Finding Creative Writers for Hire Can Be a Challenging Task—We Can Make it Easier!

Before developing Workello, we were Content Distribution.com—a professional team of writers and editors bent on producing top-notch online content! In 2019, we launched a project that would become one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever. We managed to grow our client’s site traffic from 0 to 1,000,000 organic visitors per month in under 2 years!

As our business expanded and content demand increased, we had to hastily hire new writers and editors. It soon became evident that our hiring process wasn’t built to handle such a large number of incoming applications. Our hiring funnel was clogged with poor candidates, and we were missing out on qualified ones. That’s when we realized that we needed an optimized hiring funnel that would streamline our hiring process, enable us to efficiently filter our unqualified candidates, automate repetitive tasks and eliminate the possibility of human error.

After investing $100,000+ and numerous working days into extensive research, we came up with a solution—Workello!

In the next 10+ minutes, we’ll show you the best job boards to find Creative Writers—and how you too can optimize your hiring process to attract and hire top-performing Creative Writers in record time!

How To Hire Creative Writers—Top 15 Job Boards

Check out the top 15 job boards for hiring Creative Writers in the table below:

Continue reading this article, and we’ll share with you an additional 15 websites where you can find a Creative Writer for hire who matches your company’s needs!

Why You’re Struggling To Find a Top-Quality Creative Writer for Hire

Hiring Creative Writers who are knowledgeable and experienced in your target niche can be immensely difficult since you’ll always be competing with other companies for the most qualified and experienced candidate. Experts in the field get hired faster than any job board can source them. Regardless of where you look, most candidates will prove unqualified because the qualified ones don’t stay on any platform for long.

To find a Creative Writer with the required abilities to perform their job well, you’ll need to go through hundreds of portfolios and test dozens of candidates. You also need to be quick, or else another company might find and hire that perfect candidate before you do.

Hiring is a simple process if you need a single writer, but your funnel will become clogged if you’re receiving dozens of applications daily from various job boards—we learned that the hard way.

We first started hiring on Upwork, but soon branched out to other platforms. No matter the website we used, we constantly dealt with the following issues:

• We couldn’t sort applicants by status in our hiring funnel
• Most platforms aren’t designed for hiring Creative Writers
• Candidates’ resumes didn’t match their true writing capabilities

As we expanded to other job boards—including Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster, and LinkedIn—it became even more difficult to track applications that were consistently coming in. Regardless of what we tried, we couldn’t:

• Respond to each candidate in a timely manner
• Keep notes on promising candidates
• Filter out bad candidates quickly enough

We managed to become a top content agency—only to discover that our hiring process was sorely lacking. We had to improve our hiring funnel, so we decided to pool all our resources and invest countless hours into creating the perfect, fully automated system that can be adapted to any company’s needs. That system was Workello.

Use Pre-Hire Testing To Find the Best Writer

Regardless of what job boards you advertise on, you’ll always end up with more unqualified candidates than top ones. No applicant will admit they don’t know what they’re doing, and their portfolios will inevitably paint a positive story.

If you don’t want to hire someone and discover they’re underqualified the hard way, you need to enhance your hiring process and introduce pre-hire testing.

Tests will let you gauge the candidates’ writing quality first-hand. The issue is—with hundreds of applicants to deal with, you’ll quickly lose control and won’t know where in the funnel each candidate is. You need skill assessment software to sort that out for you. 

Workello automates the entire hiring process and provides support for hassle-free testing. You only need to create a free account and:

1. Set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes with the pre-configured settings
2. Add a Workello link to all your job ads (existing or new)
3. Wait for applications to arrive
4. Send tests to filter out poor candidates with impressive portfolios
5. Interview, reject, and hire candidates from your dashboard

Streamline Your Candidate Assessment Process With Workello

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that will help you set up your job post, assess candidates, send and log tests, and review them. You’ll be able to reject candidates, invite them for an interview, and extend offers without ever leaving your dashboard.

Workello can help you test content writers, regardless of your specific needs. With our pre-hire assessment software, you can test copywriters, SEO copywriters, SEO writers, and technical writers. Need to fill other roles on your content team? Test content marketers and related roles in Workello effortlessly.

Sign up for Workello for free and streamline your hiring process effortlessly.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Before we could implement any improvements, we had to find and carefully analyze our current system’s weak points. We did this by breaking down our entire work process and carefully reviewing each segment. Ultimately, these is what we came up with:

1. To increase our client’s traffic, we required top-notch content
2. Only qualified writers can create outstanding content
3. To find the best writers, we needed to review hundreds of applications
4. Hiring skilled writers required us to quickly identify and disqualify ones
5. Filtering out unqualified applicants—that was our main weak point

It was easy to post job ads and receive applications—the issues began once they came in. We didn’t have an efficient system that could handle a large number of applications from various different platforms.

That’s why we wanted to create an optimized funnel that would help us find and hire top writers without difficulties. We noted the necessary features for our project to succeed:

1. A comprehensive platform that would gather all applications regardless of their source
2. A system that could let us sort candidates and update their status with one click
3. A single dashboard for reviewing portfolios, testing, setting up interviews, and hiring successful candidates
4. An optimized testing process that can easily filter out unqualified applicants
5. An automated communication system that would help us keep our candidates up-to-date while reducing time on manual correspondence 

In the beginning, the formula we used was Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was better than what we had before, but it was still far from perfect. We got the perfect hiring funnel only once we developed Workello!

To Hire a Creative Writer Who Can Do Their Job, You Need a Superb Job Description

Hiring a Creative Writer who is familiar with the role necessitates a detailed job description that explains the requirements and responsibilities of the positions, such as:

• What topics they’ll be writing about
• How many articles they have to submit weekly
• Whether they will be working on multiple projects simultaneously

The more details, the better—great candidates will appreciate your professionality, while unqualified ones will be discouraged from applying.

Poor-quality candidates will always apply for your job ads. You can’t prohibit them from doing so, but you can drastically reduce their numbers by adding specific role-related abilities and qualifications in the job description. 

It is also helpful to state the perks of working for your company and the possibility of promotions—this will attract ambitious Creative Writers and make them choose your agency over the competition.

If you’re not sure how you should compose your Creative Writer job description—or if you need a different but complementary role—Workello’s knowledge base offers you a large selection of pre-made job description templates. Swipe one, and—with minor adjustments— you can immediately use it to start hiring candidates!

• Content Writer
• Technical Writer
• Copywriter
• Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• E-Commerce Content Writer
• Staff Writer
• Law Firm Content Writer
• Senior Writer
• Course Writer
• Website Content Writer
• SEO Writing
• Catalog Writer
• Business Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When our company started expanding, we didn’t have a dedicated recruiting role for posting job ads and composing written tests. Instead, we had our Editors and Content Managers handle the hiring process. Distributing job ads isn’t a tough task, but it can be time-consuming—as our need for new writers grew, our Editors and Content Managers had to put aside their main duties and invest more and more time into reviewing resumes and testing candidates.

At first, we were skeptical about hiring a Recruiting Coordinator since we would have to document our entire process and educate them on it, but we went ahead and did it—there was no alternative. With Workello, you do have an alternative!

Sign up for Workello for free, and you’ll have access to the documentation you need to hire a Recruiting Coordinator who’ll help you distribute your job ads more conveniently!

The Key to an Optimized Hiring Process—A Uniform Dashboard!

It can be a daunting task to track hundreds of applications coming in from various platforms. Workello eliminates that problem by funneling them all in one place—your multi-purpose dashboard! We did this by including a custom Workello-hosted application form in each of our job ads.

Once a candidate opens the Workello form and completes their application, it will be immediately directed to your dashboard regardless of the job board they’ve sent it from.   You also won’t have to worry about incomplete submissions since all candidates will apply in the same format.

This erases the need to manually log every submission and follow up with candidates who have provided incomplete applications to request the missing info. It also allows you to sort and filter candidates by their status in your hiring funnel with greater ease.

You can check out an application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

You won’t have to leave the dashboard through each phase of the hiring procedure since it has all the necessary features to evaluate, test, review, set up interviews, and ultimately hire Creative Writers. With Workello, updating your candidates’ status is as simple as it could be—just select the appropriate option from the drop-down menu! As they progress through the funnel, their status can change into:

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

Each status is marked with a different color, so you can see how many applicants you have in each stage with a quick look.

Reject Unqualified Creative Writers

When an application arrives in your Workello dashboard, your editors and managers can review it—and if the quality of their portfolio is below the passing standard, you can reject them immediately. To do so, you only have to select the Application Rejected option.

Workello will immediately exclude the rejected candidate from the hiring funnel and send them an automated, polite rejection email informing them that they are no longer being considered for the role.

Automated email correspondence will save you a ton of time since your recruiters or managers will no longer need to manually respond to each rejected candidate, nor update successful candidates on their progress to the next stage.

Point, Click, Test

Once a candidate has passed the initial review stage, you need to test them as quickly as possible. After all, a candidate’s portfolio is not a guarantee of their skill, and many unqualified applicants submit seemingly flawless resumes! You should bear in mind that the content in these resumes is often heavily edited, and doesn’t reflect the quality of a candidate’s first draft.

To discern their true capabilities, you need to hand out tests.

When we first started out, we didn’t test our candidates and hired them based only on their portfolios. This was a major mistake, so we ended up with sub-par writers who would produce unusable content, and our editors had to revise entire pages or rewrite whole articles. That’s why we had to come up with an express testing system.

When you update an applicant’s status to Test Candidate, Workello will automatically send them a message that:

1. Congratulates them on passing the first stage of the hiring process
2. Provides them with a link to the test

When a candidate opens the test link, they’ll see a page that looks something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

To easily discern between qualified and unqualified Creative Writers, you should test them for the following skills:

1. Language expertise
2. Ability to captivate the reader with intriguing and imaginative narratives
3. Formatting knowledge

When composing a test, you should take into consideration the time necessary to complete it. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be thorough in your testing, but even high-spirited applicants will be discouraged from doing a 2,500-word assignment for a role they might not even get. Strive to find the middle-ground between reasonable thoroughness and your candidates’ willingness to complete the assignment.

Luckily, Workello allows you to create a more elaborate test since your candidates will stay continually updated on their progress through your hiring funnel. This transparency will show you as a professional company, and ambitious Creative Writers value efficiency and openness during the selection procedure.

If you’re having trouble creating a test on your own, feel free to steal ours! We’ve used this test to assess hundreds of applicants!

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate submits the finished test, they can no longer access it, and their status is immediately updated to Test Complete. From that moment, your Editors and Managers can review it and evaluate the candidate’s performance. After reviewing it, they can change an applicant’s status to either:

1. Reject Candidate—This automatically triggers a message politely informing the applicant that they have not passed the test
2. Invite to Interview—This triggers an email congratulating them on passing the test and providing them with a link to Calendly, where they can schedule a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

Workello will also make your candidate’s experience more pleasant, as they can find all the information they need on their Candidate Status page. This means your Editors and Managers won’t be bothered by repetitive emails from candidates wondering about the status of their application.

The Candidate Status page also has a section that informs candidates about what to expect next during the selection process.

Since candidates are updated about their application status in real-time, you don’t need to worry about a high-achieving applicant losing interest because of faulty communication!

You can take a look at the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Hiring Creative Writers doesn’t seem like such a difficult task when you have a fine-tuned system that streamlines every vital feature in the hiring process. When our agency started out, we didn’t have an automated hiring system, so we struggled along every step of the way.

Dozens of applications would swamp us daily from multiple different job boards, and our Editors and Managers couldn’t track them efficiently. It was difficult to stay in touch with every single applicant, and we couldn’t respond to their email on time. Many candidates became disillusioned and moved on—others got snapped up by our competitors!

Our Managers and Editors had to post ads and compose tests instead of performing their main task—managing content and editing articles. Everything was a mess, and we needed to fix it.

That’s why we decided it was high time to automate our hiring procedure. What we eventually conceived was—Workello!

Our new system allowed us to:

1. Scale our company from 1 to 45+ people in under 18 months
2. Lower the cost of content production by up to 75%
3. Successfully launch one of the most accomplished SEO campaigns ever
4. Let our Editors and Managers focus on their main roles

To create Workello, we had to invest more than $100,000 and untold hours spent in research and development. Now, you can enjoy all the benefits of our new system for the price of a single content page!

Try out Workello cost-free! You can begin hiring candidates in under 3 minutes!

How To Hire a Creative Writer—Additional 15 Hiring Websites

When using Workello, you can distribute your job ads across as many websites as you want! There’s no need to limit yourself since all applications will end up in your Workello dashboard.

Here’s a list of another 15 job boards where you can hire Creative Writers:

• Craigslist
• Editorial Freelancers Association
• FinCon Community
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer group
• Freelancer
• HireMyMom
• ProBlogger
• FlexJobs
• Scribewise
• Scripted
• Skyword
• Mediabistro
• Staffing agencies
• Storyhackers
• The Writer Finder