We Ran One of the Best SEO Campaigns of All Time

Prior to launching Workello, we were a successful content marketing agency that conducted one of the best SEO campaigns of all time. We boosted our client’s organic traffic from 0 to 1,000,000 per month in just 18 months!

To achieve all that, we needed to create a significant amount of high-quality content. That meant we had to hire dozens of new writers and editors, and we had to do it fast! It didn’t take us long to recognize that our hiring process was problematic at best.

Finding top-performing candidates required a thorough review of hundreds of CVs and portfolios—and our content managers handled a significant portion of the work. They wasted hours each day attempting to determine which individuals were as qualified as their applications suggested, instead of focusing on content management.

We soon realized we needed to completely revamp our hiring system so we decided to build an automated and optimized hiring funnel from scratch. We put in over $100,000 and thousands of hours to create what is now known as Workello. 

In the next 10 minutes, you’ll learn where to find APA editors for hire and how to speed up your hiring process using an automated hiring funnel.

Where To Find the Best APA Editors for Hire—Top 28 Job Boards

Check out the pros and cons of the top 28 job boards for finding qualified APA Editors for hire:

Read through the article to learn about 13+ additional job boards and learn how to reliably find qualified APA Editors twice as fast.

Why is Finding a Good APA Editor for Hire So Difficult?

Every business needs top-notch content if they want to attract a ton of organic visitors. The reason why it’s difficult to find qualified editors and writers is that they get snatched quickly. To discover one good candidate, you must be ready to sift through dozens of applications. 

Every job site copes with the same problem—they can’t source qualified APA Editors as quickly as they get hired. Whether you’re hiring through LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Facebook, or Upwork, you’ll need to be quick. 

There are more underqualified candidates than top-performing ones on all job sites, and they will clog your hiring funnel no matter what you do.

We used Upwork as our only hiring channel when we first started recruiting writers and editors. After a while, we had to expand across a couple additional job boards to be able to test and evaluate more candidates. This is where things started going wrong. 

We ran into the following problems:

• Candidates submitted heavily edited portfolios that didn’t reflect their true first draft capabilities
• We used platforms that weren’t designed for testing and hiring writers
• We couldn’t determine where candidates were in our hiring funnel
• Many qualified candidates received our response too late or didn’t get it at all
• Most of our candidates continued to be unqualified

After months of struggle, we realized that our approach to hiring was completely wrong. This led to spending thousands of hours creating and optimizing our hiring funnel to make hiring good candidates easier and quicker.

Use Pre-Employment Assessments To Test Editorial Candidates

Most job boards are swamped with unqualified candidates. You need to sift through tens, if not hundreds, of applicants to find just one qualified editor.

You cannot be certain whether a candidate is up to par by just looking at their portfolio or conducting a simple interview. The only way to know for sure is to assess their skills.

Pre-employment testing has proven to be the most effective selection method, as you can see here.

What’s even better than testing is having one place where all your applicants’ tests will show up once they’re ready for review. Good skill assessment software should reduce the amount of time and manual work you need to put into your hiring process.

Workello allows you to sift through hundreds of portfolios and test just as many candidates in record time. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for a free Workello account and launch your pre-configured hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes
2. Post your job ad on any job board or hiring website and link to your unique Workello job ad
3. Watch all the applicants stream into a single dashboard
4. Send automated tests to filter out unqualified candidates with good portfolios
5. Reject candidates, invite them to interviews, and send offers in just one click

Eliminate Manual Work and Improve Your Pre-Hire Assessment Strategy 

With Workello, you don’t need to use multiple platforms to assess, test, interview, and hire any role on your team. You can test a technical writer, content writer, SEO writer, or copywriter and then move them through the funnel in just one click with our high-volume recruiting software.

Start your Workello free trial today to discover the fastest way to conduct pre-hire assessments.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

We were aware that something was wrong with our system, but couldn’t pinpoint what it was. That’s why we decided to go back to the drawing board and break down the entire process into small segments. Here’s what we concluded:

1. A large number of monthly visitors is attributable to a large volume of high-quality content
2. Publishing a lot of great content requires top-notch writers and editors
3. Finding top-performing editors means sifting through hundreds of resumes
4. Getting to the best applicants requires filtering out bad ones as soon as possible

How to filter out unqualified candidates was the question we didn’t have an answer to. It was then that we started to think about how an ideal system for finding good candidates and weeding out the bad ones would look like. 

The ideal hiring system we envisioned needed to have:

• A single place to view candidates from all hiring channels
• An automated system that would allow us to sort candidates by application status
• A place where we could test, reject and hire candidates without leaving our dashboard
• An automated editing test to filter out bad candidates with good portfolios
• Email automation that would reduce the need for contacting candidates manually and informing them about their status

The system we built started off as Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier but it still needed improvement. A couple of months later, this improvised workflow evolved into the system that is Workello.

How To Write an Effective APA Editor Job Description Copy

While a well-written job description won’t deter all underqualified candidates from applying, it will discourage a significant number of them. An efficient job description should be super-specific, providing a detailed description of the position you’re offering—you should list all the tasks the prospective employee will be performing once they join your organization as well as every qualification and skill they should possess.

You shouldn’t only describe what you want from new workers, but also what they may expect from you and why they should choose to work for you over your competition. To make your job ad more attractive, you should include details about the candidate’s compensation, benefits, and chances for promotion they can look forward to.

If you don’t know how to write an effective job description or aren’t sure what are the main responsibilities and requirements for a particular role, you can help yourself to our collection of ready-made job description templates. Click on the selected role’s title, tweak the template to match your company’s needs, and copy-paste it on any job board you like!

• Editor
• Assistant Editor
• Junior Copy Editor
• Online Editor
• Production Editor
• Medical Editor
• Coordinating Editor
• Quality Assurance Editor
• Content Editor
• Bilingual Editor
• Legal Editor
• Technical Editor
• Remote Copy Editor
• Senior Editor

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When our agency first started hiring new writers and editors, we didn’t have a designated person in charge of the hiring process—it was handled by our content managers. While posting ads on different job boards wasn’t a difficult task, it took time. Instead of concentrating on managing content, they had to focus on finding qualified candidates. This slowed down content production and publishing and it felt like our business was stagnating.

At this point, hiring a Recruiting Specialist and delegating these tasks to them was the best solution, but it required documenting the entire hiring process and educating them on it. That is exactly what we did—we thoroughly documented every step of the process, saving you hundreds of hours you’d otherwise spend figuring it out on your own.

Sign up to Workello for free to get our playbooks for delegating job ads to someone else delivered to your inbox.

Receive Candidate Applications in Your Workello Dashboard

Workello ensures that all job applications go to the same place, regardless of where candidates find the job ad. When someone decides to apply, they will do so using a Workello-hosted application form that you can include in every job ad, regardless of what job board you’re posting on.

Using the same form guarantees that all applications will be submitted in the same format—applicants will not be able to submit incomplete applications, and you will not have to contact them again to ask them to provide the missing info.

Check out our application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

You can use the same dashboard for every step in your hiring process. From there, you’ll be able to review applications, send writing tests automatically, invite candidates for an interview or reject them.

Candidates are sorted by their application status and you can move them through your hiring funnel with a single click by choosing one of the following options from the drop-down menu:

1. Application Received
2. Application Rejected
3. Test Candidate
4. Test Complete
5. Reject Candidate
6. Invite for Interview
7. Send Offer

We color-coded each status to make things even easier for you. This will allow you to quickly assess the number of candidates you have in each stage of the hiring process.

Reject Unqualified Candidates

When candidates submit their applications, they instantly become visible in your Workello dashboard. By giving your content managers access to Workello, you can let them review the applications. They can quickly remove unqualified candidates from the funnel by updating their status to Application Rejected. 

Immediately upon changing the status, unqualified candidates will receive an automatic rejection email. It will notify them in a polite way that they won’t be progressing to the next stage of the hiring process. You won’t have to waste time and effort contacting unfit candidates or answering questions concerning their status.

Point, Click, Test

We’ve already mentioned that a great portfolio does not imply that the candidate’s editing skills are equally as great. A portfolio is made up entirely of a candidate’s best work that is usually written by an excellent writer and then double-checked by other editors. Portfolios reflect previous experience, but they don’t show the real quality of an editor’s work. This is why you can’t hire an editor based only on their portfolio—you need to be sure they can edit your writers’ work properly.

We didn’t test our applicants when we first started out—our decisions were based solely upon their applications. This resulted in us wasting a lot of money and time dealing with underperforming employees. When we introduced testing, things quickly started changing for the better.

Workello allows you to automate the testing process by upgrading an applicant’s status to Test Candidate. A single click of the mouse will trigger an automatic email that notifies the applicant about moving to the next stage in your hiring funnel and provides them with a link to a writing test hosted on Workello.

The page with the test will look something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

Testing candidates who apply for the role of an APA editor is a common practice that won’t surprise them. Nonetheless, you can’t expect your applicants to edit a 2,500-word article that’s riddled with errors and would take them eight hours to finish. What you want to do is prepare a test that is thorough enough to give you an insight into the candidate’s editing skills and you should use it to evaluate candidates’ abilities in the following areas:

1. Grammar and spelling
2. Contextual editing
3. Ability to adjust content style, voice, and tone
4. Recognizing factual and logical errors

A good editing test maintains a balance between thoroughness and the candidate’s willingness to put in the effort required to complete it. 

Using Workello, you can be completely transparent throughout your selection process. They’ll like how well-organized your hiring process is and how professional you are which will result in them wanting to invest their valuable time into finishing your evaluation process.

If you’re not sure how to create a good test for APA Editors, you can check out the test we used to assess our editors and get inspiration.

Interviewing Candidates

As soon as the candidate submits their writing test, their status will change to ‘Test Complete’, letting your managers know they can evaluate their work. If the candidate passes the test, you can update their status to ‘Interview Candidate’, triggering an email that contains an invite to book a video interview via Calendly.

If the candidate fails on the test, a change of status to ‘Reject Candidate’ will trigger a polite rejection email, thanking them for their time.

The Candidate Status Page

Despite all the measures we took to optimize and automate our hiring system, we continued to receive a large number of emails with the same four questions from the applicants:

1. Have you received my application?
2. Did I pass the test?
3. When will I hear back from you?
4. What are the next steps I need to take?

To make things easier and save our and our applicants’ time, we decided to design the Candidate Status page. Besides allowing candidates to see exactly where they are in the recruiting process, this page also addresses the most common questions candidates have during the hiring process.

Here is what a Candidate Status page looks like.  

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

When we first started, we didn’t have a hiring system that would help us find good editors while avoiding bad ones. Due to the quick growth of our agency, we had to spread to various job boards in search of qualified editors and writers. This resulted in hundreds of applications every day we couldn’t keep track of, so we missed out on many great candidates.

We’d frequently receive incomplete application forms, and the lack of an automated hiring system was leaving a lot of room for human error on our end. Our content managers wasted time manually posting job ads and creating tests instead of focusing on creating great content.

Dealing with all these issues made us realize that we needed to create an automated hiring system. The investment we made into its development is the single most important one we have ever made. 

The endeavor was a huge success! With Workello, we managed to:

• Reduce our content managers’ workloads, allowing them to focus on creating exceptional content rather than on recruiting new writers and editors
• Cut the cost of content production by 75% 
• Speed up our hiring process and make it hassle-free
• Grow our team from 1 to 45 writers and editors in less than two years

For the price of a single page of content, you can get instant access a product we spent thousands of hours and over $100,000 developing.

Try Workello completely for free. It’s pre-configured so you can start accepting candidates in less than 3 minutes. 

Where To Look For Good APA Editors—Additional Job Boards

Nothing can stop you from posting your job ads on several job boards and recruiting the best APA editors now that you have decided to use an automated hiring system. The following are some additional websites where you can discover the best APA editors for hire:

• Scribewise
• Scripted
• Virtual Assistant Finder
• Muck Rack
• Craigslist
• HireMyMom
• Copify
• Writers Work
• ContentGrow
• Skyword
• Society of Professional Journalists
• Freelancer
• Journalism Jobs
• Storyhackers
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer group
• The Writer Finder
• Pitchwhiz
• WriteLife Facebook group