We Hired Article Writers the Hard Way—You Don’t Have To! 

In 2019, we were ContentDistribution.com—a content agency. Back then, we initiated a campaign that proved to be one of the most ambitious SEO projects of all time. Our client grew from 0 to 1,000,000 organic visits per month in only 18 months.

We managed to achieve this unlikely goal by consistently producing high-quality content in large volumes.

This meant that our team had to grow rapidly, and so it did—we hired 45+ Writers and Editors in under 2 years. 

Soon after we started hiring en masse, we realized that our hiring process wasn’t nearly as efficient as we needed it to be. We missed out on great candidates, and we wasted time manually completing tasks that were easy to automate.

We had to make a change, and that necessity led us to create an automated hiring funnel. The funnel cost us countless hours of work and $100,000+, but the end result was worth it.

In the next 10+ minutes, you’ll learn:

1. How to find top-class, affordable Article Writers for hire
2. What makes hiring Article Writers a difficult task
3. How to use automation to evaluate and test Writers more efficiently

Top 15 Places Where You Can Find Writers for Your Articles

The following job boards are our top picks when it comes to Article Writers for hire:

The rest of the article includes 35 additional sources for finding Article Writers.

Why Hiring Article Writers Is So Difficult

The market for Article Writers is similar to the one for Developers—the best candidates get snapped up quickly. Every job board has the problem of sourcing new Writers fast enough to keep up with the demand.

As a company seeking to hire an Article Writer, you need to assess as many applicants as possible in a short period of time and find the most fitting candidate before someone else extends them an offer.

To find the one that suits you the best, you need to evaluate and test hundreds of candidates fast.

When we started hiring new people, we posted on Upwork and soon expanded to other job boards. Regardless of the board we used, we always bumped into the same problems:

• Portfolios weren’t representing a candidate’s actual ability
• We couldn’t sort candidates by their status
• Websites had no settings specific for Article Writers

Changing Job Boards Changed Nothing Else

Once we posted ads on dozens of job boards, applications would overflood us from various sources, including email, LinkedIn, Upwork, Indeed, Craigslist, Monster, etc.

No matter what we changed and what board we used, the same issues remained. We couldn’t:

• Keep track of all applications and mark the ones that caught our eye
• Track candidates by status
• Identify and connect with the best applicants fast enough
• Lower the number of bad candidates

It didn’t take us long to realize that it wasn’t the job boards that were the root of our problems—it was our hiring process. We had to take a step back and reevaluate the way we hired new Writers.

A successful SEO campaign was the fruit of our labor and commitment, and that was exactly what lacked in our approach to hiring. We decided to change that and invest time, money, and brainpower into revamping our hiring process.

We came up with an automated hiring funnel—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

We couldn’t revamp our entire hiring process without understanding what it consisted of and what was holding us back. We managed to break down the problem into the following segments:

1. Attracting a million visitors each month required us to write a large number of high-quality articles
2. Writing high-quality articles demanded that we had high-quality Article Writers
3. Finding high-quality Article Writers meant going through hundreds of job applications
4. Hiring the best Writers required sorting out the bad ones quickly
5. Sorting out bad candidates required—what?

We figured out that getting people to apply was something we never struggled with. The problem was dealing with those applications once they arrived.

To handle them properly, we needed an automated system that would simplify the whole process and let us deal with applicants more easily. We needed a system that would:

1. Gather all applications in one place, regardless of where someone finds our ad
2. Allow us to sort candidates by status and move them through the funnel with ease
3. Use a single page to evaluate, test, interview, and hire new Article Writers
4. Send automated writing tests to let us identify poor Writers with great portfolios
5. Automate communication to eliminate human error and manual email correspondence

We first started with Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier, which was an improvement but didn’t fully meet our demands. Still, it allowed us to pinpoint what was missing and create something that would work perfectly.

Writing a Good Job Description Is Half the Battle

Why should you invest time in your job description? Because it’s what makes the difference between a job listing that receives the best candidates and one that receives thousands of unqualified ones.

Unqualified candidates see job ads like moths see lightbulbs. You can’t avoid them. What you can do is use your job description to reduce their number.

To do that, you need to be as specific about the role as possible. Lay out all the responsibilities that the role includes and mention what criteria they need to meet to be able to carry out those responsibilities.

The more detailed you get, the clearer image of the position applicants will have, and many bad candidates will realize there’s no purpose in applying.

Job description’s aim isn’t solely to deter bad applicants. You should use it to promote yourself and show that your company is the right choice for top-performers.

Mention all benefits you offer to your employees, including salary increases, career advancement and learning opportunities, health and pension plans, and so on.

If you can’t think of a good job description or if you’re unsure about what role you need exactly, you can tap into our job description template database and get one for free. When you copy the template, you only need to adapt it slightly to match your company’s needs, and you can post it online!

• Writer
• Copywriter
• Science Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Travel Writer
• Blog Writer
• Technical Writer
• Case Writer
• Lifestyle Writer
• Fashion Writer
• Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Senior Writer
• Political Writer
• Financial Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

In the early days, there was nobody in our agency dedicated to posting job ads on various websites. Our Editors and Content Managers had to deal with it, and while it wasn’t a difficult task, it would take a chunk of the time they could have used to create content.

It wasn’t easy to hire someone new and delegate the job because we had to document the whole hiring process and educate the new employee on everything.

Still, there was no way around it for us, but there is for you! 

When you sign up for Workello for free, you’ll get access to our documentation and you can use it to delegate posting ads to someone else!

One Dashboard for All Job Boards

When you post your ad on various websites, applications start coming in from everywhere, and it becomes chaotic in no time.

With our dashboard and a Workello-hosted application form, those chaotic days are in the past.

Regardless of where a candidate sees your job listing, their application will always end up in your Workello dashboard. Due to using the same form, all applications will be in the same format.

The form’s fields must be filled out before a candidate can submit their application, meaning that they can’t send an application that lacks, say, a resume. Thanks to this, you won’t have to follow up with candidates who left out important information, and you won’t have to keep track of applications.

Here’s what an application can look like.

Watch Candidates Stream In

You can do everything that pertains to the hiring process without leaving your Workello dashboard. The single-page dashboard allows you to evaluate, test, review, invite for an interview, and extend an offer to the perfect Article Writer of your choice.

You can move candidates through the funnel easily by changing their status from the drop-down menu. Use one of the following options:

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

Color-coded statuses give you a clear idea of how many candidates there are in each stage of the hiring process at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Article Writers

When you receive an application, your Editors and Content Managers can access and evaluate it. If they find the candidate unqualified, they can remove them from the funnel by selecting the “Application Rejected” status. Workello will send an email automatically to politely inform the candidate they are no longer in the race.

Thanks to this automation, you won’t have to send emails to candidates manually, and they won’t clog your inbox with messages about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

Having a great application doesn’t mean a candidate is fit for the job. Your Managers can only judge based on the portfolio, but portfolios are often unrealistic—they consist solely of articles that have been heavily edited.

This means you have no idea about the quality of their 1st drafts. To get there, you need to test your candidates.

Our first hiring process didn’t have a testing phase in it. We were gullible enough to hire people based on their resumes and portfolios. It didn’t take long to show how wrong we were.

The articles we received from many Writers were unusable to the point where our Editors had to spend entire days editing or rewriting someone else’s work. We wasted thousands of dollars on unusable content because their authors’ portfolios were impressive.

That’s why we introduced testing.

When your Editors and Managers see a quality application, they can move the applicant to the next phase—automated testing. All they need to do is change their status to “Test Candidate.”

The action will trigger an automated email congratulating the candidate and including the link to the test.

The test will look something like this from the candidate’s point of view:

How To Make a Good Test

When you create a test, you need to address the following aspects of writing:

1. Research skills
2. Article formatting
3. Language proficiency

Your test needs to be complex enough for you to assess how good the candidate is at each segment.

This doesn’t mean you can go overboard and create a convoluted 2,500-word test that would take them an entire workday to complete. Many candidates already have a job and won’t devote that much time to a job they may not get.

A good test is a balance between the complexity of testing and the candidate’s willingness to go through with the test.

That balance shifts toward complexity, thanks to Workello.

When candidates start to receive informational emails every step of the way, they will think of your company as professional and transparent. Such a company is worth doing a more thorough test for.

Don’t know how to write a test? Use ours! Here’s a test we used to hire Article Writers.

Interviewing Candidates

The candidate has a time limit to complete the test. When they submit their work, their status automatically changes to “Test Complete,” and they no longer have access to the test. Instead, your Editors gain access so that they can review the work.

When they finish with the assessment, your Editors can continue with the hiring process by changing the candidate status to:

1. Reject Candidate—The candidate receives an automated email about unsuccessful testing
2. Interview Candidate—The candidate receives an automated email with a Calendly link they can use to schedule a Zoom meeting 

The Candidate Status Page

The Candidate Status page is there to make the whole process transparent. Candidates can access the page to learn about their application statuses and find general information about your entire selection process in the “What to expect next” section.

The page makes the whole process even more efficient because:

• Candidates have all information available to them and don’t have to reach out to you via email
• Your Managers don’t have to waste time replying to candidates’ emails manually
• You will never miss out on a top candidate because you failed to reply on time

You can take a look at the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Thousands of Article Writers use job boards. Top-performing Writers are in the minority, which makes it difficult to hire them.

It may sound like an exaggeration when you have an automated funnel that does everything for you, but we didn’t have that back in the day.

We had to do everything by ourselves, and we struggled every step of the way. We didn’t know how to track applications and had to check each job board individually all the time. Many candidates gave up on us even before we managed to reach out to them.

Our Editors and Managers were hired to produce content, but instead, they had to focus on posting job ads. We couldn’t do it any differently, so we decided to create a system that would allow us to be more efficient. That system allowed us to:

1. Grow our business from 1 to 45+ Writers and Editors in under 2 years
2. Cut our cost of content by 75%
3. Carry out one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever made
4. Let our Content Managers and Editors focus on creating content instead of hiring

You can use the same system now!

Creating Workello cost us countless hours of work and over $100,000, but it was worth it all. You can have it up and running for the price of a single page of content!

Try out Workello for free! It’s pre-configured so that you can start accepting new candidates in less than 3 minutes.

Additional Job Boards To Hire Article Writers

With Workello doing everything for you, there’s no reason to limit yourself to a handful of job boards. You can post your Article Writer ad on the following websites as well:

• FinCon Community
• PeoplePerHour
• Scribewise
• National Association of Hispanic Journalists
• Clarity
• The Writer Finder
• Storyhackers
• Masthead Media
• Freelancer
• Alexis Grant Media
• ContentGrow
• Staffing agencies
• Copify
• Skyword
• Virtual Assistant Finder
• National Association of Science Writers
• Muck Rack
• National Association of Black Journalists
• Society of Professional Journalists
• Pitchwhiz
• CloudPeeps
• Editorial Freelancers Association
• American Society of Journalists and Authors
• Writers Work
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer group
• WriteLife Facebook group
• Zerys
• HireMyMom
• Craigslist
• Certified Writers
• Journalism Jobs
• Scripted
• Pod Reacher
• WriterAccess
• Mediabistro