We Learned How to Hire Great Writers the Hard Way—But You Don’t Have To

Before we developed Workello, we were Content Distribution, a content agency focused on producing top-quality articles that draw traffic to websites, build authority, and improve our clients’ online presence. 

We did it successfully, and we have the numbers to show it. As Content Distribution, we ran one of the best content marketing campaigns of all time. We grew our client from 1 to 1000,000 organic website visitors in only 18 months. 

It was a remarkable achievement but getting there was not simple. Only fantastic writers are capable of producing such powerful content. Finding those writers takes a lot of time and often a lot of disappointment. 

When we started hiring writers, we were swamped with applications. Candidates contacted us via email or DMs. Some of them submitted incomplete applications, and we often received portfolios attached as Word documents. 

Keeping track of all the candidates in our hiring funnel was downright impossible. 

We missed a lot of candidates in all that chaos, and when we managed to identify one great writer, another company had beat us to them.
For once, we wanted to be that other company that snatches great candidates under someone else’s nose. So, we decided to build a hiring funnel that would allow us to do so. 

And we developed Workello, a fully automated hiring system that allowed us to scale our content team from 1 to 45+ writers and editors capable of creating top-quality content in under two years. 

A considerable investment of over $100,000 and thousands of working hours went into developing something that would transform our hiring process and take us to unimaginable successes. 

In the next 10 minutes, you will also learn:

1. Where to look for medical writers
2. Why it’s so hard to hire medical writers
3. How to use automation to evaluate more candidates

Where To Look for Medical Writers—Top 15 Job Boards

Check out these top 15 job boards for hiring medical writers at any price point:

Read through the rest of the article to find more places where you can hire medical

Finding Good Writers Is Tough—Here Is Why

Finding qualified candidates for any position is a challenge. There are three main reasons for it:

1. The majority of candidates on any job board are underqualified 
2. You are not the only one looking for great candidates
3. Reviewing applications, contacting candidates, and scheduling interviews manually is time-consuming, inefficient, and costly

Hiring writers is not different from hiring experienced programmers, for example. The best ones get hired fast, and they can basically choose who they want to work for. It’s a competitive market. 

Everything is online nowadays, and content is critical for achieving a strong online presence, everyone is fighting over great writers. Many newbies wrongly assume that content writing is not that hard, so the market is flooded with inexperienced writers. 

Hiring inexperienced writers is not a bad thing per se, but it requires time to train them and bring their writing to a satisfactory level. That is, of course, if they have a knack for writing.

There are also vast numbers of candidates whose level of the English language is far from acceptable. Pair it with a lack of talent, and you get a person who will only leech on your resources should you make the costly mistake of hiring them. 

The bottom line is that you will have to go over a hundred applications to find one top-performer. And that takes time—time you don’t have.

How To Beat the Time

The only way to get to the best candidates before your competitors is to have a system in place that would allow you to streamline your hiring process. This means you need something to help you:

• Track where all candidates are in your hiring funnel
• Communicate with applicants efficiently
• Reduce the number of bad candidates fast
• Follow up with great candidates on time

We developed a hiring funnel that does all that and more. 

How To Hire High-Quality Medicine and Science Content Team Members

Hiring a prolific content writer or editor is never an easy task, but finding candidates who can produce quality content in a medicine or science industry poses an even greater challenge. When you advertise a vacancy in your niche, you’ll always have to deal with the majority of writing applicants being unqualified.

While they can have impressive portfolios and leave a great impression on an interview, no candidate can ace a pre-hire assessment if they’re not qualified for the role. That’s why testing your applicants is a surefire way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The problem is—the more applicants you have, the more tests you need to send out manually and keep track of each candidate’s progress. Workello is skill assessment software that automates candidate assessment and the entire hiring process in one go. All the information is visible on Workello’s single-page dashboard, and you don’t have to worry about losing a top candidate due to human error. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for free and set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Post a job ad with a Workello link on various job platforms
3. Watch applications show up in your dashboard
4. Send tests to spot unqualified candidates with great portfolios 
5. Reject, interview, and send offers to candidates directly from your dashboard

Find the Best Candidate in Your Niche With a Smooth Pre-Hire Testing Process

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that helps you move candidates through the funnel effortlessly. You can use the platform to test content writers, technical writers, and copywriters with ease. Create a free account and be the fastest in the business when it comes to pre-employment assessments.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Our hiring process wasn’t working, and we had to understand what was causing us problems. 

We scrutinized our processes and concluded:

1. Publishing consistently high-quality content drives organic website traffic
2. Creating high-quality content is only possible with skilled writers
3. Finding a single qualified medical writer requires evaluating a hundred candidates
4. Evaluating a pile of applications mainly involves eliminating bad candidates from the race
5. Spotting bad candidates quickly was our biggest issue

We never had trouble getting applications. In fact, we had way more than we could handle. 

We needed a system that would:

• Provide a unified platform that gathers all applications in one place, no matter which job board they come from
• Allow us to move candidates through our hiring funnel more efficiently
• Act as a one-stop shop for testing, evaluating, and rejecting candidates, as well as inviting those we like for an interview and extending an offer to the best ones
• Automatically send writing tests designed to help us identify bad writers with impressive portfolios
• Feature email automation that saves a ton of valuable time and eliminates the possibility of human error

We started to work on creating such a system, and the first set-up was a Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier combination. It was a step in the right direction but needed a lot of improvement. With every iteration, we were one step closer to the fully-optimized hiring funnel that is Workello now. 

To Hire Qualified Medical Writers, You Need a Killer Job Ad

You want to hire a writer to break down medical studies, create articles on a variety of medical topics, and integrate vast scientific knowledge into comprehensive pieces adequate for a diverse audience that includes both the general public and physicians. 

Your job ad must attract such candidates. It means that your job description, including the requirements and responsibilities, must be super specific.

You might also want to include the types of projects they will work on, such as:

• Abstracts
• Marketing brochures
• Regulatory submissions
• Descriptions of congress booth exhibits

Although some freelance writers without an educational background in a medical or healthcare-related field can produce high-quality medical articles, you may want to specify that you are looking for a person with a degree in areas such as:

• Biology
• Anatomy
• Pharmacology
• Chemistry, etc.

Alternatively, you can state what kind of previous experience you are looking for:

• Data analyst
• Clinical educator
• Literature landscaper
• Quality reviewer

If you list precisely what kind of education and experience you expect from candidates, you will discourage unqualified ones from applying and simultaneously attract more suitable candidates. To stand out and motivate applicants to choose you over your competitors, you should also specify what they will get from working for you. Include the salary, benefits, and other relevant information in your job ad. 

If you are not entirely sure how to compose a job description or what type of writer you need exactly, you can take a look at our job description templates. Click on the one you need and adjust it to suit your specific needs. Within minutes, you will be ready to post your ad anywhere you want.

• Medical Writer
• Medical Copywriter
• Regulatory Medical Writer
• Associate Medical Writer
• Senior Medical Writer
• Nutrition Writer
• Science Writer
• Research Writer
• Technical Healthcare Writer
• Research Analyst Writer
• Medical Writer Remote
• Lifestyle Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started hiring, it was our editors’ and content managers’ responsibility to distribute job ads across multiple hiring platforms. It worked at first, but as we needed more writers, it got to the point where they had to dedicate up to two hours of their working day to this mundane task. 

Soon enough, our editors and managers started to fall behind with their primary responsibilities, and they started feeling overwhelmed. It was time to hire a Recruitment Specialist who would take over. 

It was easier said than done because we needed to document our entire hiring process so we could train that person properly. 

We went through this painful ordeal, but you don’t have to!

Register with Workello today for free and get access to our entire knowledge base, so you can learn how to delegate job ad writing and posting to someone else.

One Dashboard to Rule All Applications

You can add a link to the Workello-hosted application form to your ad and post on as many boards as you like. All the applications you receive will end up in a single place—your Workello dashboard—and they will all be uniform.

See what our application example looks like here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Not only will you see all the candidates in one place, but you will be able to move them through your hiring funnel with a single click without ever leaving your Workello dashboard. All you have to do is select the appropriate application status for each candidate:

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

This means that you can evaluate, reject, and test candidates, invite them for an interview or extend an offer right from your dashboard. And since each status is color-coded, you will always be able to instantly estimate how many candidates you have in each stage of your hiring process.

Reject Unqualified Medical Writers

When candidates start sending their applications, your editors can review them and see if they meet your basic requirements. If they don’t, your editors can easily remove them from your hiring funnel by selecting “Reject Candidate.”

This action triggers an automated rejection email, saving you valuable time you’d otherwise waste on informing each candidate manually.

Point, Click, Test

Bad candidates sending their applications are not a problem. Bad candidates sending impressive portfolios are. 

You have to keep in mind that most portfolios consist of heavily edited articles that don’t demonstrate candidates’ first draft capabilities. If you base your decisions based on portfolios alone, you risk hiring medical writers who don’t meet your company’s standards. 

You will end up paying for unusable articles, and your editors will waste more time rewriting them. Ultimately, you will end up right where you started—at the beginning of a new hiring cycle. 

The only way to avoid this scenario is to introduce testing.

With Workello, you can automate the testing process. Selecting the “Test Candidate” option triggers an email that contains a link to the writing test and detailed instructions on how to complete it. 

When candidates click on the test, the following tab will appear:

How To Make a Good Test

You may want to hire a writer to break down medical studies, create articles using language that makes complicated topics simple and understandable to the general public, or a writer who can do regulatory submissions. To be sure you have found such a writer, you need to create a test that will ask them to demonstrate their abilities. 

Make sure you select the topic that would be relevant to your company and specify the format you need. The test should help you gauge a candidate’s:

1. Command of the English language
2. Research skills
3. Knowledge of a particular medical field
4. Understanding of basic SEO 

While your test needs to be comprehensive, it mustn’t be too demanding. Remember that you’re asking someone to complete a test assignment for a job they might not get. Most people won’t be willing to invest more than 2-4 hours, so your test shouldn’t be too demanding. 

Also, if you have done all the previous steps right, wrote a great job ad, and responded to emails in a timely manner, candidates will be better motivated to complete your evaluation process. 

If you need help creating a test, take a look at the same one we used to evaluate hundreds of candidates. You can modify it so it’s suitable for medical writers. 

Interviewing Candidates

When candidates submit their tests, their status in your dashboard will automatically change to “Test Complete.” This will be a signal for your editors to review the test articles. If they don’t meet your company’s standards, your editors can click on “Reject Candidate,” and unsuccessful applicants will receive a polite rejection email thanking them for their time.

If the test article is of good quality, your editors can select “Invite for Interview” from the drop-down menu, and candidates will receive an email that:

1. Congratulates them on making it to the final stage of your hiring process
2. Contains a link to your calendar where they can book a slot at their convenience

The Candidate Status Page

We did our best to optimize our hiring process, but we still kept receiving dozens of emails every day from unqualified candidates asking about their application status. To stop this from happening, we implemented a Candidate Status page.

This is what candidates see on their end. Every time you change their application status, it will immediately show on their Candidate Status page. 

Besides tracking their status in your hiring funnel, candidates can also find information about your hiring process here. That way, they will always know what the next steps are. 

The greatest benefit of this feature is that you will never lose a great candidate again because you were too late to follow up with them. 

Here is an example of a Candidate Status page.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

It all seems very simple and intuitive now, but when we started hiring writers, we couldn’t find a system that would help us solve all of our problems at once. 

We were trapped in a loop—hire new writers, train them, realize they are not very skilled, let them go, and start over. 

We looked for qualified writers everywhere, and whenever we began a hiring cycle, we faced the same problems:

• Our editors didn’t edit; they wasted time posting job ads and reviewing applications
• Applications were coming our way from various platforms, and we couldn’t group them all in a single place
• We lost many great candidates because we were too late to follow up or never did
• The applications weren’t uniform, and many lacked important information
• We couldn’t track candidates by their application status
• We did everything manually, and there was a lot of room for mistakes

We had to change something, so we created Workello—an automated hiring system that allowed us to:

• Lower the costs of content production by 75%, thanks to a team of non-native speakers
• Run one of the greatest SEO campaigns ever
• Grow our content team  from 1 to 45 writers and editors in only 18 months
• Let our talented editors and content managers do what they do best—create fantastic content

We spent thousands of hours and over $100,000 building a system that is available to you at the price of one quality article. And you can test it for free.

Try Workello now and start automating your hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes.

More Job Boards Where You Can Hire Medical Writers

Since all applications you receive will end up in the same place, you don’t have to worry about how you will keep track of all applications on several hiring boards. You can post your job ad wherever you want and increase your chances of finding a perfect medical writer.

Here are some more websites you can use to hire medical writers:

• WritersWork
• Kolabtree
• Trovit
• PeoplePerHour
• Writer Access
• The Writers for Hire
• Medical Writers
• The Med Writers
• Writezillas
• Guru
• AMWA
• EMWA
• Randstad
• Freelancer
• Workopolis