The worst writing job posting I've seen

I’ve been scouring the web for job postings for two months now. Had a bunch of interviews and promising responses. Sometimes, I’ll cruise Craislist just for kicks, but the number of scams and crap on there usually make it counterproductive. There are so many hours in a day after all.

Until now, my favorite ridiculous requirement for a posting was “Evidence of sensitivity to and acceptance of people from diverse cultures.” That commentary is here

I’m cruising through today’s indeed.com posting, and come across the below ad, which goes above and beyond any previous ridiculousness.

Cosmetic Surgery Article and Content Writing
oDesk - Minnetonka, MN
See original job posting at oDesk »

Hello,

I will offer you a project based job, with a lot of articles to write and I want you to write them for me for $2/article.

I am looking for someone to write approximately 16 descriptions of different cosmetic surgery procedures (~300-500 words each).

The descriptions of the different procedures should include (bus is not limited to):

• Good candidates for the procedure
• Ideal outcome
• How the procedure is performed
• Recovery
• Risks

Furthermore, I will want an additional ~8 articles (~400-600 words each) on certain cosmetic surgery related topics.

Candidates must be fluent in english and have previous writing experience.

If you are interested, I would like to hire you first for a trial write up of one of the procedures, and if I am happy with your work, then hire you for the rest of the project.

I would like to pay you $3.00 for the first/trial article. And then if I am satisfied with your work, pay you $2.00/article for the remaining ~25 articles.

Please respond at your earliest convenience with a cover letter and a short explanation of why I should trust you for this job.

Thanks,

Nate

Where to start with this one? How about the rate of pay expected for a professional writer. For those who don’t write, let me give you an idea. If I’m burning through an article of 300-500 words, I can expect the first draft to take between 20-30 minutes. The research involved before that takes about an hour. This isn’t including revisions and so forth. And working this fast leads to bad writing. So 25 articles would take about a solid week of work. For $51. That's $1.35 an hour. You could move to Indonesia and work for Nike for more money than that.

As a comparison, I recently got paid $100 for a 500 word article for a business. A quick search of common rates for freelance writing is $77 an hour . The low end on another site for writing is $45 an hour. 

Any writer willing to do the above work would be losing money in time and cost of production. Not only that, you get the privilege of writing a trial article for this person just for the pleasure of losing money writing the rest of the articles.

The perception of professional writing as an easy task that doesn’t take years of practice is pretty common. Craigslist often includes ads for business that want people to write for them “for the experience.” This ad is even worse, because I get the impression that since you are being “paid” for the work, the poster will be much more critical and hard to work with than someone just looking for free copy. But more than that, you are saying something about your business by how little you want to pay for the very thing that will help you drive in new customers. What you are saying is not good.

Back to applying for jobs that could reasonably support a life.