The Shortlist Is the Worst Way to Hire a Copywriter

A marketing director rang me last month with a request I’ve had a thousand times. “Send me three writers. I’ll pick.”

It’s an entirely reasonable thing to ask. It’s how you buy nearly everything else — three builders’ quotes, three agencies in a pitch, three candidates in a final round. Nobody has ever been fired for creating a shortlist.

But after two decades of placing creative talent and then ringing everyone six weeks later to find out how it went, I can tell you what the shortlist reliably produces. Not the best writer for the job. The most comparable one. If you’re about to hire a copywriter for work that genuinely matters, that distinction is the whole game.

A shortlist measures legibility, not writing

Put three writers side by side and you believe you’re comparing work. You aren’t. You’re comparing how easily each one can be summarised in a meeting.

Writer A arrives with a deck, three case studies, conversion percentages and a tidy process diagram. Writer B sends a link to eleven pieces with no commentary, three of which are the best things you’ll read all year, and answers your questions with “it depends on what the business is actually trying to do.” Writer A wins the comparison. Every time. Not because the work is better, but because the work is easier to defend when someone senior asks why you chose them.

This is the trap in how most companies hire copywriters. The moment you make it a comparison, you stop selecting for the writing and start selecting for the presentation of the writing. Those are different skills, and the correlation between them is much weaker than you’d hope. Some of the finest writers I represent are genuinely poor at explaining why they’re good. Their explanation is the page.

Committees choose the candidate with the fewest objections

The second thing a shortlist does is invite an audience. Three names means three people can have an opinion, and now the decision belongs to a room.

Rooms don’t pick favourites. Rooms eliminate. Someone finds Writer B’s tone too sharp for the brand. Someone else isn’t sure about the gap in Writer C’s CV. Writer A had no such flags — nobody loved Writer A, but nobody objected either. And so the person you hire is not the one anybody wanted. It’s the one nobody could argue against.

You went looking for a point of view and you bought the absence of one. That’s the whole failure in a sentence, and it happens quietly enough that nobody ever traces the mediocre launch copy back to the meeting where it was decided.

The test project tests conditions that don’t exist

The natural fix, everyone assumes, is a paid test. Same brief to all three, five hundred words, blind assessment, may the best writer win.

I’ve seen hundreds of these. They’re fairer than unpaid tests, and I’d always rather a client paid. But a test project isn’t a small version of the job. It’s a different job.

The real work involves access — to you, to the product, to the person who actually decides. It involves three weeks of absorbing how the business talks about itself, one uncomfortable question in week two that changes the direction, and the confidence to hand back something other than what was asked for. A test removes every one of those conditions. What’s left rewards speed, compliance and the ability to please a stranger from a cold start.

Which is exactly where a competent mid-level writer performs closest to a great senior one. You’ve designed an exercise that compresses the gap you’re paying to detect. Worse, the writers with the strongest books are usually mid-project when your test lands, and a meaningful number of them simply decline. Your shortlist quietly becomes a list of who was available and willing to audition.

Three writers aren’t three quotes for the same window

Comparison shopping works when the units are identical. Three builders quoting on the same window are genuinely comparable, because the window is fixed and only the price and the finish vary.

Writers are not units. A brand voice specialist, a long-form B2B writer and someone who has spent nine years on retail campaigns aren’t three versions of the same product at different prices. They’re different instruments. Lining them up forces you to invent a common scale, and the only scales available in a spreadsheet are day rate and years of experience — the two variables least predictive of whether the work will be any good.

Everything that actually matters is unscaleable: whether this person’s particular obsessions map onto your particular problem. And you cannot see that in a row of three. You can only see it if someone knows both the problem and all three writers well enough to say which one it is.

Spend the three weeks on the brief instead

Here’s the arithmetic that gives the game away. A client will spend three weeks assembling a shortlist and forty minutes writing the brief. I’ve watched it more times than I can count.

Reverse it. Write the brief first — properly, before you go looking for anyone. What decision does this copy have to change, in whose head, and what do they currently believe? Which sentence has to be true by the end? What’s already been tried, and why did it fail?

Do that and something useful happens: the brief starts eliminating candidates on its own. A brief with a real business problem in it makes the right writer obvious and the other two irrelevant. The choice stops being a preference and becomes a match. When you need to hire a freelance copywriter — or an SEO copywriter, or a creative director for six weeks — the brief is doing the selection work that the shortlist was only ever pretending to do.

And when you know the problem that precisely, you don’t need three names. You need one, with a reason attached.

Ask for one name and the reasoning behind it

So when you set out to hire a copywriter, change the request. The best question you can ask anyone who represents creative talent isn’t “who’s available?” It’s “who would you put on this, and why that person and not the others?”

That question is unanswerable from a database. It’s answerable by someone with a personally vetted roster, a memory of how each of those writers behaved on the last four jobs, and enough conviction to put one name forward and stand behind it. That’s what we do — you brief us, we recommend one writer matched to your brief, usually within twenty-four hours, and we tell you exactly why it’s them.

A shortlist protects the person choosing. A recommendation risks something. In my experience, the work is always better when someone is willing to be wrong on your behalf.

Jack Stafford is the founder of Copywriter Collective, a premium creative talent agency based in Amsterdam.