Copy Our Hiring Formula and Find the Best Copy Editor for Hire at Every Price Point!

In 2019, our content agency, ContentDistribution.com, started working on a new project. It turned out to be one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time as we grew from 0 to 1,500,000 organic monthly visitors per month in less than 2 years.

Truth be told, we didn’t plan on it—our client didn’t have such ambitious goals. We produced high-quality content that performed above expectations and increased the production volume in no time. This sounds like a huge task, but it was even worse in reality.

We didn’t have a lot of experience hiring Writers and would post job ads on various boards expecting everything would go smoothly. Instead, such rapid scaling turned into a nightmare.

We had no means of tracking candidates by their status in our hiring funnel, people would send in incomplete applications, their portfolios would be in Word, we had to spend hours on email correspondence every week… You name it, we encountered it.

We decided we had to change our approach. After investing countless hours and $100,000+, we are proud creators of Workello—a fully automated hiring funnel dedicated to hiring content team members.

We did it this way because we didn’t know any better. Now we do, and we want to share our experience with you!

In the next few minutes, we’ll show you:

1. How to find a Copy Editor
2. What makes hiring Copy Editors so difficult
3. How an automated hiring funnel can optimize your hiring process and halve the hiring costs

How To Find a Good Copy Editor—Top 15 Job Boards

In our quest for Writers and Editors, we used dozens of job boards. These are our top 15 picks, with their pros and cons:

Read the rest of the article, and we’ll share with you another 15 websites where you can find an affordable Copy Editor for hire.

Why You Can’t Cherry Pick Copy Editors the Way You Want To

It’s not hard to find Editors—you have job boards all over the internet, and you’ll find candidates on each one. The problem is finding Editors that are good enough to get hired and hiring those Editors before a different company does.

All these job boards are populated with dozens of companies looking for the same top-performing Copy Editor you’re trying to hire. The best ones get snapped up instantly, and the majority of candidates that remain are unqualified.

The only way to find the Copy Editor that meets your demands in a sea of underqualified applicants is to evaluate hundreds of applications and to do it faster than your competition.

When we started looking for new employees on Upwork, we thought that would be easy as everyone applied through that platform. Since we needed to expand to other job boards, we found hiring the best candidates increasingly difficult.

With every job board we used, we faced the same issues:

• Candidates’ portfolios didn’t represent their skill set accurately
• Job boards didn’t offer any customization for hiring Editors
• We had no means of sorting candidates by their status in the hiring funnel

Different Job Boards, Same Problems

As applications started coming in from Craigslist, Indeed, Monster, Facebook, Glassdoor, and various other sources, we realized that some problems persisted regardless of the job board. We had trouble with:

• Tracking candidates by their status in the funnel
• Keeping track of candidates that stood out
• Logging applications and responding to each applicant
• Getting back to the most interesting candidates on time
• Reducing the number of unqualified candidates

We decided to invest money, time, and brainpower into remodeling and optimizing our hiring process so that it wouldn’t rely on how some job-listing website worked.

The result of our investment was Workello, and the result of Workello was finding the best candidate rapidly.

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 first had to understand how our hiring process worked and where the issue was to be able to remodel it. We broke down the process into five steps:

1. Obtaining high conversion requires standout copy
2. Great copy demands hiring top-notch Copywriters and Copy Editors
3. Hiring a professional Copy Editor that knows how to optimize your copy requires evaluating hundreds of applications
4. Finding the best candidate demands spotting bad Editors quickly
5. Spotting bad Copy Editors—we didn’t know how to do that

Getting Editors to apply is the easy part. Sifting through their applications and spotting top candidates is what causes the struggle.

To deal with that issue, we realized that we needed a system that would automate our hiring process and make everything run smoothly. A system that would do that had to have:

1. A single platform that gathers all applications from every job board
2. A way to sort candidates and change their status easily
3. A dashboard that would let us evaluate, test, interview, and hire Copy Editors all within the same page
4. An automatically-sent test that will let us identify bad Editors with great portfolios
5. Automated email correspondence that would stop us from missing out on the best candidates due to human error

Our first iteration was Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. While we weren’t completely happy with it, it showed us it was possible to improve the hiring process and not depend on external websites. We took it as a starting point and worked on creating a fully optimized system—Workello.

Great Job Description Attracts Great Candidates

Copy Editors’ job is to differentiate between good and bad copy—they’ll know how to appreciate a great job description.

Whenever you post a job ad, you will always receive dozens of applications from unqualified candidates—that’s unavoidable. What you can avoid is getting a great number of them. With a quality description, you can dissuade many unqualified candidates from applying and see their number plummet.

Your job description should go into detail about the role you’re offering. Make sure to specify every responsibility your new employee will have, as well as any requirement they must meet to be able to carry out their job efficiently.

If it becomes clear to underqualified candidates they won’t be able to do the job, the majority of them won’t apply.

A good job description doesn’t only deter bad candidates—it also attracts top ones. You should use your job ad to show the best Editors why they should take your offer instead of someone else’s.

Go into detail about any benefits that you offer, such as health plans, career advancement and learning opportunities, salary increases, and so on.

Struggling with writing your job description? Don’t know which specific role you’re looking for? You can take one of our pre-vetted job description templates. All you need to do is copy a template, adapt it so it fits what your company needs, and you can post it online.

Click on the job role that interests you to find the template for it:

• Editor
• Executive Editor
• Multiplatform Copy Editor
• Online Editor
• Senior Editor
• Remote Copy Editor
• Technical Editor
• Medical Copy Editor
• Newsletter Editor
• Web Editor
• Content Editor
• Junior Copy Editor
• Financial Editor
• Chief Editor
• Legal Editor

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

ContentDistribution.com didn’t have a dedicated person to handle job ad distribution and recruitment. Instead, our Content Managers and Editors had to deal with it and visit various job boards to post listings. It wasn’t difficult, but it was time-consuming.

They had to spend a couple of hours each day on tasks that weren’t meant for them, and our content production suffered. It wasn’t easy to hire a Recruitment Manager because we didn’t have any documentation on how we hired people, and we couldn’t delegate it to someone else.

Now we do, and you can benefit from it too!

When you register for Workello for free, we’ll grant you access to our documentation so that you can get someone else to handle job ad distribution for you in a flash!

A Single Dashboard To Handle Your ENTIRE Hiring Process

Our Workello dashboard is a single access point for everything you need to do from the moment someone applies to the moment you hire them. It starts with aggregating various sources of applications and listing all candidates in one place.

The way this works is by using the same link for submitting applications in all your ads. From now on, you will no longer have to visit all the different websites and keep track of applications manually.

Due to the same link being used everywhere, each candidate will submit the same Workello-hosted application form that requires them to fill out all the fields. They won’t be able to submit incomplete applications, and you won’t have to reach out to individual candidates to ask for additional information.

You can check out an application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

The dashboard you use to keep track of applications is the same one you use to do everything else. Without ever having to go to a different webpage, you will be able to access various stages in your selection process and find information about candidates.

The dashboard allows you to evaluate candidates, test them, invite them for an interview, and extend an offer to the best ones. The best part is that you do all of that with a single click. All you need to do is change their candidate status from the drop-down menu. The options are:

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

These statuses are color-coded so that you can visually discern how many candidates you have in each stage.

Reject Unqualified Copy Editors

Once an application shows up in your dashboard, your Content Managers can review it and pass judgment. If they find a candidate unqualified for the job, they can remove them from the funnel by choosing the “Application Rejected” option from the menu.

When this happens, an automated email will be sent to the candidate, politely informing them of your decision. This feature eliminates the need to send emails to rejected candidates manually, and candidates won’t have to inquire you about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

Passing the initial stage doesn’t automatically make candidates the right fit for your company. The reason for this is the portfolio. Many candidates have impressive portfolios, but the work they present in them rarely matches their 1st draft quality.

The copy inside portfolios largely depends on the Copywriter who wrote it and the QA phases that happened after the initial editing. The only way to know exactly how good someone is at editing copy is to test them.

When we were on the hiring spree, we would hire Writers without testing them, taking into account their portfolios only. This proved to be a mistake that cost us thousands of dollars we wasted on unusable content.

Our Editors had to edit bad candidates’ articles heavily or rewrite them completely before we could publish them, causing a backlog and extra work for themselves.

That’s why we introduced testing and why we hire Editors internally, promoting Writers who are already familiar with our requirements.

You don’t have to go down the same route, but remember that you can’t hire a good Copy Editor based on their portfolio alone.

When your Managers come across a promising application, they can change the candidate’s status to “Test Candidate,” which will trigger an automated email with:

1. Congratulations on reaching the next stage
2. A link to the editing test

Once they click on the link, a page similar to this one will open:

How To Make a Good Test

A copyediting test should let your Managers assess a candidate’s skills related to:

1. Grammar and spelling
2. Suggesting more powerful ways to “sell” a certain benefit
3. Contextual editing

While you need to evaluate these segments thoroughly, you also need to find the right balance between thoroughness and a candidate’s willingness to complete the test.

Most Editors are used to the idea of having to complete a test during the selection process. That doesn’t mean you can go crazy with it and create a convoluted, 2,500-word test that would take them 8+ hours to complete. After all, you’re asking them to do something for free for a company that may not hire them.

Luckily, Workello can help you create a more demanding test.

When candidates apply for a position in your organization, they will receive automated emails swiftly with all the necessary information about their application status and the steps they need to take going forward.

This will leave them wanting to put in extra effort for a professional company that values transparency and candidates’ time.

Interviewing Candidates

Candidates have a deadline by which they have to submit their test. Once they press the Submit Test button, their status changes to “Test Complete” automatically, and they enter the next stage of the funnel.

Your Content Managers can access the test and review it. When this happens, they can change the candidate status to one of two options:

1. Reject Candidate—The candidate receives an automated email that lets them know they didn’t pass the test
2. Invite for Interview—The candidate receives an automated email that includes a Calendly link via which they can schedule a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

We’ve also included the Candidate Status page so that the whole process becomes smooth sailing on the candidates’ end as well. They can use this page to find all the required information about their application status. This way, they won’t have to bother your recruiting department with emails asking for additional info.

The page also contains an FAQ and a “What to expect next” section that informs candidates about the further steps in your selection process.

Many companies—us included—have not once missed out on a great candidate because they became disinterested due to a missed email. With a system that removes manual email correspondence, this will never happen again.

Check out the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Workello makes everything sound easy and only a click away. When we started hiring new people, there was no system we could rely on, and we had to do everything by ourselves.

It was a nightmare.

Applications started flying in from dozens of job boards, and we had no way of keeping track of them all. We didn’t know which job board someone applied through, we had to deal with incomplete applications, and we became overwhelmed with the sheer number of applicants.

Thanks to this, we couldn’t get back to the best candidates in time—they would quickly grow disinterested or receive an offer from a different company.

Our Content Managers had to take time away from producing content and deal with posting job ads and collecting applications. It had a massive negative impact on our productivity.

We decided to take action and create a fully optimized, automated hiring funnel from scratch. It took us years and $100,000+, but we did it, and it helped us:

1. Grow our company from 1 to 45+ Writers and Editors in under 18 months
2. Cut our cost of content by 75%
3. Work on one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever
4. Allow Managers to focus on their actual job

Now, you can use the same hiring funnel and replicate our success for the price of a single page of content!

Try out Workello for free! It takes less than 3 minutes to set it up, and you can start accepting new candidates immediately.

Where To Find Copy Editors—Additional Job Boards

With Workello gathering applications for you and making everything easier, you can post your job ads all over the internet and use all sources for finding quality Copy Editors.

Check out the following job boards to find the best Copy Editors:

• Copify
• Craigslist
• Edit Fast
• Storyhackers
• Muck Rack
• PeoplePerHour
• CloudPeeps
• Mediabistro
• Scripted
• Proofread Now
• Clarity
• Proofreading Pal
• Edit 911
• Pod Reacher