Finding a Top-Notch Writer is a Difficult Task—See How We Made It Easier!

Prior to developing workello, we were a successful content company—Content Distribution.com. In 2019, we took on an ambitious VS-backed client and managed to grow their website traffic from 0 to 1,500,000 organic visitors per month, in under two years. Thanks to our hard work and a steady output of top-quality creative content, we executed one of the best SEO campaigns ever!

To fulfill our client’s demands, we had to hastily scale our writing team from 1 to 45+ employees in under 2 years. This wasn’t extremely difficult, especially since our hiring system wasn’t optimized for such a large quota of candidates.

We couldn’t properly log and evaluate hundreds of applications coming in from a dozen different job boards every single day. It was next-to-impossible to respond to each candidate on time, so a bunch of talented writers slipped through our fingers.

We also had to do everything manually—from reviewing applications to sending follow-up emails—since there wasn’t a single automated feature in our system. It didn’t take us long to realize that the key to successfully hiring top-performing writers is process automation!

Since we couldn’t find any ATS that would resolve all our problems single-handedly, we decided to create one.This cost us hundreds of hours of scrupulous R&D and tens of thousands of dollars. The end result was Workello—a streamlined, fully automated ATS, specifically designed for hiring writers!

In the next 15 minutes, we’ll show you the top 15 websites to hire a Freelance Writer for short stories, as well as how Workello’s process automation can help you review, test, and hire writers more efficiently!

Where To Hire a Freelance Writer for Short Stories—Take a Look at These 15 Job Boards!

During our hiring spree, we posted on dozens of different job boards. Here are our top 15 picks for hiring freelance writers for short stories:

Read the rest of our article and discover an additional 15 websites to hire the right writer for your business!

Why Hiring a Good Freelance Writer Seems Impossible

No matter which job board you choose or if you post on every single one of them, finding and hiring a top-performing freelance writer is going to be difficult. This is the case because exceptional writers get hired almost instantly. 

No job board can source great writers quickly enough to satisfy each company’s needs. Since you’ll be competing with others for that perfect candidate, you need to spot them and extend them a job offer fast. To accomplish this, you need to sift through hundreds of portfolios and filter out all unqualified applicants as fast as possible.

This is impossible  without an automated system, as we learned the hard way.

In the beginning, we relied on Upwork to find candidates. We soon widened our search and included other platforms, yet the same issues arose:

• It was a nightmare to sort out all the applications we were receiving from multiple different sources
• We couldn’t keep track of our candidates’ progress through the hiring funnel
• Applicants’ portfolios weren’t a reliable gauge of their actual abilities

Our network expanded to incorporate LinkedIn, Facebook, Glassdoor, Craigslist, Monster, and many others, but nothing changed—it only got worse! All the previous issues remained, and many new ones cropped up:

• Keeping notes on writers whose resumes seemed excellent
• Responding to high-spirited candidates in a time-efficient manner
• Cutting down the number of underskilled applicants

We spent all our time, money, and effort into developing high-quality content, but barely gave any attention to our hiring funnel. The issue got out of hand and we could no longer ignore it—it was painfully obvious that our hiring system was long overdue for a complete overhaul.

That’s how the idea for Workello was born—out of necessity.

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

Before we could implement any changes, we first had to understand what parts of our hiring system were broken. To do this, we broke down our entire process into distinct components and tried tracing the problem to its source. 

This is what we came up with:

1. To attract many visitors to our client’s website, we had to publish a high volume of top-quality articles
2. To maintain high content velocity, we needed a team of top-quality writers
3. Finding a single skilled writer requires evaluating and testing hundreds of candidates
4. To hire a talented candidate, we needed the means to filter out unqualified ones fast
5. How to spot and remove poor candidates from the funnel—that was a question we didn’t have the answer to

Receiving applications was never an issue—evaluating hundreds of them manually each day was the problem. 

Our new system desperately needed automed features that would make the hiring process ten times easier and less time-consuming. These are the features we knew were crucial:

1. A single place to view all applications regardless of which job board they came from
2. The option to sort candidates according to their status in our hiring funnel
3. The ability to review, test, schedule an interview, and reject or hire a candidate with a single click
4. Automated tests that would help us spot and filter out poor-performing writers of inadequate skill or experience
5. Email automation to keep our candidates updated during each stage of the selection process

 The first iteration of our new model used the combination  Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It took us in the right direction, but there was much more room for improvement. Countless hours of R&D and numerous iterations later, we found the fix-all solution we desired!

What a Good Job Description for Freelance Short Story Writers Needs To Include

Your job description needs to be as detailed as possible to grab the attention of suitable freelancers for the role. This especially holds true if you’re looking to hire a Freelance Writer for Short Stories.

There are many niches for short stories, and not every freelance writer has the appropriate skills or knowledge to tackle every single one of them. 

That’s why it’s important to state the type of short story they will be expected to write (romance, horror, detective fiction), as well as the narrative and non-narrative elements they need to be acquainted with, such as:

• Style and language use
• Genre, theme, and setting
• Character development
• Target audience for the story

Aside from this, you should also clarify other general requirements, including:

• Prior work experience
• Education degree
• Creative writing certificates

Once you have covered these crucial points, it is wise to consider the rate you’re willing to pay your freelancers. Since they won’t have the benefits of a regular employee, the most ambitious freelance writers will work for the highest bidder. This means you should take the rates other companies are paying into the equation—and make sure yours are slightly higher!

If you’re not sure how you should arrange this information in your job ad—or if you’re looking for another similar role, such as a Narrative Copywriter for hire—check out one of our pre-vetted templates. 

You can freely choose one from the list below, modify it according to the specifics of the role, and use it to make the perfect fiction writing hire!

• Freelance Writer
• Writer
• Blog Writer
• Content Writer
• Creative Writer for Entertainment

Review All Applications From the Same Page—Your Workello Dashboard!

It’s quite easy to get overwhelmed by the constant flush of applications arriving from various different networks—but Workello has a perfect solution for that! 

No matter how many ads you post—nor on how many websites—they will all instantly appear in your unique Workello dashboard, where you can evaluate them at your leisure.

Our one-of-a-kind Workello-hosted application form also provides two additional benefits. Since all your candidates have to complete this form in order to apply, you won’t need to worry about receiving incomplete applications.

Stemming from the previous one, the second benefit is—you’ll no longer have to manually contact candidates who left out important details from their portfolio!

See what the application form looks like here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

With Workello’s process automation, you can easily wrap up the entire hiring process without leaving your dashboard. From here, you can conduct each stage of the process with maximum efficiency—reviewing, testing, sending invitations to interview, and lastly rejecting or hiring a writer.

To advance your candidates from one stage to the next, you only need to select the appropriate status from the drop-down menu:

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

To make the dashboard more intuitive and easy to use, we’ve made sure each status is color-coded. This way, you can see the exact number of candidates you have at each stage of your hiring funnel, at a glance!

Reject Unqualified Candidates

When an application pops up in your Workello dashboard, your editors and content managers can open and review it to see if it meets your company’s basic hiring standards. If it doesn’t, they can immediately remove the candidate from your funnel by choosing the Application Rejected option.

When you do this, Workello will send an automated rejection message that politely informs the candidate about your decision.

Point, Click, Test

The best piece of advice we can give to anyone hiring writers is to never hire based on portfolios alone.  

A portfolio is rarely an accurate representation of the candidate’s writing skill. It features only their best work, that has been heavily edited and polished to perfection. 

The only way to see the writer’s first draft quality is by testing them. 

Not testing candidates was the biggest mistake we made when we first started hiring. We took our candidates’ portfolio at face value, and our naivety resulted in hundreds of unusable articles that our editors had to rewrite from scratch.

To prevent this from reocurring, we added a testing feature to Workello.

After evaluating a writer’s portfolio, you can move them along to the testing stage by changing their status in your funnel to Test Candidate. 

Doing this triggers an automatic email that informs the candidate of their reaching the testing stage and provides them with a link and instructions for the written test.

Our writing test looked like this:

How To Make a Good Test

A well-rounded test should enable you to assess the candidate’s:

1. Mastery of the English language
2. Creativity
3. Writing style
4. Formatting abilities

While the test should be thorough, you can’t reasonably expect someone to write a 10-page short story for a gig they might not even get. 

What you should do instead is give them the necessary prompts, explain the setting in a few sentences, and tell them to write around 300-500 words. This should give you a pretty good idea of how well the writer understands the brief, how good their English is, and whether their writing style aligns with what you have in mind. 

With Workello, setting up a custom writing test is super-simple. All you need to do is add the test instructions when setting up your account. You can be as detailed as you want, and you can always update the writing test later on. 

After the test instructions are set up, each time you update the candidate’s application status in your funnel to “Test Candidate,” they’ll receive a link to the writing test which includes all of your instructions.

Click here to learn how to set up a test in Workello in 2 minutes!

Interview Candidates

Once a candidate submits their test, their application status will immediately change to Test Complete. You can then evaluate the test and, based on how good it is, update their status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Sends an automatic email that informs the candidate about their failure to pass the written test
2. Invite for Interview—Sends an automatic email informing the candidate that they have passed the test and including a Calendly link to schedule an interview with your HR team

The Candidate Status Page

Workello provides your candidates with a convenient way to inform themselves about their application status, as well as find general information about your hiring process—via the Candidate Status page!

This page also has a What to expect next section, where they can find relevant details about each upcoming stage in your selection process.

With all the information at their disposal, candidate’s won’t have to bombard you with transactional emails. As a result, you’ll save a lot of valuable time you’d otherwise waste answering the same questions regarding the status of every individual candidate’s application.

You can see what the Candidate Status page looks like here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

With every aspect of the hiring process streamlined to perfection, hiring writers is a breeze. But, without something like Workello, it can quickly turn into a nightmare.

Tracking where each candidate was in our hiring funnel was impossible without a robust ATS, and it took us hours each day just to sort their applications because of the different job boards they arrived from.

We couldn’t stay in touch with candidates who had shown promise, and this made many give up to seek employment elsewhere.

Without a dedicated recruiter, our content managers and editors had to set aside precious time in order to review portfolios and test candidates. As they became more and more absorbed in their secondary responsibilities, our content production took a downward turn. We were publishing fewer and fewer articles—and of lesser quality!

We had to turn this around lest our business suffer further. That’s when we steeled ourselves for the long road to devising our own fully automated hiring funnel—one that would solve all our hiring issues simultaneously!

When we finally succeeded, Workello allowed us to:

1. Grow our team from 1 to 45+ writers in under 2 years
2. Lower the cost of content production by 75%
3. Head one of the most ambitious SEO projects ever imagined
4. Let our editors and content managers focus on their priorities—editing and managing content

Workello was the hard-earned reward we got after many months of dedicated R&D and numerous investments costing upwards of $100,000. Now, you can enjoy all the benefits our new system provides for the price of a single content page!

Try out Workello for free! Everything is pre-configured, so you can start accepting applications in less than 3 minutes!

Check Out These 15 Additional Job Boards If You’re Looking To Hire a Freelance Writer for Short Stories

There’s no longer any need to restrict the number of job boards you use, as Workello ensures all applications arrive where they’re supposed to—your Workello dashboard. With such great leeway in the hiring process, it’d be a waste not to cast a wider net in your search for the perfect freelance writer!

Try out some of the following websites:

• Craigslist
• Certified Writers
• ContentGrow
• WriterAccess
• Mediabistro
• Masthead Media
• Pitchwhiz
• Freelancer
• PeoplePerHour
• HireMyMom
• Storyhackers
• Muck Rack
• Scribewise
• Pod Reacher
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer group