Finding Qualified Writers Is Hard—We Learned How To Do It the Hard Way

Before we developed Workello, we were an ambitious content agency with an excellent track record. We ran one of the best SEO campaigns of all time, growing our client’s organic traffic from 0 to 1,500,000 monthly visitors in under two years. 

To achieve such an excellent result, we had to scale our content team from 1 to 45+ members fast. During that time, we realized our hiring system was completely broken.

We received applications on multiple platforms, candidates contacted us via email and DMs, they sent portfolios as Word documents, and many submissions were incomplete. We had to manually respond to every single email, and we had no way of keeping track of where candidates were in our hiring funnel.

It took us so much time to process each application, eliminate bad ones, and ask for missing information that we regularly missed out on excellent candidates. By the time we managed to identify them, someone else had already extended them an offer.

That’s why we invested over $100,000 and months of R&D into creating Workello—an automated hiring funnel specifically designed for hiring writers. 

In the next 10 minutes, you will learn how to copy our process, as well as:

1. What the best job boards for finding writers for your dropshipping business are
2. How to find qualified writers
3. Why hiring qualified writers is so difficult
4. How to use automation to evaluate more candidates and identify the best ones faster

Where To Find Writers for Your Dropshipping Business

Below are some of the most popular job boards for hiring professional writers:

Read through the rest of the article to find more places where you can find writers for your Shopify store.

What Makes Hiring Writers for Your Dropshipping Business Hard

Hiring qualified candidates for any role is difficult. When it comes to writing positions, these are the biggest reasons why it is so:

• Most of the candidates are unqualified
• Other companies are also looking for the best writers
• Hiring platforms can’t source good candidates as quickly as they get hired
• Identifying writers with a particular set of skills complicates things further

Hiring writers for a dropshipping business is even more challenging because you need to find a person capable of writing copy that has the power to convert visitors into sales. 

Writing blog articles is relatively simple—with a clear topic and precise guidelines, good writers can quickly catch on. 

Copywriters have to take their writing one step further and speak to the customers on a more personal level. That is the only way to persuade someone they need a particular product and develop a trusting relationship between the customer and the brand.

To find a single writer capable of producing such a copy, you must evaluate dozens of applicants. If you want to beat your competition and hire that one writer first, you must be fast. 

If you don’t have an automated system in place, you will waste incredible amounts of time:

• Logging each application
• Trying to keep track of all candidates in your hiring funnel (and often failing)
• Sending dozens of emails every day
• Filtering out unqualified candidates

We know first-hand how difficult hiring writers is. That’s why we’ve developed an optimized system that allows businesses to hire better writers, faster—Workello! 

Pre-Employment Testing Is Difficult—You Can Make It Easy

With every job listing, you get a bundle of applications from unqualified candidates—with writing positions, the number of such candidates grows exponentially.

It’s difficult to understand how good someone is at writing from their portfolio alone—nobody shares their worst examples and unedited work. You need to introduce pre-hire testing to gauge your candidates’ skill set. If they can’t write a stellar test, how can they create high-quality content?

If you go down this route, you’ll need assistance. Keeping track of hundreds of candidates, sending and collecting tests, taking care of correspondence—it quickly turns into a disaster if you do it manually. Reliable skill assessment software will keep you organized and allow you to focus on other tasks. 

Workello is a high-volume recruiting solution that will help you automate assessments and the hiring process in general. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for free and set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Post job ads on your favorite job platforms and add a Workello link
3. Review applications from your dashboard
4. Send tests to filter high-quality writers from bad ones quickly
5. Reject, interview, and hire the best applicants

Hire the Top 1% Fast With Workello’s Pre-Hire Assessments

With Workello, you can assess, test, reject, interview, and hire candidates with a single click—all actions are available on your single-page dashboard. Move candidates through the funnel by changing their application status, and Workello will do the rest.

You can use our platform to send out copywriting, content writing, and technical writing tests automatically. If you’re looking for someone in the SEO department, make sure to test your SEO writers and SEO copywriters. Workello also supports content marketer testing.

Use our free trial and cut your hiring costs in half with an automated hiring funnel.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

When we first started hiring, it quickly became apparent that our approach to hiring writers was fundamentally wrong. Still, before we could create an optimized system that would allow us to find and hire great writers more efficiently, we had to understand what was wrong with our existing process. 

Here’s what we wrote down:

1. Increasing conversions requires loads of consistently high-quality copy
2. Creating high-quality copy is only possible with superb writers
3. Identifying qualified writers requires evaluating hundreds of applicants
4. Finding the ideal candidate requires filtering out dozens of bad ones fast
5. Filtering our unqualified candidates quickly and efficiently—that’s what we didn’t have an answer for

Once we understood what the root cause of the problem was, we sat down and started brainstorming what our ideal hiring process would look like. It didn’t take us long to come to the conclusion that the following features were mandatory:

• A single dashboard that gathers all applications, wherever they come from
• An option to sort candidates according to their status in our hiring funnel
• A single point of entry for conducting every step of our hiring process
• A built-in testing feature that automatically delivers tests to candidates who meet the basic requirements
• Email automation that saves time and prevents human error

Our first attempt at such a system was a combination of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier. After countless iterations, that first set-up evolved into an optimized hiring system—Workello!

A Good Job Description Attracts the Best Candidates

We’ve mentioned that most of the candidates you evaluate will be subpar—that’s a given. Although you can’t completely avoid unqualified applicants, you can significantly reduce their number with a great job description. 

The key to writing a good job description is being as specific and detailed as possible. List the requirements a candidate must meet and the responsibilities that the position entails. If your job ad is clear and specific, unqualified candidates will understand that there is no point in applying since they don’t have the competencies necessary to succeed in the role and likely won’t be considered for the job.

To attract the best candidates, you should also perceive your job ad as a way to promote your company. We have already mentioned that you won’t be the only one looking for great copywriters. That means you need to sell your company to the best candidates and make them choose you over others. 

To do this, you should include information about the salary, advancement opportunities, and all the additional benefits candidates would get from working for you. 

To get more help writing a killer job ad, tap into our extensive database of ready-made job description templates. Choose the one you are interested in, customize to suit your company’s needs, and within minutes, you can post your job ad on any hiring platform you like:

• Freelance Writer
• Freelance Copywriter
• SEO Copywriter
• Conversion Copywriter
• B2B Copywriter
• Direct Marketing Copywriter
• E-commerce Content Writer
• Digital Marketing Copywriter

All Candidate Applications in one Place

The main benefit of Workello is the fact that you can conduct your entire hiring process from a single dashboard. 

Regardless of where you post your job ad, you’ll be able to see all candidate applications in one place. This is done by leveraging a Workello-hosted application form that you can easily embed in your job ads. 

Every interested candidate will have to fill out the same application form, no matter where they find your job ad. This eliminates the possibility of incomplete submissions and completely removes the need to check each job board every day and manually log each application.

Check out an example of the application form here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

All the applications will end up in the same place—your Workello dashboard. From there, you can move candidates through your hiring funnel with a single click. All you have to do is select one of the available application statuses:

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

Color-coded status options make your life even easier because you will always know how many applicants you have in each stage just by looking at your dashboard.

Reject Unqualified Writers

Your editor can determine that a candidate doesn’t meet your basic requirements even before the testing phase. In that case, they can easily remove them from the race by selecting the “Reject Candidate” option. 

The candidate will receive an automated rejection email, politely informing them that you won’t be considering them for the position at this time.

Point, Click, Test

Making a hiring decision based on portfolios alone is a costly mistake, but one you can easily avoid. If candidates meet the basic job requirements, the next step is the writing test.

Portfolios are rarely an accurate representation of someone’s writing skills. They usually only feature the writer’s best work, plus the articles have likely gone through at least one round of editing and have been polished to perfection before being published. 

The only way to accurately assess a writer’s skills is by testing them.

We wasted so much time and money on unusable content before we introduced testing. 

After we ended up with many subpar writers on our payroll and lost thousands of dollars, we stopped trusting what we saw in portfolios.That’s why we made sure to include a built-in testing feature in Workello. 

Now, all you need to do is select the “Test Candidate” option from a drop-down menu, and the chosen candidate will receive an email that:

1. Congratulates them on successfully making it to the next phase of your hiring process
2. Provides them with a link to the test

When applicants click on the link, it will take them to a page that looks something like this:

How to Make a Good Test

If your test is too demanding, candidates will be unwilling to complete it. If you make it too simple, you won’t be able to accurately gauge a candidate’s capabilities. 

A good test maintains a perfect balance between test complexity and a candidate’s willingness to complete it. Workello lets you tip the scales in favor of test thoroughness.

Thanks to email automation, candidates receive instant updates whenever you change their application status. That ensures transparency, removes the need for transactional emails, and leaves a strong positive impression. With every aspect of your hiring process streamlined, candidates will recognize you as a serious, professional company. In turn, they’ll be willing to put in a bit more effort to complete your testing process. 

When it comes to the test itself, the three areas you have to evaluate are:

1. Language proficiency
2. Research skills
3. Formatting skills

If you don’t know how to create a good test, you can adapt the one we used to evaluate hundreds of candidates and scale our content team. Click here to learn how to set up a test in Workello and see our example.

Interviewing Candidates

Once candidates submit their completed tests, their status will automatically change to “Test Complete.” It means that your editor can now access the test to review it. 

If the candidate did a good job, change their status to “Invite for Interview.” They will automatically receive an email inviting them to schedule a Zoom meeting via Calendly. If the candidate failed your test, changing their application status to “Reject Candidate” will trigger a rejection email thanking them for their time. 

The Candidate Status Page

We automated our processes and optimized our hiring system, but we still received dozens of emails every day from candidates asking:

• Have you received my application?
• Have you evaluated my test?
• When will I hear from you?
• What can I expect next?

Even if we copy-pasted replies to such questions, we still wasted too much time. What is worse, if we were too late to reply, we lost great candidates. 

To prevent this from happening, we implemented an automated Candidate Status page. This is where candidates can find answers to the most commonly asked questions and track their application status. 

There is also the What to expect next section, where candidates can see the specifics of our hiring process. Check out an example of a Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Our hiring process now functions flawlessly, but it wasn’t always like that.

We used several job boards to source candidates, hoping that the more places we looked, the better chances of finding great candidates faster we would have. Nothing was further from the truth. 

We felt completely lost among applications streaming from all sides. Many of them lacked essential information that would allow us to evaluate candidates properly. We couldn’t sort candidates according to their application status, and we couldn’t find those we remembered liking. 

We had to reach out to each candidate manually and wasted so much time. The biggest problem was filtering out bad candidates efficiently. All the while, our editors didn’t edit—they were writing and posting job ads and designing tests manually. 

All those challenges motivated us to create a hiring funnel to solve all of our problems at once. We spent $100,000+ and countless working hours developing a system that now seems so simple. And it paid off big time:

1. We hired 45+ writers and editors in under two years
2. We lowered our content production costs by up to 75% thanks to hiring non-native writers
3. Our editors went back to their jobs
4. We ran one of the best SEO campaigns of all time

Try Workello now for free! Everything is pre-configured, so you can start accepting applications in less than three minutes.  More Job Boards for Finding Writers for Your Dropshipping Business

Since all applications you receive end up in the same place, you won’t have to worry about checking all the job boards you posted your ad on to see what’s new. 

To increase your chances of finding writers for your dropshipping business, cast a wider net and consider more websites to post your job ad.

Here are some more options:

• Remote.co
• AngelList
• Virtual Vocations
• Dynamite Jobs
• Creative Jobs Central
• Get Copywriting Jobs
• Mediabistro
• Creative Hotlist
• Coroflot
• Dribble
• FlexCareers
• Guru
• Carbon Made
• Lensa
• Creative Pool
• Ebyline
• Skyword
• Freelancer
• Working Nomads
• Copywriters.com
• SolidGigs
• Clear Voice
• PeoplePerHour
• Pure Content
• Text Broker
• Truelancer
• Scripted
• Copywriting.network