The last couple of weeks I’ve been recruiting many people for a variety of roles. I am looking for Developers, Testers, Project managers, Copywriters, Content producers and UX designers. Recruiting means a lot of work and preparation. As a hiring manager I sometimes wish for dedicated HR help. The whole process from A-Z is really eating-up almost all my time at the moment. Interviews suppose to be fun (for a candidate and for me), but from time to time it can really be frustrating and a waste of time.
In some of the interviews I’ve done, I was shocked with missing experiences. For instance with Copywriters without common SEO knowledge. Its really strange to me to see candidates WITH convincing stories about their copywriting capabilities, but WITHOUT knowing anything about SEO. How can a copywriter write great text for online purpose, without doing the minimum preparation and research about what consumers are looking for? And without knowing what works best?
Even the bare minimum knowledge would have pleased me for the interview moment. Basics and common sense to me is knowing at least a thing or two about:
- Keyword research
- META information (keywords, titles, descriptions)
- Canonical tags
- Robots.txt
- Referring and incoming links
- H1, H2 and H3 sections
- Good introduction text
- Basic HTML knowledge (you don’t need to be a front-end developer to understand the basics)
- Google Search Console use and common sense
- Duplicate content common sense
- Structured data and as a result: Instant Answers in Google
For all you Copywriters out there: just remember the basics mentioned above. Search for it online, there is enough to read about it in just 20-30 minutes, to be able to come prepared.