Hiring Writers Is Hard—We Learned That the Hard Way

We started as Content Distribution, a content agency dedicated to producing top-quality articles and achieving excellent content marketing results. One of our most successful endeavors was an SEO campaign that proved to be one of the greatest SEO projects ever! In only 18 months, our client grew from 0 to 1,000,000 organic website visits per month.

To achieve such incredible success, we had to produce consistently high-quality content and in large quantities. That meant that we had to grow our content team fast. In less than 2 years, we hired 45+ writers and editors. 

But the beginning of our hiring quest was more than shaky. We quickly realized that our hiring process was nowhere near as efficient as we needed it to be. 

We received piles of applications, but we couldn’t go through them fast enough. We couldn’t sort all applicants according to their status in our hiring funnel. Missing great candidates was a regular occurrence. We did everything manually, wasted tremendous amounts of time, while many of the tasks could have been easily automated. 

We had to change something, and we had to do it immediately. This impossible situation motivated us to develop an automated hiring funnel that cost us thousands of hours of work and over $100,000. But it was the best investment we have ever made.

In the next 10 minutes, you’ll find out:

1. How to find qualified and affordable brief writers
2. What makes hiring brief writers hard
3. How to use automation to evaluate more candidates and test them efficiently

Top 15 Job Boards Where You Can Hire Brief Writers

The following 15 job boards are our top picks for hiring brief writers:

Why Is It Hard To Hire Brief Writers

The best candidates get hired quickly—that’s how it is in every field. No matter which job boards you use, you will quickly realize that they can’t source good writers fast enough to keep up with the ever-increasing demand. 

The biggest issue you will face when hiring brief writers is that most of the applicants will be unqualified. To find one top-performer, you will have to review dozens of applications. If you want to hire them before someone else gets the chance, you will have to go over those applications quickly. 

Without a proper system in place, you are unlikely to succeed. 

When we started hiring writers “in bulk,” we only used Upwork. Then, we expanded our search to other job boards hoping to improve our chances of finding a qualified writer faster. But we only ran into more problems:

• We received hundreds of applications, scattered across a dozen different job boards
• We still had no way to keep track of all candidates and know where they were in our hiring funnel
• Most candidates were still unqualified, and we couldn’t filter them out fast enough

It quickly became apparent that the source of our problems was not job boards but our inefficient hiring system. 

We realized that we were so successful with our content marketing projects because we invested a lot of effort and resources in creating high-quality articles. But we didn’t spend more than a couple hundred dollars in optimizing our hiring funnel. 

We knew that had to change, so we directed time, money, and brainpower in developing an automated hiring system. That system is now Workello!

Use Pre-Hire Testing To Find the Best Writer

Regardless of what job boards you advertise on, you’ll always end up with more unqualified candidates than top ones. No applicant will admit they don’t know what they’re doing, and their portfolios will inevitably paint a positive story.

If you don’t want to hire someone and discover they’re underqualified the hard way, you need to enhance your hiring process and introduce pre-hire testing.

Tests will let you gauge the candidates’ writing quality first-hand. The issue is—with hundreds of applicants to deal with, you’ll quickly lose control and won’t know where in the funnel each candidate is. You need skill assessment software to sort that out for you. 

Workello automates the entire hiring process and provides support for hassle-free testing. You only need to create a free account and:

1. Set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes with the pre-configured settings
2. Add a Workello link to all your job ads (existing or new)
3. Wait for applications to arrive
4. Send tests to filter out poor candidates with impressive portfolios
5. Interview, reject, and hire candidates from your dashboard

Streamline Your Candidate Assessment Process With Workello

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that will help you set up your job post, assess candidates, send and log tests, and review them. You’ll be able to reject candidates, invite them for an interview, and extend offers without ever leaving your dashboard.

Workello can help you test content writers, regardless of your specific needs. With our pre-hire assessment software, you can test copywriters, SEO copywriters, SEO writers, and technical writers. Need to fill other roles on your content team? Test content marketers and related roles in Workello effortlessly.

Sign up for Workello for free and streamline your hiring process effortlessly.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

If we wanted to transform our hiring process, we needed to understand what was causing us trouble. We broke down the problem into the following elements:

1. Attracting large numbers of website visitors requires huge amounts of consistently high-quality content
2. Creating high-quality content is only possible with high-quality writers
3. Identifying high-quality writers requires reviewing hundreds of applications
4. Hiring top-performers necessitates filtering out bad candidates fast
5. Filtering out bad candidates requires us to do what?

It was evident that getting people to send us their applications was never a problem. Not having a functioning system to handle those applications was. 

We set down and listed the features of an ideal hiring system that would allow us to deal with all the applications efficiently. It needed to:

1. Compile all applications in one place, regardless of where a candidate applied
2. Allow us to sort candidates according to their application status and move them through our hiring funnel easily
3. Enable us to evaluate, test, interview, and hire new writers from a single page
4. Send writing tests automatically so we can identify poor writers with fantastic portfolios
5. Automate email communication to improve efficiency and eliminate human error

We first started with Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier combination. It was a step in the right direction but needed more work. It was a great starting point that enabled us to identify our biggest issues and figure out ways to overcome them.

A Good Job Description Is Half the Battle

You will always receive applications from unqualified candidates—that’s a given. Many candidates find writing jobs attractive because they are remote. They also believe that this is something they can do easily. Often, these candidates lack fundamental knowledge of the English language, let alone adequate writing skills. 

Although you can’t avoid bad candidates, you can significantly reduce their number by investing time in writing a killer job description. That way, you will also attract the best candidates.  

You can do that by being specific about the role as much as possible. List all the responsibilities that the position involves and specify the criteria that candidates must meet to be successful in that role. 

The more details you give, the better picture of the job candidates will get, and bad applicants will understand that there is no point in submitting their resumes. 

You can also use your job ad to promote your company and motivate the best candidates to choose you over your competition. To do that, you should include the benefits they would get from working for you. Mention the bonuses, potential salary increases, learning opportunities, career advancement, paid time off, health plans, and other perks. 

How To Write a Job Ad for Brief Writers

It is crucial you specify exactly what type of briefs candidates can expect to write—legal or creative briefs. 

These two types of briefs require completely different sets of skills. For legal briefs, you will need a person with appropriate educational background and knowledge of legal terminology and style. 

Creative briefs need to be concrete, concise, and precise so teams know how to execute particular projects. So, you will need a writer capable of outlining the specifics of the project in a clear and concise manner.

If you can’t figure out how to compose a good job description or you are unsure what role you need precisely, you can take a look at our extensive job description template database. They are completely free, so you can click on the one you need, modify it to suit your needs, and post it on job boards you use. 

Here are some examples:

• Writer
• Copywriter
• Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Blog Writer
• Technical Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Legal Writer
• Law Firm Content Writer
• Creative Writer for Entertainment
• Lifestyle Writer
• Science Writer
• Business Writer
• Case Writer
• Financial Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started hiring writers, there was no person in our company dedicated to posting job ads and evaluating incoming applications. Our editors and content managers had to deal with these tasks. It was simple enough, but it took them a lot of time, and their primary responsibilities began to suffer.

Hiring someone new and delegating ad posting to them wasn’t easy because we had to document our hiring process and train the new employee. 

We went through this challenging and time-consuming process, but you don’t have to!

When you register with Workello for free, you’ll get access to our playbooks, and you can use them to delegate posting ads to someone else!

Multiple Job Boards and Only One Dashboard

Without Workello, you post your ad on many websites, applications start streaming in from all sides, and everything turns into chaos in no time!

With Workello, you post your ad on as many websites as you like, and all applications come to your dashboard in an orderly manner. That’s because you will include a link to a Workello-hosted application form in your ad. The days of chaos and despair become a thing of the past!

What’s more, because all the applicants will use the same form, all the submissions will be uniform, and you won’t have to bother with incomplete applications ever again.

Check out what an application form looks like.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Every single step of your hiring process you can do without ever leaving your Workello dashboard. From there, you can evaluate, test, review, reject, invite for interviews, and extend offers.

All you need to do to move candidates through your hiring funnel is select an appropriate application status from a drop-down menu. You will have 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

There is a cherry on top, too. Each status is color-coded, which allows you to have a clear picture of how many candidates there are in each stage of your hiring process instantly.

Reject Unqualified Article Writers

Once applications start coming in, your editors or content managers can immediately decide whether candidates meet your basic requirements. If they find a candidate unqualified, they can select the “Application Rejected” option and remove them from the funnel. 

Upon this action, Workello will automatically send an email to politely inform the candidate that you won’t be considering them. 

Point, Click, Test

You will receive many incredible applications and great portfolios, but you mustn’t jump to conclusions and think you have found perfect candidates. A portfolio tells you only so much, and they are often not an accurate demonstration of candidates’ skills. 

It’s only natural that candidates will select the best articles to put in their portfolios. After all, that is the way to promote themselves. But in many cases, these articles have gone through many rounds of editing and tell you nothing about a candidate’s first-draft capabilities. 

The only way to see what candidates’ first drafts would look like is to test them. 

When we first started hiring writers, we didn’t test them. We trusted the portfolios. Our gullibility came back to bite us many times. 

We paid for many unusable articles, our editors wasted some more time making them decent, and we were back to square one—a new hiring cycle.

So we introduced testing. 

When your editors see a good application, they can move the candidate to the testing stage of your hiring process. They will choose the “Test Candidate” status, and Workello will send the writing test automatically, along with the necessary instructions. 

This is what the test will look like:

How To Make a Good Test

You need to design a test so it can check a candidate’s:

1. Research skills
2. Formatting skills 
3. Language proficiency
4. Knowledge of the necessary terminology

Your test should be detailed and complex enough to enable you to assess each of these aspects. However, you mustn’t take it too far and expect that a candidate produces a 2,500-word brief. It would take them an entire working day to complete it, and you have to consider that many of the candidates already have jobs. 

Plus, how many do you think would be willing to invest so much time and effort for a job they might not even get?

A good test is a perfect balance of thoroughness and a candidate’s willingness to complete it. 

And you can influence candidates’ willingness a bit by doing everything right up to this phase. If candidates read an informative ad which led them to apply and then received emails with all the necessary information without having to contact you first, you will come across as professional and transparent. 

These are the qualities that the best candidates will value, and it will signal to them that your company is worth investing a bit more effort. 

With email automation, Workello helps you achieve transparency and efficient communication. 

If you don’t know how to write a test, why not use ours? Here’s a test we used to scale our content team.

Interviewing Candidates

Once candidates submit completed tests, their status will automatically change to “Test Complete.” That will be the signal for your editors to review the test articles. 

Depending on how well a candidate did, your editors can choose to:

1. Reject Candidate—The candidate receives an automated rejection email 
2. Interview Candidate—The candidate receives an automated email with a Calendly link and instructions to schedule a video meeting 

The Candidate Status Page

We implemented a Candidate Status page to improve transparency and prevent candidates from sending transactional questions, such as:

• Have you received my applications?
• What are the next steps?
• When can I expect to hear from you?

A Candidate Status page is where applicants can find all the information about your hiring process, so they always know what to expect next. This page will also show them their application status. 

This feature will ensure you never lose another great candidate due to inefficient communication or waste time responding to candidates’ emails manually.

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

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Countless writers use job boards to find work, but the good ones are scarce. That’s what makes it difficult to hire brief writers. 

Now we have an automated hiring funnel that does a lot of the work for us. But when we first started hiring writers, we ran into problems every step of the way:

• We didn’t have a way to track where candidates were in our hiring funnel
• We had to check every single job board we used manually
• Many candidates got hired by someone else by the time we managed to follow up with them
• Our editors and content managers focused on posting job ads instead of what they were hired to do —create content

There was nothing on the market that would solve all of our problems at once, so we had to make it ourselves.

And we did—we designed a system that allowed us to:

1. Grow our content team from 1 to 45+ members in under 2 years
2. Cut our content costs by 75%
3. Run one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever
4. Let our editors and content managers do their jobs

We spent countless hours working, carried our limitless iterations, invested over $100,000 to create Workello, and it was all well worth it! For the price of a single article, you can get that hiring system and streamline your hiring process. 

Try out Workello now for free! It’s pre-configured, so you can start accepting new candidates in under 3 minutes.