We Had No Idea How Difficult Hiring Writers Is—We Learned From Costly Mistakes

Before we developed Workello, we were Content Distribution, an agency focused solely on producing excellent quality content. In 2019, we took on an ambitious project that resulted in one of the most successful content marketing campaigns ever. 

In less than two years, we grew our client from 0 to 1,000,000 organic monthly visitors by publishing about 10,000 pages of content within that time. 

Such a high volume of content production demanded that we scale our team quickly. So, at the same time, our company also grew from 1 to more than 45 writers and editors. 

When we started hiring, we didn’t expect to face so many challenges. We thought it was enough to post a job ad and review a handful of applications to find a few great writers. We were unpleasantly surprised when we received piles of applications and realized that we didn’t know how to handle them efficiently. 

With hundreds of applications streaming in from multiple sources, we couldn’t keep track of all the applicants. We had no idea where many of them were in our hiring funnel, and we failed to contact all of them. On top of everything, applications we received were often incomplete. So we had to contact each candidate and request the missing information.

It wasn’t hard to realize that we lacked a system that would allow us to identify qualified writers quickly. There was nothing on the market specifically designed for hiring writers. So we decided to create our own system. 

Months and thousands of dollars later, we have Workello—an automated hiring funnel dedicated to hiring content teams that saves time and money. 

In the next 10 minutes, you will learn:

1. What the best websites for hiring game writers are
2. What makes hiring writers so difficult of you don’t have an automated hiring funnel
3. How automated testing can help you find the best writers fast

Top Websites To Find Game Writers for Hire

The following table presents top websites where games studios hiring writers can find qualified candidates:

Posting Job Ads Is Easy—Finding Great Candidates Is a Whole Other Story

Great writers are really hard to come by. If you’re looking for someone with a specific skill set that’s able to write an entire story for your game, you’ll likely have to review hundreds of candidates. Separating the wheat from the chaff will be a challenge. 

You will face two biggest issues:

1. Most of the applications you receive will be from inexperienced or bad writers
2. Dozens of other companies will be looking for that one top-performer

The best writers get hired so quickly that job boards can’t source them to keep up with demand. As a result, most remaining candidates won’t be qualified. This means that no matter where you post your job ads, you can be sure that most of the candidates will not be suitable for the position you are offering. To find one great candidate, you will have to evaluate a hundred applications. 

At the same time, the best candidates will receive offers in an instant. To have a fighting chance, you have to be fast. 

When we started hiring writers and editors, we thought that the best course of action would be to start posting ads on multiple platforms—expand the talent pool. When looking for a role as specific as a video game writer, widening your search is essential. The trouble is that it also opens the door to more unqualified candidates. 

Having used multiple different platforms, we learned that they were all lacking in the same way:

• There was no possibility to track candidates as they moved through our hiring funnel
• Portfolios submitted hardly reflected candidates’ actual writing abilities
• None of the platforms was designed to test and hire writers or editors

As a result, we kept wasting time trying to identify good writers, which is why we often reach out to them too late. 

It was evident we had to do something about this situation. It dawned on us that our content agency thrived due to our commitment to producing top-quality content. We didn’t approach our hiring process with the same dedication, and that had to change. 

We decided to develop an automated system that would enable us to get to filter out unqualified candidates efficiently and find great writers faster.

Pre-Hire Assessments Allow You To Hire the Best Writer in Your Niche

You’ll never get an applicant that admits they have no idea how to write content for your niche. While their portfolios may include some industry-related articles, you’ll never know how good they are at it until you see their first draft. Don’t wait to hire them for that to happen—improve your hiring process with pre-employment assessments.

Coming up with a writing test is the easy part. What do you do when hundreds of writing samples start flooding your inbox? You need skill assessment software to keep the process organized and to avoid missing out on a top candidate due to an email you forgot to respond to.

Workello will entirely automate your hiring process and take care of assessment management. You only need to:

1. Create a free account and set up a pre-configured hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Add a Workello link to your job listings (works with all job boards)
3. Wait for applications to start coming your way
4. Send tests to spot bad writers with impressive portfolios fast
5. Reject, interview, and hire the best candidates with a single click

Streamline Your Testing Process and Hire the Top 1% of Writers With Workello

With Workello—high-volume recruiting software—you can automate your entire hiring process and cut costs by 50%. Use our platform to test content writers for whatever writing needs you have, be it technical, SEO, or any other type of writing. You can also assess copywriters and SEO copywriters.

Sign up for free and assess, test, reject, interview, and hire writers from your Workello dashboard effortlessly.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Figuring out that our hiring process was broken was the easy part. The hard part was identifying the problem and figuring out how to solve it. 

We started brainstorming and broke the process down to it basic elements:

1. Only top-quality content can drive 1 million+ organic visitors to your website
2. Creating top-quality content is only possible with a team of fantastic writers
3. Identifying one top-performing writer demands reviewing dozens of applications
4. Reviewing piles of applications mostly consisted of weeding out bad candidates
5. Weeding out bad candidates quickly was what we struggled with

There is a huge demand for writers, and candidates know it. So hiring platforms are flooded with wannabe writers who lack basic writing skills. Writing positions are remote, which also makes them attractive. Creating stories for games is objectively fun, and these ads will receive a lot of attention.

The reality is that most applicants won’t have the skills you need. Many are beginners who are yet to learn the craft but love playing video games and jump at the opportunity when they see game studios that are hiring writers.

You need writers with the experience and skills necessary for creating content you need. While they do exist, you will have trouble identifying them in the sea of unqualified candidates. Without an automated system in place, you are bound to waste time filtering them out. 

When we were looking for writers, we recognized that spotting great candidates fast enough was our greatest pain point, so we jotted down what an ideal hiring funnel should have:

1. A single dashboard that would display applications from every job board we posted a job ad on
2. An option to sort candidates by their status in our hiring platform easily
3. A platform with built-in features that would allow us to evaluate, test, reject, interview, and hire writers without having to switch through various pages
4. Automated communication that saves time and eliminates the possibility of human error

Our first attempt at such a system was a Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier mashup. It worked better but needed a lot more work. Months of iterations later, we have a fully optimized funnel—Workello.

A Good Job Description Will Help Attract Qualified Candidates

You can’t completely prevent unqualified candidates from applying, but you can significantly reduce their number by writing a great job description. 

A good job ad copy has all the necessary details regarding work responsibilities, and requirements candidates need to meet. 

Game studios hiring writers must state that they are looking for people with experience writing scripts and narratives for video games. The job ad must clearly demonstrate precisely what you need. 

If you are looking for a person with particular education or certification, be sure to specify that. There are many courses that focus on the video game industry. Game developers that hire writers should state that they need a person who attended courses that focused on literature, for example. 

Depending on the type of games your company develops, you may also specify additional requirements. For instance, if your game is about ancient mythology, a degree in history or philosophy may also be useful. 

Think long and hard about what set of skills and knowledge your ideal candidate should have and incorporate that in your job ad. It will help discourage unqualified writers from applying.

You also need to do your best to attract qualified writers. We have already mentioned that the best writers get offers fast. This is particularly true for highly specialized areas such as video game writers. Your ad must show candidates why they should choose to work for you instead of another company. 

You can do that by mentioning the salary range and all the benefits and perks that come with the job. These include bonuses, health plans, paid time off, learning opportunities, the possibility of career advancement, etc. 

If you are having trouble composing a good video game writer job description, or you want to hire another type of writer, Workello has an extensive database of pre-vetted templates. It will take you minutes to modify the template you need and post it on job boards you like.

1. Copywriter
2. Content Writer
3. Writer
4. Instructional Writer
5. Technical Writer
6. Freelance Writer
7. SEO Writing
8. Research Writer
9. Assessment Writer
10. Marketing Communications Writer
11. Digital and Multiplatform Content Writer
12. Digital Content Writer
13. Quality Assurance Technical Writer
14. Website Content Writer
15. E-commerce Content Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started expanding our content team, we didn’t have a person dedicated to posting job ads across various hiring boards. Our content managers and editors handled this task. It wasn’t hard for them, but it kept them away from their primary responsibilities—producing content. 

It was clear we had to hire someone to handle job ad distribution, but it was easier said than done. We needed to document our entire hiring process so we could train the new person. 

We wrote down every single step of the hiring process, so you don’t have to!

When you sign up with Workello for free, you will gain access to our playbooks and learn how to delegate the job to someone else!

See All Applications In Your Workello Dashboard

Before we had Workello, we had to check a dozen job boards daily to see the newly submitted applications. Then we had to figure out how to sort them and keep track of each candidate. 

We ran into many problems as we did this. For instance, some candidates sent us emails with their portfolios. Matching those portfolios with their applications on hiring boards was often tricky. It all took tremendous amounts of time, so we were slow to respond to candidates. By the time we finally identified and reached out to a good candidate, they had either lost interest or accepted an offer from another content agency. 

With Workello, we eliminated this problem. Job ads you post will have a link to a Workello-hosted application form, which will ensure all applications end up in the same place—your Workello dashboard.

You will “kill two birds with one stone,” too, as all the applications will be in the same format. That means you will no longer have to deal with incomplete submissions. 

Check out an application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Your Workello dashboard will be a single point of entry for whatever you need to do with the applications you receive. From a single page, you can evaluate, test, reject, interview candidates, even send an offer to the ones you choose to hire. 

Moving candidates through your hiring funnel is done with a single click. All you have to do is choose the appropriate option form a 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

Each status is color-coded, so you can see how many candidates you have in each stage of your hiring process within seconds.

Reject Unqualified Writers

As the applications stream in, your editors and content managers can review them. If they see that a candidate doesn’t meet your hiring requirements, they can easily remove them from the funnel by changing their application status to “Application Rejected.”

This action triggers an automated rejection email that politely informs the candidates that you won’t be hiring them at this time.

Point, Click, Test

You will receive many applications that seem fantastic on paper but don’t accurately showcase a writer’s actual abilities. Candidates will send you polished articles that hardly demonstrate a their first-draft skills. You will get some insight into a candidate’s experience, but you will have no idea how much editing they’ll need.  

The only way to gauge a candidate’s real skills is to test them. This is especially important for game studios hiring writers because they require a specific skill set or may need a particular style.

We didn’t test our candidates at first, which cost us a lot of time and money. We ended up paying for a ton of unusable content, and our editors had to edit or completely rewrite it. 

The only way to avoid this is to test candidates. So, we implemented a testing feature into Workello. If editors decide that an application meets your requirements, they can change the candidate’s status to “Test Candidate.” This will trigger an automated email that:

1. Congratulates a candidate on moving onto the next stage of your hiring process
2. Includes a link to the writing tests
3. Provides detailed instructions for submitting the test

When candidates click on the link, they will open a page that looks like this:

How To Make a Good Test

When creating a writing test, you have to find a perfect balance between test thoroughness and candidate willingness. The more exhausting your test is, the less willing a candidate will be to complete it. At the same time, the more detailed the test, the better you can gauge a candidate’s writing abilities. 

If you have followed all the steps above, by the time candidates receive the test, they will have been impressed with your company. You will have made an impression of a professional business with a streamlined hiring funnel. 

It means you will have sent emails in a timely manner, your job ad will have been detailed and informative, and you will have been transparent. The candidates received notifications whenever you moved them to the next stage in your hiring funnel and they always knew what the next steps would be.

That is what Workello allows you to do. It automates communication which allows transparency and efficiency that you wouldn’t have been able to achieve manually. As a result, candidates will feel good about investing their time to complete your writing test.

As for the test itself, make sure you evaluate candidates’:

1. Language Proficiency
2. Creativity
3. Storytelling skills
4. Dialogue writing skills

If you are having trouble creating a test for game writers, check out what a well-designed, balanced text looks like. Click here to see the test we’ve used to evaluate hundreds of writers.

Interviewing Candidates

After candidates submit completed tests, their application status will automatically change to “Test Complete,” letting your editors know it’s time to review them. If the test is up to your company standards, your editors can change the application status to “Invite for Interview.”

This will trigger an automated email with an invitation to schedule a video interview via Calendly. 

If the test is not up to the standards, your editors can select the “Reject Candidate” option from the drop-down menu. The candidates will receive a polite rejection email thanking them for their time. 

The Candidate Status Page

Despite our best efforts to optimize our hiring system, we still wasted a lot of time responding to the same emails, dozens of times, every single day. Candidates wanted to know:

• If we have received their applications
• If we have had the time to review their tests
• When they can expect to hear from us
• What the next steps are

If we failed to reply on time, we often lost excellent candidates. 

To avoid this, we implemented a Candidate Status Page where applicants can find answers to the most common questions and see what our hiring process looks like. They will also see where they are exactly in our hiring process.

Check out an example of a Candidate Status page here. 

The Investment Paid Off Big Time

With Workello, hiring writers seems super-simple. The problem is, we didn’t have anything like it when we first started scaling our content team. 

Keeping track of all applicants and knowing where they are in our hiring channel was impossible. We couldn’t follow up with every candidate, and we often failed to get in touch with great writers fast enough. 

We often received incomplete applications and had to waste time writing follow-up emails asking for the missing information. 

Our editors neglected their primary duties while writing and posting job ads. 

We were in desperate need of an automated system. 

But we have Workello now because we have gone through this challenging experience. After months of trials and errors, countless working hours, and over $100,000, we have a fully-automated system you can get for the price of a single page of content. 

With our automated funnel designed for content teams, we managed to:

1. Build a team of 45+ writers and editors in less than 2 years
2. Lower the cost of quality content production by 75%
3. Execute one of the best SEO campaigns of all time
4. Enable editors and content managers to focus on creating excellent content

Try Workello completely for free and start automating your hiring funnel and accepting applications from game writers in less than 3 minutes.