Two writing samples are sitting in your inbox and both read well.
One was written after a forty-minute call with somebody who does the job every day. The other was written from three competitor blog posts and a reasonable imagination. The sentences are equally clean, the structure is equally sensible, and you cannot tell which is which.
Neither can anybody else. That is the whole problem with how writers get hired.
The portfolio shows you output. What you are actually buying is a process, and the output of a good process and a hollow one now look identical on the page. So reading samples is close to useless, and the only test that works is to run the process once, on your own subject, and pay for it.
And the thing to judge is not the draft. It is the call.
You are buying the part that happens before the writing
Fluent prose stopped being scarce. I went through what a model can and cannot bring to a piece and will not repeat it, except for the one line that matters here: a model can organise your experience, it cannot have any.
Which means the writer’s value sits in the hour before the writing. Can they get a number out of your sales head? Can they ask your service engineer what goes wrong, and keep asking when the first answer is “it depends”? Can they tell the difference between what your category says and what your customer said?
That is an interviewing skill rather than a writing one, and almost nobody hires for it. It is also the thing you cannot teach in a week, whereas structure, length and tone are a week’s work.
So the hire is an interviewer who writes. Not a writer who will interview if you insist.
The trial, specified
Pay for it. Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 for 500 words is fair for the information you are about to get, and asking for free trial work selects for people with no other options.
Three conditions, all of which matter.
The subject has to be one only your business knows. Not “write me a post about digital marketing in India”. Something where the public internet is no help: why your churn spikes in month three, what the objection is that kills half your deals, how a specific installation actually goes.
They get one 20-minute call with a real person in your business. Not with you, ideally, because founders over-explain. Give them your salesperson or your operations lead.
The deliverable includes their source material. Who they spoke to, what was said, the numbers and where each came from. This is also how I would handle the AI question, by the way. Banning the tools is unenforceable and slightly ridiculous. Requiring the inputs is enforceable, and if the inputs are real and first-hand then which editor they typed into is not your problem.
Score the call, not the copy
Here is the part worth printing out. Sit in on the call and listen for six things.
Did they ask for a number, and did they push once when the first answer was vague? “Roughly how long” is a question. Accepting “it varies” is not.
Did they ask what goes wrong? Everybody asks how the thing works. The writer who asks where it breaks is the one who will produce something a reader believes.
Did they ask who the reader is and what the reader already thinks? Those are two questions and the second one is the harder one.
Did they ask what you are not willing to say in public? Constraints are the most useful thing you can give a writer and the thing they most rarely ask for.
Did they repeat something back in their own words and check it? That is the clearest sign somebody is listening rather than collecting quotes.
And did a question arrive two days later, unprompted? A writer who emails one follow-up on the third day has been thinking about your business on a Tuesday evening. Nothing else in this process tells you more.
The anti-signal: a writer whose only requests were a tone-of-voice document and a keyword. Those are the inputs to average writing, and they are what somebody asks for when the plan is to assemble rather than to find out.
Let the person who was interviewed mark the draft
A small procedural thing worth more than it sounds.
You will read the draft for polish, because that is what founders notice. Give it instead to the salesperson or engineer who was on the call, and ask one question: did they understand it, or did they paraphrase you?
That person can tell in ninety seconds. They know what the real answer was and they can see whether it survived. It is the sharpest quality check available to you and it costs nothing.
Settling the brief is your job rather than theirs, and I wrote up what a usable content brief contains separately, so the short version is that a writer working without one is guessing and the guessing is not their fault.
Per word is the wrong unit
Look at the published rates for Indian content writers in 2026 and you will find everything from under Rs 1 a word to Rs 15, with most commercial guides clustering a competent generalist somewhere around Rs 1 to Rs 3 and specialist or export-facing work at Rs 5 and up.
Treat those as the shape of the market rather than as prices. They come from agencies and job boards rather than any survey, and they disagree with each other considerably.
The spread is the actually interesting part. A price range that runs thirtyfold for the same nominal service is not a market, it is a sign that the unit has stopped measuring anything.
And run the arithmetic on the bottom of it. At Rs 0.75 a word, a thousand-word piece pays Rs 750. Nobody can afford to spend forty minutes interviewing your engineer inside that number, so the price is not a discount on the same service. It is a different service, and it is the one that produces fluent, empty, slightly familiar copy.
So price the piece, not the words, and put the interview inside the scope explicitly. Pay for a researched piece with a named source in it. The typing is the cheap half now, and paying by the word is paying by the half that got cheap.
One writer, or a cheaper bench
The genuine structural choice, and the costs sit in different places.
The second piece from the same writer costs you less than the first did, in your own time. By the fifth they know your objection, your constraints and who to call. Somewhere around the eighth they start proposing topics you had not thought of, which is the point at which the arrangement actually pays.
A rotating bench never gets past piece one. The per-word rate looks better and the onboarding cost is paid again every single time, in founder hours, which is the one input you cannot buy more of.
The exception is genuinely low-stakes volume, product descriptions and category pages, where there is nothing to learn and a bench is correct. Keep the two budgets separate so the cheap work does not set the price for the work that needs a person.
Before lunch
An hour, and you can start today.
Write down the three subjects where the public internet is no help to a writer. One of them is your trial brief.
Then book the 20-minute call with your salesperson or your operations lead rather than with yourself, and tell them to answer normally rather than helpfully.
Then write the six questions from the scoring list on a card, and sit in on the call with the card in front of you. You will know inside ten minutes.
If you’d like a second opinion on a trial piece or on which subjects are worth a writer’s time at all, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on content marketing cover what to do with the writing once you have it. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.