is generally trustworthy and legit and you just want to see his or her writing style. If you're talking about customers already perusing this forum, I'd suggest that a review of a writer's posting history will also help them determine whether a given writer expresses himself well in writing as well as how well he knows English grammar. With respect to the suggestion about grammar tests, just consider the writer's posting history to be a "grammar test" because no busy writer is going to bother dealing with any client who asks him to spend his time taking some "grammar test" for him.


I didn't suggest that ordering a short project was a "perfect" test; it's just that there's really no other way to test out a new writer at all besides ordering a short project. Not every writer who can produce a coherent 2 pages can necessarily write a good 50-pg project; but the more important point is that a writer who can't even do the former certainly can't do the latter, and this test, albeit imperfect, will help customer weed out writers who can't even write a good 2 pages.

Another option would be to pay the writer for just the Introduction (or Literature Review) of the longer project, or to pay for a short outline and proposal before ordering the full 50-pg project. Whichever option a customer chooses, it's always a good idea, although not necessarily a "perfect" test, to simply try out any new writer with a shorter project of some type before paying for a long one. That's all I'm suggesting.

This is exactly how I started doing business with freelancewriter after I wasted a lot of money ordering a large project from a website that looked very professional. What I received from them was something ridiculously bad, it was useless in every way possible. I put my trust in freelancewriter to complete the same order even though I was still quite afraid and skeptical due to my bad experience. He suggested just doing the literature review for me first and what he delivered was excellent. Since then I have ordered around 5 or 6 other projects from him. Every project I have received has helped me receive outstanding marks. He is expensive but not as expensive as paying someone else for a useless project first before ordering the same one from him to get it done right.

@StudentAbroad
Thank you; much appreciated, obviously.

I don't know which client this is, but the scenario described happens to me roughly once a month: someone contacts me for the first time and sends me some atrociously-bad "writing" received elsewhere and asks me whether I can fix it. Usually, it's so bad that it would be much more work (and, probably, with a worse outcome) than just doing it from scratch. About half as often, it's someone who contacted me for a quote first but then decided to go with a cheaper service; then, a few weeks later, the same person contacts me again for the same project after receiving something totally useless for that cheaper price. Usually, I don't warn them about that possibility in advance unless they specifically ask me whether I can "match" the cheaper price they're quoted elsewhere, because I know that just sounds like a hard sell. If they ask me to match the cheaper price before finalizing that order, I do respond by letting them know how often that happens and just suggest that they minimize their risk by ordering only a small portion before they prepay for a large project.

@StudentAbroad and @FreelanceWriter hit the nail on the head.

In my experience, doing a few pages for a new client is the best way to earn their trust -- and repeat business. I understand they don't know me from Adam and they want to know they aren't flushing their money. I often offer a nominal discount for the first few pages (when plausible) to show my skills.

As for resume and writing samples, previous posts said what I feel, too: resumes can be easily fabricated and much of the info on a resume can't be accurately verified. On writing samples, I would never send a sample of something I've done in the past as that would breach the confidence of other clients. When I explain this, new/prospective clients understand as they don't want me sharing their completed projects, either. ;)

It takes time to build and cultivate a lucrative client pool but if one is willing to stay the course and to work on potential weaknesses (constructive criticism are our friends even though it stings sometimes), the end result is worth the effort.

If a student wants to test the writer's ability before hiring him, then he can consider giving him a written test based on the actual assignment. You should be able to ask him to write a short essay based on a related topic. That should offer you a good enough idea as to his writing style, his ability to do correct research, and his actual English language abilities. This isn't rocket science. Simple tests will often result in results that will be more than helpful to the client. If you are lucky, he won't charge you for the sample essay.

The problem is that none of those choices apply in the age of AI academic writing. There are cases wherein the writers themselves turn to AI for writing for their clients so it is really difficult to "test" a writer's true abilities these days. Not unless you can have the writer do a spur of the moment test, and submit it to you within 40 minutes. Stay online with him to make sure he is not running an AI quick write on you. Make sure to have your AI detector app available for immediate verification,

One thing that makes it much easier is having access to an extensive history of a writer's several thousand substantive forum posts dating back almost 20 years for comparison. I know that there's no AI program in existence today that can write anywhere remotely close to the way that I write, or (especially) as well, even when it comes to informal forum posts, let alone formal academic writing. If you have nothing to compare to a writing sample, it might be very difficult to distinguish AI writing from really bad human writing, but it's extremely easy to identify human writing that's obviously much too good to have been written by any AI program. That's another tremendous advantage of finding a real legitimate writer on this forum where you can research every member's entire posting history to get a real sense of his or her unique writing style and substantive consistency of thought, attitude, and beliefs going back many years.