Make an Informed Choice When Hiring a Part-Time College Student for a Writing Role—Our Expertise Will Guide You

Long before we created the automated hiring funnel known as Workello, we were a small content company called Content Distribution.com. Back in 2019, we took on an ambitious project for a VC-backed client that required us to increase their number of monthly visitors from 0 to 1,500,000.

To succeed, we had to publish 600+ pages of top-notch content each month. Doing this with 1 or 2 writers was impossible, so we had to rapidly scale our team from 1 to 45+ Writers and Editors. This is when troubles started springing up by the dozens.

Our hiring system wasn’t optimized to handle the insurmountable number of candidates who were applying for the job. Due to this, we couldn’t get in touch with some truly promising Writers. Applicants were sending their portfolios and resumes in varying formats. Some tried to contact us directly on Facebook and LinkedIn. It was all an utter mess—that we didn’t have an answer to!

Something had to change, so we decided to get our hands dirty and come up with our own answer. We focused all our brain power and invested long hours into tireless R&D. In the process, we spent more than $100,000, but it was all worth it. In the end, we had our solution—Workello!

In the following 10+ minutes, this article will show you the best hiring websites to find part-time college students for any writing role. You’ll also learn how to duplicate our accomplishments by optimizing your hiring funnel for greater efficacy.

Where To Find Competent Part-Time College Students for a Writing Role

During our hiring spree, we relied on numerous hiring platforms. In our opinion, these are the major 15 job boards you should check out:

Why Is It So Difficult To Find a Part-Time College Student for a Writing Gig?

The largest problem you’ll encounter is the fact that you’re not the only company looking to hire a talented and affordable writing candidate. Exceptional part-time writers go off the market faster than job boards can source new, qualified writers. This leaves a vacuum that’s quickly filled with sub-par candidates who don’t possess the required skills to perform well in the role.

The competition is fierce, and you’ll have to identify that ideal candidate before another company hires them. This means you have to quickly evaluate, test, and interview dozens of applicants fast. This may be a simple matter if you need a single part-time writer, but scaling an entire team is much more difficult.

We initially used Upwork and LinkedIn, though we soon had to expand to other job boards. As we included other job boards—such as Glassdoor, Indeed, Facebook, and Craigslist— hundreds of applications started to flood our system. Regardless of the platform we used, we had difficulties:

• Tracking candidates by their status in our hiring funnel
• Logging each application and responding to candidates in a timely manner
• Keeping in touch with promising Part-Time Writers
• Noting those candidates who showed some aptitude for the role
• Lowering the number of sub-par applicants

Our SEO project was such a success because of the time and effort we dedicated to it. Indirectly, this lead us to neglect our hiring funnel—and we decided to change that.

We invested countless hours, tons of money, and worked unceasingly until we had what we sought—a fine-tuned, fully automated hiring system!

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

To figure out why our hiring system didn’t work, we had to break it down into discrete elements and carefully appraise each one. Our thought-process lead us to these conclusions:

1. To increase our client’s website traffic, we had to publish large volumes of top-quality content
2. Only top-performing writers could create engaging, relevant, valuable content
3. To find an outstanding writer, we needed to review hundreds of portfolios
4. Finding an excellent writer meant identifying and filtering out poor candidates fast
5. We just didn’t have the means to spot bad writers quickly enough

Receiving applications was never the issue. What we struggled with was handling them once they arrived in our hiring funnel.

We had to make sure that every layer of our new system would be stable, so we jotted down a list of the most vital features it needed to have:

1. An integrated platform that would collect all candidate applications no matter which job board someone applied on
2. An optimized system that can let us sort candidates by their application status in our funnel with one click
3. A unified dashboard for reviewing, testing, interviewing, and ultimately hiring the most capable Writers
4. Testing automation that would allow us to identify poor writers with brilliant resumes
5. An automated messaging system that would reduce time on manual back-and-forth with candidates while reducing the risk of human error

Our initial model used the combination Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was a small step forward, but Workello would arrive only after many more iterations and incremental improvements.

An Ambiguous Job Description Attracts Unqualified Part-Time Writers

To attract the right kind of Writer for your business, you need to craft a thorough, detailed job description. This will not only draw the attention of skilled candidates who are the perfect fit for the role, but also discourage unqualified ones.

In practice, this means mentioning every single requirement and responsibility that the role demands in your organization. If you’re vague and use too many general terms, any writer will think they can perform the job well.

You should pay particular attention to the niche they need to have some experience in. Since you’re looking to hire a part-timing college student, it’s wise to state the preferred type of education they should possess. Additionally, you could list common skills—such as knowledge of MS Office tools—that they are expected to possess.

To stay one step ahead of the competition, it is also important to state the rate you’re willing to pay. Sometimes, even a slightly higher paycheck can land you a much better Writer.

If you’re looking for an outline for your job description, feel free to use one of our premade templates:

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

How the Workello Dashboard Makes Your Hiring Process Much Less Painful

The Workello dashboard serves as the gathering place for all applications regardless of the platform writers apply on. This is possible thanks to a Workello-hosted application form that you can easily embed in your job ad.

No matter how many job boards you’re using, each application will end up in the same dashboard, removing the need to check each website separately in order to see the status of a candidate’s application.

Our Workello-hosted application form also ensures the same format across all applications. This allows for greater uniformity and consistency in the hiring process.

Check out what the application form looks like here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Your dashboard will be the only page you need to complete the entirety of the hiring process. It has all the required features to review resumes, send out tests, invite candidates to interview, and finally extend a job offer to the most successful Writer. 

To change the status of a candidate in your funnel, you only need to pick the appropriate option from a 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

You can instantly tell at what stage a candidate is since each status is in a different color.

Reject Unqualified Part-Time Writers

There will be many unqualified candidates in your hiring funnel, and you’ll want to remove the very worst ones even before the testing stage. Doing that is simple—you only need to select the Application Rejected option, and they will be removed from your hiring funnel.

Workello will immediately send them an automated rejection message politely informing them that they have been removed from the selection process. Due to this automation, you’ll save time on notifying each candidate manually—and you also won’t get flooded by tons of emails from applicants wondering about their status.

Point, Click, Test

Even if your Recruiters like a candidate’s portfolio, that doesn’t mean you should hire them right away. 

Why? Because a portfolio contains only examples of their finest works—and only after it has gone through an extensive editing process.

To see what a candidate’s raw skills are, you need to test them thoroughly.

We didn’t have any sort of testing system at first. Instead, we blindly believed our candidate’s portfolios—this was a major misstep. The candidates we hired created unusable content we had to rewrite from scratch, and we ended up wasting thousands of dollars in the process.

To ensure this wouldn’t happen again, we decided to implement automated testing. Using Workello, you can immediately test a candidate by selecting the Test Candidate option, which triggers an automatic message that:

1. Informs the candidate that they have reached the testing stage
2. Contains a link to the writing test

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

How To Make a Good Test

To create a test that will enable you to accurately assess a writer’s capabilities, you must to make sure that it can assess these vital skills:

1. Language proficiency (spelling, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, etc.)
2. Ability to perform meticulous research on a specific topic
3. Formatting skills (spacing, margins, etc.)

While your test should be able to cover all these points, you can’t exactly candidates for a part-time writer position to write a 2,500-word article as a test. You have to balance out test thoroughness and candidates’ willingness to complete it. From our experience, a 500-word test article will suffice.

With Workello, you can even be a bit more thorough if you like. Our hiring system is so transparent—with candidates getting detailed instructions and immediate updates on their application status—that many Writers will be willing to commit a bit more time and effort to completing the test. They will do this if they’re convinced they’re doing it for a serious, professional content agency.

Click here to see how you can set up a test in Workello in 3 minutes!

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate finishes the writing test and selects the Submit Test option, their status changes immediately to Test Complete. You can then reject those who have failed the test and interview those who have successfully passed it by choosing one of these options:

1. Reject Candidate—This option triggers an email that courteously informs the candidate about their failure to pass the testing stage
2. Invite for Interview—Selecting this option triggers an email that notifies the candidate about their success in the testing stage and invites them to set up an interview via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

Workello also includes a Candidate Status page that your candidates can see after submitting their application. They can use it to quickly see their application status, which means they no longer have to bother your recruiters via email.

To help your candidates learn about each stage in the funnel, this page also has a What to expect next section that contains all the details they need to approach it thoroughly informed.

With this page at their disposal, you no longer need to worry about missing out on a great Writer just because your Recruiter couldn’t respond to their questions on time. It will also save them time on unnecessary manual correspondence

Check out what the page looks like here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

An automated hiring funnel makes the candidate selection process ten times easier. But we had no system like Workello to rely on when we started out—and we faced obstacles at every step.

Dozens of candidates were applying each day—and applications came from many different websites. We couldn’t reliably log each one, so we lost many talented Writers who lost their motivation due to the prolonged time it took us to reply. Others just got hired by another company before we could extend our job offer.

Due to our lack of specialized Recruiters, our Editors and Content Managers had to multitask editing and managing content with additional recruitment responsibilities. Content production faltered and our articles became of a much poorer quality.

We had to do everything manually and in an extremely time-consuming and inefficient manner. With Workello, this is a thing of the past!

Once we developed Workello, it helped us:

1. Grow our writing team from 1 to 45+ employees in less than 18 months
2. Cut the cost of producing quality content by up to 75%!
3. Create and execute one of the most successful SEO projects ever!
4. Allow our Content Managers and Editors to refocus on their main responsibilities

We had to spend more than $100,000 and invest months of work to finally come up with a viable solution to all our problems. You can now get all the benefit of our hard-earned success for the small price of one content page!

Try out Workello today for free! Everything’s pre-configured, so you can start hiring writers in under 5 minutes!