Hiring Any Writers Is Tough—But You Can Learn From Our Mistakes

Before we created Workello, we were Content Distribution, a successful content agency, dedicated to producing excellent-quality content. With a team of talented writers and editors, we ran one of the biggest SEO campaigns ever. We took a client from 0 to 1,000,000 organic visitors per month in just 18 months!

As our company grew, we needed to create more content, and that meant finding more great content writers. 

In less than two years, we managed to hire over 45 highly competent writers. But it didn’t happen without a hitch. We faced a lot of troubles before we learned what we needed to do.

During those turbulent times, we quickly realized that our approach to hiring was all wrong. 

To find one great writer, it is necessary to evaluate dozens. That’s a given. But when you have to move candidates through your hiring funnel manually, the entire process becomes a disorganized mess. Our editors and content managers did most of the legwork, which took a toll on what they were actually supposed to be doing—producing content. 

The problems were many. We received applications through different channels—emails, DMs scattered across numerous platforms, etc. Many candidates sent their portfolios as Word documents. The applications were inconsistent and many lacked information that would let us adequately evaluate candidates. We couldn’t keep track of where candidates were in our hiring funnel. And we had to tackle all that manually.

Thousands of hours and over $100,000 later, we are armed with a highly efficient, automated, and optimized hiring system. It allows us to hire fantastic content writers fast. 

You can have such a helpful tool at your disposal too. In the next ten minutes you’ll learn:

1. Where to look for full-time content writers
2. Why hiring a content writer is so challenging
3. How to test and evaluate candidates with an automated system

Top 15 Job Boards to Hire Full-Time Content Writers

Check out our selection of top 15 job boards for hiring full-time content writers:

Read the rest of the article to find 60 more job boards where you can hire full-time content writers at any price point.

Why Is It So Hard To Hire Full-Time Content Writers

It’s always tricky finding that one qualified candidate in the sea of inexperienced, unreliable, would-be content writers. The process is time-consuming and can be pretty heavy on your company’s budget. The competition is fierce too—you are not the only company searching for competent writers.

It took us a while to learn that we could expand the search to non-native speakers. It made the talent pool way bigger but demanded that we invest even more effort in weeding out bad candidates. 

Hiring full-time content writers comes with added challenges—all the good ones go off the market in an instant. Freelancers are an option, of course, but there is an undeniable benefit to full-time writers. 

Freelance writers tend to be less reliable. They set their own working hours, which can lead to late submissions and delays in workflow. They may also be reluctant to do revisions. 

While facing all those challenges, to find that one top-performer, you must also review over 100 applications. And without automation, you will have to do all of this manually:

• Move applicants through your hiring funnel
• Keep track of their status in your funnel at all times
• Send dozens of follow-up emails every single day

On top of everything, you have to understand that most of the applicants will be unqualified. The more time you waste filtering bad candidates out manually, the more great content writers slip through your fingers. 

If you want to stay in the game and “win” the next amazing candidate, you need a proven, reliable system in place. 

Our Biggest Issues

We realized that to find one good candidate, we had to expand our search to multiple platforms. We did, and the problems we had only multiplied:

• Most writers were bad, regardless of where we looked for them
• Lack of automation made us too slow, and we lost many good candidates
• We couldn’t keep track of candidates in our hiring funnel
• Responding to all applications and logging them was impossible
• We couldn’t keep note of candidates we liked and often lost them in the process

It soon became clear to us that developing a functioning hiring system deserved as much financial and brainpower investment as content production. We learned this the hard way. But our efforts paid off when we came up with 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

Our old system was broken, and we knew we had to do something about it. To understand it better, we broke the process down:

1. For the number of monthly website visitors to increase, we need a lot of top-quality content
2. To create top-quality content, we need top-performing writers
3. To hire one top-performing writer, we have to evaluate dozens
4. To find that one great writer, we have to filter out bad ones
5. To filter out bad ones, we need a system we don’t have

With every job ad posting came tons of applications—that was never an issue. We didn’t know what to do with all those applications—that was a massive problem. 

With Workello, we can now manage thousands of applications easily. It allows us to track candidates’ status in our hiring funnel, efficiently filter out unqualified ones, as well as identify and get in touch with great candidates much faster. 

An ideal hiring system needed to have the following features:

• A unified dashboard displaying all applications, wherever they come from
• Possibility to change candidates’ application status with a single click
• A single dashboard that allows us to evaluate, test, reject candidates or invite the ones we like for interviews
• An option to send tests automatically to weed out bad candidates with great portfolios
• Automated communication that saves time and eliminates human error

What started as a Google Sheets+Google Forms+Zapier mashup evolved into a fully-optimized hiring system specifically designed for content teams. Countless iterations resulted in Workello, a system that does all the hard work for you!

A Good Full-Time Content Writer Job Description Is Half the Battle

There will always be bad writers who send their applications. While you can’t avoid it, you can significantly reduce the number of unqualified applicants by writing an excellent job description. 

A good job description is clear, well-organized, and detailed. It means you have to state precise requirements for the position you are hiring for, as well as the responsibilities it entails. Be specific regarding the work experience you want and the set of technical skills required. 

If you are looking for a full-time content writer, make it clear that you are looking for a person who can put in 40 hours a week. To make the offer more enticing, list the benefits, perks, and salary in the ad. Incentivize the candidates to pick you over the competition by showing them what they can get from working with you. 

If you are unsure how to compose a full-time content writer job description or you think you may be looking for a different role, Workello has an extensive database of pre-made job description templates. Within minutes, you can tailor them to suit your company’s needs:

• Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Senior Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Website Content Writer
• Senior Copywriter
• Technical Writer
• Copywriter
• Assessment Writer
• E-commerce Content Writer
• SEO Writer
• Marketing Communications Writer
• Contract Writer
• Arts and Entertainment Writer
• Business Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started hiring content writers, we didn’t have a dedicated recruiter. Instead, we had to rely on our content managers and editors to post ads on multiple job boards. It is hardly nuclear physics, but it did take a lot of time. 

As we grew, we needed to hire more writers. That meant that editors and content managers had to set aside more of their time on this menial task while their actual job suffered. 

Delegating this task to a Recruitment Coordinator is an option. But you will have to train them, and to do that, you have to document the entire process.

We did that, so you don’t have to spend a minute of your time doing it yourself. 

Register for Workello today, completely for free, and get access to our playbooks. You will learn how to delegate job ad distribution to someone else.

One Integrated Dashboard to Manage All Applications

You don’t have to worry about tracking applications on many different job boards anymore. Post your job ad on as many job boards as you want, and Workello will ensure you don’t miss any of the candidates. 

With the Workello-hosted application form, all submissions will be in the same format, complete with all the necessary information, and sent to a single place—your Workello dashboard.

Take a look at our application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

From your Workello dashboard, you can move candidates through your hiring funnel with a single click. You can review applications, reject candidates, send tests, and invite candidates you like for an interview. 

Each action you take will trigger an appropriate automated email, letting candidates know about their status in your hiring funnel. 

As they move through your funnel, candidates can have these statuses:

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

As a cherry on top, we color-coded each status. You can see how many candidates you have in each stage at a glance!

Reject Unqualified Writers

You can give your editors and content managers access to your Workello account so they can assess the applications as they come in. 

Applications that your managers deem unsatisfactory can easily be dismissed by changing the status to “Application Rejected.” Workello will send an automated email politely informing the candidates that your company will not be hiring them at this time. 

The automated process will eliminate human error and you won’t have to waste any time sending these emails. 

Point, Click, Test

A candidate’s portfolio will give you information about their work experience, but it will hardly demonstrate their actual writing skills. Portfolios candidates submit typically consist of heavily edited articles. You will have no idea how much rewriting it took to bring them up to that level. 

What you need is to see candidates’ first-draft capabilities. The only way to do that is to test them. 

Before we started testing candidates, we had many subpar writers on our payroll, and our editors had their hands full rewriting and fixing articles to make them publishable. 

Workello’s built-in testing feature saves you both time and money. Once you change that applicant’s status to “Test Candidate,” they will receive an email that does three things:

1. Congratulates them on moving on to the next stage of the hiring process
2. Provides them with a link to the writing test
3. Gives clear instructions on how to complete the test 

This is what the link will lead to:

How To Make a Good Test

To find a competent writer, you have to test their:

1. Language proficiency
2. Research skills
3. Formatting skills

Besides that, a good test should be comprehensive enough to let you gauge your candidates’ abilities but not too exhausting to make them give up on completing the test. Workello allows you to strike that perfect balance between test thoroughness and candidate willingness. 

You need to understand that candidates value professionalism, transparency, and effectiveness. Workello helps you achieve precisely that by sending automated emails the moment you change an applicant’s status in your hiring funnel and keeping them informed about what happens next. It will let you make a good impression on the candidates, and they will stay invested in completing your test. 

If you are unsure how to make a good test, you can check out the one we use. It will be an excellent starting point that you can tweak to suit your needs and requirements. You can change the topic so it matches your industry, specify formatting requirements, etc. 

Interviewing Candidates

Once the candidates submit completed tests, Workello will automatically change their application status to “Test Completed.” Your editors can then evaluate the articles and decide how to update the candidates’ application statuses.

They can choose to “Reject Candidate” or “Invite for Interview.” Each action will trigger an automated email with an appropriate message. 

The rejection email will politely inform the candidate that you will not be hiring them at this time. The email inviting candidates for an interview will contain instructions for scheduling an interview via Calendly. 

The Candidate Status Page

The inefficacy of communication systems of many hiring platforms is a common problem. We experienced that first-hand before Workello. While we did our best to optimize our processes, we always received many emails from candidates asking about their application status, next steps, etc.

Workello eliminates this with the Candidate Status page, allowing them to track their progress through your hiring funnel. They will always know which stage they are in and what happens next. That is the transparency we were talking about. 

Here is what a Candidate Status page looks like.  

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

When we were starting out and needed to hire full-time content writers, not only did we not have a reliable system in place, but there was nothing on the market that could solve all of our problems at once. 

When we started to grow and needed even more writers, we started posting ads left and right, investing all our hopes in the piles of prospective applications we would receive. Little did we know that the pile of applications would be our primary source of trouble. 

We couldn’t track applicants, and new applications kept streaming in. We felt completely lost, confused, and stretched to the limit. And while we were trying to pull ourselves together, some excellent candidates slipped through the cracks. 

We kept receiving incomplete applications, which demanded contacting candidates again. 

Our editors and content managers were overworked dealing with job postings while trying to do their primary jobs too. Needless to say, their performance dropped dramatically. 

It seemed as if our troubles were endless, and there was no system or platform that could solve all of our problems at once. So we built our own system—Workello!

Thousands of hours or R&D and more than $100,000 worth of investment resulted in an automated hiring funnel that helped us:

1. Build a content team from 1 to 45 in less than two years
2. Cut the costs of content production by 75%
3. Lead one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever
4. Let our editors and content managers focus on their primary duties

We went through this hellish ordeal, but you don’t have to! You get a fully automated, optimized hiring funnel that we spent months and thousands of dollars building at the price of a single quality page of content. Plus, you get a free trial period.

Log in to Workello for free and start accepting applications in less than 3 minutes! 

More Job Boards You Can Use To Hire Full-Time Content Writers

With Workello, all the applications will go to your dashboard, so you won’t have to worry about where you have posted your ads. Here is an extensive list of places where you can look for full-time content writers:

• The Write Life Facebook community
• FinCon Facebook community
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer Facebook group
• What’s Your Plan B? Facebook group
• Certified Writers
• Clarity.fm 
• Editorial Freelancers Association
• Society of Professional Journalists 
• National Association of Black Journalists
• National Association of Science Writers
• National Association of Hispanic Journalists 
• American Society of Journalists & Authors
• Asian American Journalists Association 
• Association of Health Care Journalists
• Society of Environmental Journalists
• The Association of LGBTQ Journalists
• Native American Journalists Association
• Association of Ghostwriters
• Journalism Jobs
• Mediabistro
• HireMyMom.com 
• CloudPeeps
• PeoplePerHour
• Freelancer
• Pitchwhiz
• Contently
• Scripted
• Skyword
• Muck Rack
• Zerys
• Writers Work
• WriterAccess
• PodReacher
• Copify
• Scribewise
• Masthead Media
• Storyhackers
• Coroflot
• ContentGrow
• Alexis Grant Media
• Aquent
• Artisan Talent
• Creative Circle
• iCreatives
• Kelly Services
• Paladin Staffing
• The Creative Group
• 24 Seven
• Vitamin T
• Wunderland Group
• Guru
• BloggingPro
• Hire Writers
• Freelance Writing Gigs
• Constant Content
• Online Writing Jobs
• Be a Freelance Blogger
• Copify
• The Writer Finder
• Craigslist