Going From 1 to 45+ Employees in Just 18 Months—Here’s How We Did It

In 2019, ContentDistribution was a small, but ambitious content agency. When we took on one of the largest SEO projects in our careers, we only had a single writer in our team.

Fast forward two years, our client grew from 0 to 1,500,000 organic visitors monthly, and we were at the helm of one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time.

To achieve such rapid growth, we committed to publishing 600+ pages of high-quality content every month. This required us to grow our team from 1 to 45+ writers, editors, and content marketers in record time.

Back then, we thought posting a job ad on a few job boards was all the work that was necessary to hire a content marketer. Our naivety came back to bite us big time.

Applications would start coming our way from various sources, and we had no way of logging and tracking them efficiently. Candidates would submit incomplete applications, their portfolios would be poorly formatted, we had to manually follow up with each candidate, and we wasted so much time on repetitive, dull tasks. Everything was disorganized, and it felt like we were stuck in a never-ending hiring cycle. 

It was obvious that our hiring system didn’t work. We wasted time and energy on completing menial tasks that could have been automated.

That’s why we decided to completely revamp it. After countless hours and over $100,000+ invested, we created Workello—a fully-automated hiring funnel dedicated to hiring content marketers and writers.

Read on to discover:

1. Where you can find content marketers online
2. Why you need automation if you want to hire the best content marketers
3. Why you should hire a content marketer only after testing their skills

Finding Content Marketers—Top 15 Job Boards

We searched content marketers on dozens of job boards and decided to share with you what we found out. Here are the pros and cons of our top 15 job boards for hiring content marketers:

Why Is Hiring a Content Marketer So Incredibly Difficult

Content marketing is a booming industry, and companies of all shapes and sizes are hiring writers and content marketers to improve their online visibility and drive organic traffic to their websites. 

The trouble with the popularity of content marketing is that a lot of inexperienced people see it as an opportunity to build a lucrative career. As a result, when you post a job ad, you will get swarmed with applications from candidates who are nowhere near being qualified for the job.

The average number of candidates reviewed before hiring a content marketer is in the hundreds. You will need to sift through so many applications to find the candidate that suits your organization perfectly. 

The trouble is, dozens of other companies are looking for a skilled, experienced professional for the same role, so you must be swift in your selection process.

We initially used only Upwork but soon expanded to multiple other hiring platforms. Dealing with applications was made even tougher because:

• Websites didn’t have any features to optimize hiring content marketers
• We couldn’t sort candidates by their status in our hiring funnel
• Portfolios we received didn’t represent a candidate’s actual skill level

Aside from tapping into a larger talent pool, the main reason for posting ads on many different job boards was to see if there’s a difference in candidate quality between different hiring platforms.

We started receiving applications from LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, Craigslist, and so on, but none of the issues disappeared. Regardless of the website, we could never:

• Keep track of applications
• Sort candidates by their application status in our hiring funnel
• Highlight candidates that seemed promising at first
• Reach out to candidates that showed promise before it was too late
• Reduce the number of bad applicants

We looked for solutions online, but none could solve all these problems at once. We realized that if we wanted perfection, we had to create our own hiring funnel, optimized for hiring writers, editors, and content marketers. That’s how we started working on Workello.

Don’t Hire a Content Manager Before You Test Their Skills

When you’re hiring for a senior content management role—whether it’s a content director, head of content, content manager, or content strategist or publisher—you’ll be faced with a specific recruitment dilemma. Chances are most of your applicants will submit portfolios with impressive lists of content campaigns they worked on. How can you tell what their contribution to the successes of those campaigns was?

You can’t know for certain by looking at their CV. The only way to know how skilled they actually are is to test them even before you spend time interviewing them.

When you have tens or hundreds of applicants, testing each one quickly becomes impossible to manage unless you have skill assessment software. Workello removes the issue of having to send and store tests manually by automating the entire process and keeping everything organized. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for free and create your hiring funnel with our pre-configured settings in under 3 minutes
2. Create your Workello job ad and use the link to post on as many job boards
3. Wait for applications to start showing up in your single-page dashboard
4. Test candidates to assess their skills 
5. Use the dashboard to assess, reject, and interview candidates and send an offer to the best one

Speed Up the Testing Phase and Hire the Top 1% Candidates With Workello

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that automates the entire hiring process. You can use the dashboard to assess, test, interview, and reject candidates. All you need to do is change their application status. 

Besides content managers, you can use the platform to test content marketers and other content team members, such as technical writers, copywriters, and content writers. If your SEO team needs new members, you can also test SEO writers and SEO copywriters.

Sign up for free and enjoy the fastest and most efficient pre-employment assessment process with Workello.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Before we could work on a system that would optimize our hiring process, we needed to understand what the root cause of the problem was. We broke down our process into five steps:

1. Driving tons of organic traffic to our clients’ websites require publishing large volumes of top-quality content
2. Executing a successful SEO strategy isn’t just about writing articles—you need an experienced content marketer 
3. Finding a singled top-performing content marketer means evaluating dozens of applications
4. Determining what candidate is the best fit for our organization is only possible if we filter our all unqualified candidates fast and interview the good ones
5. Filtering out unqualified candidates efficiently was what we didn’t have an answer for

The issue was not that we didn’t get enough applications—the core of the problem was the fact that we didn’t know what to do with them once they arrived. We needed an efficient way to log applications, screen dozens of portfolios, keep track of where everyone is in our hiring funnel, and follow-up with the most promising content marketer candidates.

We wanted a robust solution that would streamline every aspect of hiring content marketers. We wrote down all of the features that our new hiring system had to have:

1. A unified platform that collects all applications from every website you post an ad on
2. An optimized system that allows you to easily sort candidates by their application status in the hiring funnel
3. A single dashboard to evaluate, test, interview, and hire content marketers
4. A built-in testing feature that allows you to spot bad marketers with impressive portfolios
5. Automated email correspondence that removes the chance of human error and ensures candidates are notified of their application status changes instantly

The first iteration of the new process was a mix of Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was a step in the right direction, but it was still miles away from the ideal hiring funnel we had envisioned.

Before the Process Starts—Why Job Descriptions Are Important

No matter what you do, you will never be able to avoid unqualified candidates completely, but a well-written job description can help you drop their number significantly.

When you write a job description, you need to go into detail about the role you’re offering. This is especially true for content marketers, which is a position that differs widely from one company to another.

You should specify every responsibility that the role entails, as well as all requirements you want your candidates to meet. This will not only give a clearer idea of the role you’re offering, it will also deter unqualified candidates. The more detailed you get, the more obvious it will become that they won’t meet the cut, and many won’t even apply.

As your job description is the only way to communicate with your candidates, you should use it to sell your company and attract top-performing candidates. List any benefits you offer to your employees, such as career advancement opportunities, salary increases, bonuses, health plans, and so on.

Don’t know how to write a killer content marketer job description that will draw the attention of the best candidates? You can use our free, pre-made Content Marketing Specialist job description template! All you need to do is slightly adapt it to the responsibilities and requirements of the role in your organization and post it on any job board you like.

If you’re building your content team for the first time, check out our job description templates for similar roles:

• Content Marketing Manager
• Content Marketing Strategist
• Senior Content Marketing Manager
• Senior Web Content Manager
• Content Manager
• SEO Content Manager
• Content Manager B2B
• Content Operations Manager
• Content Marketing Associate
• Social Media Content Manager

See All Applications in a Single, Unified Dashboard

With Workello, whenever someone applies for the position in your company, regardless of where a candidate finds your job ad on, you’ll instantly see their application in your unique Workello dashboard. 

All you need to do is include a link to a Workello-hosted application form in your job ad. This ensures that every application is complete and uniform, and completely eliminates the need to check dozens of job boards every week and log applications manually.

Check out an application form example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Once applications start popping up in your Workello dashboard, you can conduct your entire hiring process through the same page. Our dashboard allows you to evaluate, test, and invite candidates to an interview, as well as extend an offer once you select someone for the job.

To move candidates through your hiring funnel like this, you only need to change their candidate status by choosing the appropriate option from the drop-down menu. Options include:

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

With every status color-coded, you’ll be able to glance at your dashboard and figure out instantly how many candidates are in each stage of your hiring funnel.

Reject Unqualified Content Marketers

The first step in the hiring process is evaluating applications you receive. When your recruiter/hiring manager assesses an application, they will be able to tell whether someone’s good enough to go to the testing phase or if the testing is unnecessary.

If the candidate doesn’t meet your minimum hiring criteria, you can remove them from the funnel by changing the candidate status to “Application Rejected.”

This change triggers an automated email Workello will send to the candidate, informing them politely that they failed to reach the next stage in the selection process.

With such email automation, your managers won’t have to notify applicants manually, and candidates won’t spam your HR department with emails about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

When a candidate passes the initial evaluation, it’s time to test them.

The testing phase is crucial for finding a top-notch marketer, because portfolios are rarely an accurate representation of someone’s skills. They’ll include only the most successful SEO projects, but dozens of variables impact the success of an SEO campaign, so it’s difficult to discern how big of an impact they had as individuals.

Marketers work closely with content managers and other marketing people, and you won’t be able to determine your candidate’s ability to develop a strategy or generate new leads without figuring out how they think.

If you think testing is redundant, you’re not alone—we thought so too! In the beginning, we hired people based on their portfolios and assumed they would be able to reach the same numbers with us. We were incredibly wrong.

The first few marketers we hired failed to generate any significant leads. Their content guidelines didn’t match our clients’ brand voices.

Our writers and editors worked on content that wasn’t ranking and didn’t generate any visitors, and we ended up wasting thousands of dollars on content that simply didn’t yield results.

This all changed once we introduced automated testing.

When your managers evaluate an application and find it good enough, they can change the candidate status to “Test Candidate.” This triggers an email that congratulates the candidate on reaching the testing phase and includes a link to the test.

Here’s how a test for writers looks like once candidates click on the link:

How To Make a Good Test

A good test needs to balance out thoroughness and the candidates’ willingness to complete it.

There’s little use in making a complex test that would challenge them in every way possible if nobody goes ahead and completes it. Most candidates won’t have the motivation to take a test that takes them a whole day to finish and will start looking for a job elsewhere.

Still, that doesn’t mean your test should be a walk in the park—you must assess their knowledge and experience to see if they fit your company’s needs.

A content marketer test should challenge the candidate on the responsibilities that they will have to carry out daily—these differ from company to company. If you want your marketer to create content, you should test their knowledge of English.

If the role you’re offering focuses on lead generation and developing an SEO strategy, you should come up with a scenario and ask your candidates to describe their preferred course of action. Ask them about how they approach developing a strategy, how they turn a lead into a customer, and so on.

Luckily, using Workello allows you to go into more depth and create a more demanding test. This is thanks to the professionalism and transparency Workello provides you with. When they apply, candidates will receive an email every time there’s a change in their application status, and they will have all the information they need.

This will show the candidates they matter to you, and they will gladly put some extra effort in for a company that values them.

See how you can set up a test with Workello in under 3 minutes!

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate completes the test, Workello will automatically change their status to “Test Complete.”

This will allow your managers to take a look at their test and review it. When they finish assessing the applicant’s abilities, they can change the candidate status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Sends an automated email that informs the candidate that they failed the test
2. Invite for Interview—Sends an automated email with a Calendly link they can use to schedule a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

Workello makes everything easy for candidates as well. Your applicants can assess the Candidate Status page and find all the necessary information about their application status there.

The page also includes a “What to expect next” section that contains general information about your selection process so that they know how many more steps they need to take before they get the job.

The Candidate Status page eliminates the need for candidates to contact you and ask about information on their application status, and you won’t have to worry about missing out on a top candidate because you didn’t respond to a message they sent.

Check out the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

There are thousands of content marketers out there, but only a fraction of them are good. Finding the best ones becomes easy when you have an automated hiring funnel at your side. We didn’t have that.

When we began looking for new people, hundreds of applications would flood us from multiple job boards. We had no means of keeping track of them and struggled to reach out to candidates in a week’s time. In that time, most top-performing candidates would find a job elsewhere or would grow disinterested in our company.

Our content managers had to put content production aside for a couple of hours each day so they could post job listings on various job boards. Our whole business model suffered because of our hiring process.

We invested $100,000+ and years of work into creating Workello, and now, this fully-automated hiring funnel could be yours for the price of a single page of content!

Thanks to Workello, we managed to:

1. Grow our business from 1 to 45+ employees in under 2 years
2. Cut the cost of content by 75%
3. Work on one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns of all time
4. Allow our content managers to focus on their job instead of hiring future coworkers

Now, you can replicate our success!Try out Workello for free! We pre-configured it so that you can start accepting new candidates in under 3 minutes.