Finding and Hiring a Skilled B2B Technical Writer Is Hard—Discover How We Scaled Our Team In Under 18 Months!

Before we created Workello, we were a small, ambitious content company known as ContentDistribution.com. Back in 2019, we took on a client project that required us to grow their organic site traffic from 0 to 1,500,000+ monthly visitors.

The project was a huge success, and we eventually went on to lead one of the most accomplished SEO campaigns ever. Still, this wouldn’t have been possible with one or two writers and editors. To successfully grow our project, it was necessary to scale our team from 1 to 45+ people at a rapid pace.

At the time, we didn’t have a dedicated recruiting officer, and everything—from posting ads to reviewing resumes and sending out tests—had to be performed manually. This turned out to be a slow, expensive, tedious process. 

Candidates would send in poorly-formatted portfolios—often in Word—which we had no means of verifying. We had difficulties tracking where candidates were in our hiring funnel, filtering out unqualified ones, and keeping in touch with the most promising writers. To make matters worse, our content managers and content editors had to set aside valuable time for tedious, repetitive tasks that could easily be automated.

Our entire hiring process was chaotic, and there wasn’t a single solution on the market that could fix all our problems. That’s when we decided to do something about it with a more hands-on approach.

After pouring $100,000+ and numerous work hours into R&D, we finally had the solution we so desperately sought—a fine-tuned system specifically designed for hiring writers, called Workello.

When we first started out, we struggled a lot with every aspect of the hiring process, but with Workello—now, you don’t have to! This article will show you:

• Which job boards to visit to hire B2B content marketing technical writers who can meet your business needs
• Why you need to thoroughly test and assess each candidate before extending a job offer
• How setting up Workello’s automated hiring funnel can help you find and recruit a top-performing employee in record time

Top 15 Job Boards To Hire B2B Content Marketing Technical Writers

The list below gives you an overview of some of our favorite job boards for hiring B2B content marketing technical writers:

What Makes It Difficult To Hire B2B Content Marketing Technical Writers With Sufficient Expertise in the Role

Building a team of talented writers is extremely difficult. The market is oversaturated with mediocre writers, and all the good ones are instantly snapped up by successful companies like ours. 

Hiring B2B content marketing technical writers is even more of a challenge, considering the specialized technical knowledge required to write valuable B2B content. These experts are an invaluable asset to every B2B business since they are responsible for creating vital technical documents like datasheets, product specifications, white papers, and case studies. You might have a solid copywriting strategy, but to successfully retain B2B buyers and grow your customer base—you need the proper technical documentation.

For these reasons, top-performing B2B content marketing technical writers are in high demand. Consequently, most job boards are quickly left teeming with hundreds of unqualified candidates with little experience in the B2B content industry.

The hiring process is a constant race with other companies. To get the most proficient candidates before the competition, you need to be quick—which means testing, evaluating, and interviewing dozens of candidates as fast as possible.

The Fundamental Hiring Issues

We used only Upwork at the start of our hiring spree—though we soon included other platforms as well. We immediately started encountering problems, and some of the most persistent ones included:

• Job boards didn’t have the features necessary for finding and hiring B2B technical writers
• We couldn’t efficiently sort candidates by their application status in our hiring funnel
• We received hundreds of great portfolios from unqualified writers, which didn’t accurately reflect their technical writing capabilities
• It was impossible to quickly and efficiently filter out bad candidates
• We had to manually respond to each transactional email

There were some patchwork solutions online, but none of them could resolve all our hiring issues simultaneously. 

If we wanted a robust, comprehensive hiring system fine-tuned for finding and recruiting editors, content writers, and technical writers—we had to create it ourselves. That’s when we began working on developing Workello.

Why You Should Test Technical Content Professionals Before Hiring Them

Hiring skilled members for your content team has never been an easy task, but the challenge is even bigger if you’re looking for an experienced technical writer or editor. It’s easy for candidates to amp up their resumes and portfolios with niche-specific samples that have been heavily edited by third-party collaborators, and you’ll be none the wiser about the quality of their work until you hire them. The only way to gauge their actual skills is to add pre-employment assessments to your hiring process.

Testing candidates is impossible without skill assessment software to keep everything organized and under control. Without it, you’ll have to communicate with candidates, send tests, collect and grade them, and keep track of what stage of the hiring process each candidate is in.

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that takes care of the entire process for you. After you sign up for free, you’ll find the perfect candidate by taking the following steps:

1. Launch your pre-configured hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Add a Workello link to your job postings on all job boards you use
3. Wait for applications to come your way
4. Send tests to applicants to test their technical writing skills
5. Reject, interview, and hire candidates from your single-page dashboard

Test Candidates for Technical Roles Effortlessly With Workello

You can use Workello to test technical writers in any industry. The platform is not for technical writing only—you can use it to test content writers and SEO writers as well. With Workello, you can manage candidates through the entire selection process without ever leaving your dashboard. Use Workello’s free trial to sign up and see for yourself how fast you will identify the top 1% of technical writer candidates.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Before we could improve our hiring system, we had to intimately understand all the problems that plagued it. To do that, we broke down our process into discrete elements and carefully analyzed each one:

1. To boost our client’s organic site traffic, we had to create, edit, and publish high volumes of top-quality content
2. To accomplish that, we needed talented, high-achieving content writers and editors
3. To find even a single knowledgeable, experienced candidate, we would have to assess hundreds of applications in short order
4. To determine which applicants were the best fit for our business, we had to thoroughly test and evaluate each one
5. Our outdated system lacked the means to efficiently spot and filter out candidates who fail to meet our hiring standards

Receiving enough applications was never a problem—we’d post ads online, and interested parties would send in their resumes. The problems would begin once the applications arrived. 

It took us too much time and manual effort to properly log applications, screen candidates, and keep track of the most promising applicants. We knew there had to be a better, more efficient, streamlined way to conduct the hiring process.

Our Ideal Hiring Solution

We needed a robust hiring solution designed specifically to help content agencies recruit skilled writers. Below is a list of all the features our new system had to possess:

1. A unified platform that would gather all applications regardless of their source
2. A candidate sorting functionality that would allow us to easily categorize applications by their application status in our hiring funnel
3. An all-in-one dashboard with options for assessing, testing, scheduling interviews, and extending job offers
4. Streamlined testing features that would let us easily spot and filter out subpar candidates with shining portfolios
5. An automated email communication system that would regularly update candidates on any changes to their application status while reducing the risk of human error

Our first iteration relied on a combination of Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was a good start, but Workello would come only after countless additional iterations, tweaks, and incremental improvements.

A Detailed Job Description Is Indispensable For Finding a Technical Writer With Experience In B2B Content Marketing

No matter the hiring platform you use, you’ll invariably find many more subpar technical writers than top-performing B2B experts. That’s said, an in-depth job description can help you keep the number of unqualified applicants to a minimum.

To dissuade subpar candidates from applying for your ad, you need to go into as much detail as possible about the requirements and responsibilities of a B2B technical writer in your company.

It is imperative that you specify the scope of their daily tasks, who they’ll report to, and whether they’ll have any supervisory duties. Also, clarify the necessary work experience, level of education, technical skills, as well as industry-specific knowledge required to perform in the role successfully. The latter is especially important, as a B2B technical writer who’s intimately familiar with cryptocurrency, for instance, might know next to nothing about other content niches, such as software or entrepreneurship.

Since the job description is the first point of contact you’ll have with prospective candidates, you should also use it as an opportunity to “sell” your brand to high-achieving B2B technical writers. 

List out the perks and benefits they’ll enjoy as your employees, such as your insurance plan, PTO, yearly/monthly bonuses, possible raises, and career advancement opportunities. Expert B2B technical writers appreciate transparency and openness, and will recognize you as a serious, professional company. In turn, this will make them more likely to apply with you instead of a competitor.

If you’re facing difficulties while composing your job ad—or if you need more info on the role—you can use our extensive knowledge base to find a suitable technical writer job description template. Take one, customize it according to your company’s specific needs, and you’re ready to post it online!

• Technical Writer
• Technical Writer II
• Technical Writer III
• Technical Writing Consultant
• Quality Assurance Technical writer
• Technical Writing Manager
• Junior Technical Writer
• Senior Technical Writer
• Technical Writer and Editor
• Technical Writer Intern
• Technical Writer in Healthcare
• Technical Writer for Cyber Security

A Single Place To View All Your Applications—Your Workello Dashboard

Regardless of where a candidate finds your ad, their application will immediately get forwarded to your Workello dashboard. You only have to include the link to your unique Workello-hosted application form in your job ad.

This form ensures consistency across all applications you receive. Each one will arrive in the same format, and you’ll no longer get unfinished submissions that lack crucial candidate information.

You can check out an example of this application form here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Once candidates start entering your funnel, you can use the Workello dashboard to conduct every aspect of the hiring process. It includes functionalities for evaluating resumes, sending tests, inviting candidates to interview, and ultimately extending a job offer to the most experienced B2B technical writer.

It’s easy to move applicants from one stage of the hiring funnel to the next. To change their status, you only have to select the corresponding option from the drop-down menu. There are 7 statuses in total:

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

Also, every status is color-coded, which means you can tell at a glance how many candidates you have at which stage of the hiring funnel.

Reject Unqualified B2B Content Marketing Technical Writers

When an application arrives, your managers and editors can immediately review it. If it’s apparent that a candidate doesn’t have the necessary skills and experience, you can immediately remove them from the hiring funnel by updating their status to Application Rejected.

This option triggers an automatic rejection email, politely informing the candidate that they will not be progressing to the next stage of the selection process.

Our automated communications remove the need to manually inform candidates about application status changes. You also don’t need to worry about answering hundreds of emails from candidates on the waiting list.

Point, Click, Test

Just because a candidate has passed the initial screening doesn’t mean you should offer them the job without a second thought. Though their portfolio might seem good on paper, you can’t know if it accurately represents their real skills and capabilities.

Any candidate can have their portfolio brushed up and polished by a third party. Also, technical writers typically include only the finest examples of their work—and you need to see what their average is like. 

To get a precise measure of their actual abilities, you need to put them to the test.

One of our biggest early mistakes was not having any sort of testing system in place. We would hire writers based solely on their portfolios, naively believing that the candidates were as good as they promised.

The writers we hired produced subpar content that had to be revised extensively. In some cases, our editors had to rewrite long-form articles from scratch. This added even more burdens to our editors’ busy work schedule. All the while, our business was getting nowhere, as we had to constantly cycle new employees—hoping they would do better than our previous writers.

We eventually turned the situation around by implementing a testing system. To test a candidate with Workello, click the Test Candidate option, which sends an automated email to the chosen candidate:

• Congratulating them on successfully passing the initial evaluation
• Giving them a link to the writing assignment
• Providing them with clear-cut instructions on how to complete it

Once a candidate opens the link, they will be shown a page resembling this one:

How To Make a Good Test

To see if a B2B content marketing technical writer’s skills are up to your company’s hiring standards, you need to test them for:

1. Language proficiency
2. Research skills
3. Industry-specific knowledge
4. Ability to present technical information in an easy-to-understand manner

The assignment should be thorough enough to let you estimate their skills but not unnecessarily long or demanding. Even top-notch technical writers won’t agree to write a 3,000+ word case study on a company they don’t even work in!

Candidates will respect you more if you value their time as much as their own. They’ll have more of an incentive to complete even a longer assignment once they see you’re updating them regularly on their progress.

Here’s how you can set up your own test in Workello in under 5 minutes!

Interviewing Candidates

Once a candidate turns in the completed test, Workello automatically updates their status to Test Complete.

Now, your editors and content managers can properly review it. When they are done with the assessment, you can further update a candidate’s status to to: 

• Reject Candidate—Triggers an automated message notifying the candidate that they have not passed the written test

• Invite for Interview—Triggers an automated message congratulating them on passing the test and inviting them to set up an interview via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

With Workello, your candidates have a convenient way to stay informed about their application status without having to reach out to your HR department. All the details they require can be found on our Candidate Status page.

This page also has a “What to expect next” section that provides them with useful information for each successive step in your hiring funnel.

Take a look at the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investments Paid Off Big Time

It’s easy to find and hire B2B content marketing technical writers when your hiring system is streamlined and fully-automated. When we began scaling our team, we had to start from scratch.

Myriads of applications would stream into our hiring funnel from dozens of different websites—and we had no means of tracking them effectively. We struggled to maintain contact with candidates who had shown promise. Consequently, many of them grew disinterested, or left to find employment at another company.

Our content managers and editors were taking more and more time off from their primary duties to post ads and test candidates. This sent our content production into a downward spiral, and business suffered. 

There seemed to be no end to our troubles—so we decided to take matters into our own hands. We invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and spent dozens of days on R&D—all so we might find a satisfactory solution. That solution was Workello!

Our new, fine-tuned system allowed us to:

1. Scale our company from 1 to 45+ writers and editors in under 18 months
2. Decrease the costs of producing content by a staggering 75%
3. Lead one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns of all time
4. Let our managers and editors focus on their primary duties instead of part-timing a recruiting role

Register for Workello for free! Everything is pre-configured—you only need to log in, and you can start reviewing B2B technical writers in less than 3 minutes!