"You wouldn't turn away a brilliant field sales rep because she didn't like paperwork. Why turn away thousands of brilliant copywriters because they don't like telephones?"
As content marketing has steadily worked its way to the forefront of commercial promotion, the need for great copywriters has exploded. The number of copywriting agencies alone has shown us that demand is sky-high.
It's one of those markets which, at a glance, looks like rich-pickings for the hirer. Almost any business can get a copywriter.
But introduce economics into the equation, and a profoundly simple task suddenly becomes an almighty challenge. True, there's a huge number of writers, but only a fraction of a percent can deliver the economic return that companies are really looking for. Fewer still are both capable of delivering and prepared to do so for a third party. And even fewer both can and will, within the confines of that third party's budget.
There are employers who have been listing the same copywriting jobs on job boards for months on end. They can't find what they're looking for.
So are these employers expecting too much? Well, I don't think it's at all unreasonable for them to expect capable writers for the salaries they're offering. The problem may be that they're not only expecting writers…
Regularly, creatives are expected to double as customer service advisers, negotiators, meeters and greeters, analytics report compilers, email outreach beavers - even salespeople.
And I absolutely understand why this happens. If you're a copywriter in a full-time, employed role, a fairly small business probably isn't going to find enough copywriting to occupy your working hours.
I've been there myself. I was the creative writer within a small business. I wasn't full-time - I did a 32-hour week - but I would never have filled all those hours with the required volume of copywriting work alone.
I was lucky. I had other skills that enabled me to save the company a lot of money on website development and other IT solutions. I slashed their IT budget by covering development and maintenance tasks. Work that would have cost them £83 per hour in professional services, as opposed to my hourly rate, which was a fraction of that. And I really enjoyed that work.
I loved being able to say: "Actually, you'll no longer need to hire a data-entry temp for the busy period. I've automated the process". I loved being able to say: "You don't need to pay that B2B vendor four digits for software. I can recreate the functions in-house." I loved being able to say: "You don't need to pay that IT company £200+ every Monday to correct database errors. You now have a database that doesn't produce errors."… "Oh, and that new section you couldn't afford to add to the site - I can build that."
Like a lot online multitaskers, I'm an introvert. I don't like socialising. Don't like negotiating. Don't like anything that involves pro-actively approaching people. And telesales? Brings me out in a cold sweat. Work-wise, I just want to sit in front of a computer and make amazingly productive things.
But it's often hard for extrovert bosses to understand where the line is. I always knew that if I didn't come up with more urgent projects (like saving the company five grand), I'd be hearing the dreaded… "So, can you just pop onto Facebook and respond to the clients…"
There's a widespread assumption in office environments, that writers are suited to anything that involves writing. Even if the task itself amounts to customer service, or negotiation, or proactive sales. But a huge number of creative people actually head down the copywriting road very specifically to avoid those things. Introversion, and even social phobia/anxiety, are so common among writers, that employers who aren't accommodating socially-reluctant creatives are almost inevitably missing out on the bulk of the talent. Dare I even say, the best of the talent?
If a business is advertising what's essentially a customer service and sales role which also involves writing content, no introvert is going to want that job. And these requirements are incredibly common. Go through a random section of writers' job listings on a jobs board, and you'll find that nearly all of them incorporate interpersonal duties to some extent.
So how much talent, exactly, are employers eliminating by requiring writers to cover bases they don't want to cover?
Dramatic as this may sound, probably most of it.
It's well documented that the percentage of writers who are introverts is extremely high. Indeed, many people who've worked with writers at real scale cite that the majority are to a greater or lesser extent introverted.
But for a starker illustration of the writer's view of teamwork, think of your favourite book. How many authors' names are there on the cover? I can fairly confidently predict that the answer is one. I get that business is built around A-type personalities and interpersonal attributes. But if teamwork was meant to be part of a writer's job, famous authors would be lists.
Writing is in fact one of the only areas of employment in which suitability for the core task regularly takes a back seat to suitability for a range of secondary tasks. And in other walks of life this approach seems crazy…
If you're a competing football team, you know the press may ask to interview the players. So do you build the team from PR experts who also happen to play football? Or do you just bring in the best footballers, who have the brilliance to win the club titles? It sounds like a stupid question, because it is. If you want the best footballers, you buy in the best footballers, and you accept that eight out of ten of them will probably be terrible in interviews. Their thing is football. Not PR. It'll be the same in almost any other field of expertise. And it's the same with writers.
The businesses who are struggling to employ writers are the ones who are really trying to hire customer service administrators, or sales account managers, who also happen to be amazing content creators. True, the writing bit comes at the top of the ad, but three quarters of the duties list comprises interpersonal work. And because so many companies are now developing these expectations, there's an element of contagion. They're looking at other employers' ads, and thinking that's just the done thing.
So what's the solution for businesses who want to hire the best writers, but don't have enough copywriting work to fill a full-time week?
I don't think hiring freelancers is the long-term answer, because good freelancers are just too easy to lose, and bad or mediocre freelancers are all too common when the good ones hit the road. Employing a copywriter does make the most sense for businesses who are serious about written content, but there's nothing to say that all employment has to be full-time.
If more businesses began to recognise copywriting as a pure role, with no additives, so to speak, a part-time market would form naturally. Rather than every employment-seeking copywriter needing to find one full-time position (because there aren't enough part-time positions), they could instead easily secure two or three part-time roles with different companies.
And the social media tasks? The email outreach? The upselling? How these tasks are best distributed depends on the business. But it makes a lot more sense to assign them to customer service administrators and sales personnel than to copywriters. Written English is a primary educational subject in the UK, so it's not unreasonable to require an exemplary written English standard when sourcing admin and sales staff. But it must be recognised that admin and sales staff with English A Levels and above, are admin and sales staff, and a copywriter is - or at least should be - a separate appointment. Albeit that such a separate appointment may need to be a part-time role.
I know a lot of businesses don't require good written English when sourcing sales staff, because they're worried it might compromise their access to the best talent. But that only goes to underline, once again, how misguided is the policy of requiring copywriters to be good at admin, negotiation and sales.
You wouldn't turn away a brilliant field sales rep because she didn't like paperwork. Why turn away thousands of brilliant copywriters because they don't like telephones?