It’s a Struggle To Hire Journal Editors of Proven Skill—Our Expertise Can Help You Out

Before we developed Workello, we were Content Distribution.com—an aspiring company dead-set on creating top-quality content that consistently generates tons of organic traffic. We did precisely that by devising and executing one of the most prolific SEO projects to date! In a span of 18 months, we managed to grow our client’s organic website traffic from 0 to 1,000,000 visitors per month.

To meet our client’s demands, we had to produce hundreds of top-notch articles on a monthly basis. This would be an impossible task for a one-man team, so we decided to expand our operations. In less than 2 years, our company grew from 1 to 45+ employees—but such rapid growth came at a price.

We didn’t have an efficient hiring system in place, so we encountered difficulties every step of the way. Posting job listings and reviewing portfolios were slow manual activities that devoured our editors’ time while also distracting them from their main responsibilities.

Applicants were contacting us left and right in great numbers—on LinkedIn, Facebook, by email, and through various job boards. We weren’t prepared for such a large influx of applications. To make matters worse, they arrived inconsistently in various formats.

Our hiring funnel got clogged, and responding to each candidate in a timely manner was impossible without automated messaging. Because of these shortcomings, many highly qualified writers became disinterested and communication with them broke off.

It was obvious that our hiring system wasn’t working, and we desperately needed a new, better, fully-automated one to replace it. As no ATS could solve all our problems simultaneously, we decided to invent the solution ourselves.

We sank $100,000+ and hundreds of hours into R&D, and after dozens of iterations—we finally had Workello!

In the next 15 minutes, you’ll learn:

1. Why finding freelance editors with psychology degrees isn’t easy
2. What websites you can use to find competent candidates
3. How you can replicate our success by optimizing your process with Workello!

Where To Search for Freelance Editors With Psychology Degrees—Best 15 Job Boards

Here’s a table showing you the pros and cons of the top 15 websites where you can find freelance editors with psychology degrees:

Why Is It So Challenging To Find Freelance Editors With Psychology Degrees?

You want to find freelance editors with psychology degrees who meet all the standards of your business. There are two problems with this. First, competent editors in general are greatly sought after by various publishing houses and content agencies—they get snatched up quickly!

Second—finding a skilled editor who also possesses a strong background in psychology is twice as difficult, as their specific skill set makes them all the more valuable to pop psychology magazines and academic publishers alike.

To find the right fit for your company, you’ll need to quickly review and test dozens of candidates. That’s the only way to increase your odds of finding a qualified freelance editor. Once you have identified them, you need to extend them an offer fast. Demand is high, supply low, and if you’re tardy—another company might hire them before you! 

Job boards can’t source great editors fast enough—that’s the sad reality. It is also the reason why great companies settle for less-than-great candidates. We know since we’ve used numerous job boards in our quest for the best writers and editors. No matter the one we used, our problems remained the same:

• Tracking candidates by their application status proved impossible
• Logging each application and responding to every candidate on time proved equally daunting
• Candidates’ portfolios seldom gave an accurate depiction of their real capabilities
• There was no reliable way to spot poor candidates with great resumes 

What we needed was a comprehensive solution that would solve our problems in one swoop. But there wasn’t such an ATS on the market. Seeing no other way, we devoted time, energy, and resources to building a fully-automated hiring funnel that would make recruitment easier. The result was—Workello!

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 

After a few failed hiring cycles, we realized that the problem was with our whole hiring funnel. It wasn’t working properly, and in order to fix it, we first had to narrow down what caused it to malfunction in the first place. That’s why we disassembled our entire work process and carefully reviewed each separate element. These were our conclusions:

1. To grow our client’s website traffic, we had to publish vast amounts of top-notch content
2. Only the most skilled writers could craft articles of outstanding quality
3. Finding such writers required us to sort through dozens of applications as fast as possible
4. To identify and hire suitable candidates, we first had to filter out the unqualified ones
5. Our system lacked the means to quickly identify poor candidates with dazzling portfolios—that was our main problem

Applications were always plentiful. The problem wasn’t in receiving them but in reviewing them once they arrived—and responding to promising candidates before another company recognized their talent!

What Components Constitute a Perfect Hiring Funnel

Our new hiring funnel would need an array of features that would reinvigorate our stagnant processes. We immediately began jotting down ideas, and this is the list we came up with:

1. A single gathering place to see all applications from every hiring platform
2. A tracking system that would let us sort candidates according to their status in our hiring funnel
3. A unified dashboard for reviewing CVs, testing, interviewing, and finally hiring candidates
4. Automated tests that would allow us to quickly spot sub-par candidates with deceptively good portfolios
5. Automated communication that would save us time on manual correspondence and reduce the risk of human error

In our first attempt, we used a combination of Google Sheets+Google Forms+Zapier. It was better than what we had before, but still a long ways off from the perfect system we had imagined. Workello would come much later—after a series of gradual improvements and numerous iterations.

A Detailed Job Description Will Help You Find Freelance Editors With Psychology Degrees Much Faster

Unsuitable freelance editors will apply for your ads no matter what you do. You can’t prohibit them from applying, but you can still lower their numbers in your hiring funnel to something more manageable. The best way to discourage unsuitable candidates from applying is to write an exhaustive, in-depth job description copy. Another benefit of doing this is that top-performers who meet the requirements will know the role fits them like a glove immediately upon reading your ad.

A job description for a freelance editor should include the following specifications:

• Editing experience
• Technical abilities

Since you want a candidate with a background in psychology, you should specify that they need to possess a degree in that field. To narrow down your search even further, you could additionally state the branch of psychology they ought to be familiar with—but this depends on the specifics of your content niche.

If you’re looking to fill an entry-level position, it could be useful to add that you’re also seeking student editors for hire—this will be reassuring to talented candidates who have not yet attained a degree.

As freelancers don’t enjoy the perks of regular employment, you should see what the current rate is for freelance editors. It might cost you more, but top-quality candidates are well worth the extra investment.

If you don’t know how to formulate your job description copy or are in a hurry, feel free to steal one of our pre-configured templates. Adjust it according to the specifications of the job, and you can use it to find freelance editors with psychology degrees who are well-suited for the role!

• Editor
• Managing Editor
• Branded Content Editor
• Digital Editor
• Culture Editor
• Associate Editor
• Medical Editor
• Research Editor
• Scientific Editor
• Specialist Editor
• Subject Matter Expert Online Editor
• Senior Editor
• Assistant Editor
• Editorial Assistant
• Bilingual Editor

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

Having a Recruiting Specialist in your team makes the hiring process much easier—we learned that after the grueling period in which we didn’t have one.  Back then, the responsibility of reviewing applications and testing candidates fell on our editors. The task itself wasn’t difficult, but it distracted them from their actual role—editing our articles to perfection!

It was an inefficient way to conduct the recruitment process—and ultimately unproductive. Our content became shoddy as our editors had to set aside more and more time for their secondary duty.

This couldn’t go on any longer, so we decided to hire a Recruiting Specialist. Delegating this task was also an issue—since we first had to complete the documentation of our entire hiring system and educate a prospective Recruiter.

This process used up even more of our time and energy. Still, we had to do it—there was no other option. With Workello, you do have a better alternative! 

When you sign up for Workello for free, you’ll gain access to our hiring documents and learn how to delegate the role to someone else!

A Single Unified Dashboard Makes Recruiting Freelance Editors Ten Times Easier!

With Workello, you can post ads across dozens of platforms without ever worrying that you’re using too many. No matter the website a candidate uses to apply, each application will always arrive in your Workello dashboard.

Your custom Workello hosted-application form also ensures uniformity across all received applications. You’ll no longer receive invalid submission with missing details, and consequently won’t need to manually reach out to candidates who sent such applications.

Our application form looks like this.

Watch Candidates Stream In

With Workello, you can effortlessly move your candidates along through each stage of the funnel without leaving the dashboard. To update their status, select the corresponding option from the top-down menu:

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

Each status is of a different color, so you can instantly see how many applicants you have in each stage of the process.

Reject Unqualified Freelance Editors

There’s no point in testing candidates who don’t meet your most basic hiring criteria. If you identify an unsuitable candidate, you can immediately remove them from your hiring funnel by changing their status to Application Rejected.

Upon doing so, Workello sends them an email informing them that their application has been rejected. This means you no longer need to manually inform each candidate who didn’t make the cut.

Point, Click, Test

While you may get a sense of a candidate’s prior experience by scanning their portfolio, their actual capabilities will remain a mystery until you test them. Applicants will only include samples of their best work, which is usually QA’d by a third party and polished to perfection. The content might be good, but you should still approach it with a critical mindset.

To see if they are really fit for the role, you need to assess their work first-hand. This requires testing them thoroughly.

When we started out, one of our biggest mistakes was not setting up any sort of testing system. Blindly believing in the seemingly spotless content of our candidates’ portfolios, we hired them without a second thought. This lapse of judgment cost us thousands of dollars—and we ended up with unpublishable articles that our Editors had to rework from scratch.

To prevent such disastrous outcomes in the future, we decided that Wokrello had to come with a built-in testing feature.

With Workello, assessing a candidate’s skills has never been more convenient. To see if their abilities add up to what they’ve included in their portfolio, you only need to select the Test Candidate option. Doing so triggers an automated email that congratulates them on reaching the testing stage and provides a link to the editing test.

Once they open the link, they’ll be redirected to a page that resembles the one below (albeit not a writing test):

How To Make a Good Test

To determine if a freelance editor possess the required expertise to do editorial work in the psychology niche, you need to assess their:

1. Ability to fact-check information in the field of psychology
2. Capacity to provide useful comments and improve the workflow of a given article
3. Spelling and grammar skills

Remember that the test is there to give you an accurate picture of an editor’s qualities—it’s not supposed to be a tortuous 2500-word assignment that could take them well over a day to finish. Be as exacting as the specifications of the role demand, but respect your candidates’ time as well. No one will set off an entire Saturday to complete a test for a job they possibly won’t get.

Luckily, Workello allows for more thoroughness in the testing stage. Since they get updated as soon as their application changes, your candidates will stay informed about each successive stage in your hiring funnel. This gives them a chance to prepare more thoroughly for the test, so many won’t mind completing a slightly more elaborate assignment. They might even be glad to do so if they’re convinced they’re dealing with a highly professional company.

If you don’t have the time or the knowledge to compose an editing assignment from scratch, you can adapt our editing test and use it to assess the skills and competencies of freelance editors who make it to the testing stage.

Interviewing Candidates

Turning in the completed assignment automatically updates a candidate’s status to Test Complete. They lose further access to it, and your editors can then review the test to assess their performance. Based on how well they met your expectations, you can select one of the options:

1. Reject Candidate—Sends an automatic message that informs the candidate that your company is no longer considering them for the position
2. Invite for Interview—Sends an automated email that congratulates them on passing the test and invites them to schedule an interview through the provided Calendly link

The Candidate Status Page

To ensure your candidates can find all the essential info they need at a moment’s notice, we have created a special Candidate Status page. It allows them to stay continually informed about each successive step in the selection process—and you won’t have to reply to dozens of transactional emails daily.

Here is what the Candidate Status page looks like.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

With Workello, finding and hiring top-quality writers and editors seems like a breeze. Before Workello, we faced numerous technical and logistical issues all because we lacked any semblance of process automation.

Every single task—from posting ads and evaluating portfolios to distributing tests and interviewing candidates—was a manual, time-consuming chore. What’s worse, these chores fell on our editors, which led to the stagnation of our content production.

We were stuck in a never-ending cycle. To break out of it, we had to devise a new, fully-automated system. That’s how Workello came around—out of pure necessity.

Once we had Workello at our back, we finally managed to:

• Increase the number of qualified writers and editors in our team from 1 to 45 in under 2 years
• Lower the costs of content production by up to 75%
• Lead one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns ever envisioned
• Let our editors and content managers reprioritize their actual duties—managing and editing articles

To accomplish all of this, we spent more than $100,000 and sank countless hours into diligent R&D. Now, you can have it for the paltry price of a single page of content—but you may also give it a test run for free!

Register for Workello for free! You only need to create your account—everything else is pre-configured—and you can start accepting applications in less than 5 minutes!