Hiring Writers Is Hard—Learn From Our Mistakes

Before we created Workello, we were a content agency known as Content Distribution. We were successful because we put all our efforts into creating excellent quality content for our clients. Thanks to the skills of our writers, we executed one of the greatest SEO campaigns of all time! 

Creating valuable content that can generate over 1 million of organic website visitors per month was only possible because we had excellent writers. Hiring those writers was not something we excelled at initially. 

We didn’t have an automated system that would help us scale our content team, so we faced a lot of challenges. We were swamped with hundreds of applications that all needed to be logged, reviewed, and sorted. 

The problem was that we used several hiring platforms, so these applications were coming our way from all directions, and we had no way of gathering them all in a single place. Keeping track of where the candidates were in our hiring funnel was impossible. 

Those applications were all in various formats, and many of them were incomplete. We asked candidates for their portfolios, and many of them submitted Word documents which we had no means of verifying and often had trouble matching with the candidate. 

On top of everything, most of the candidates were not up to our standards. So, we wasted tremendous amounts of time sifting through them to get to one good writer. We were often too late because the best writers flew off the market in an instant. It was absolute chaos. 

We couldn’t find anything that would solve all our problems at once, so we decided to build our own system. Now, $100,000 and limitless hours of work later, we have Workello—an optimized funnel that allows us to hire professional writers faster and at any price point. 

In the next 10 minutes, you will learn how to copy our processes. You will find out:

1. Where to look for affordable product description writers
2. How to combat difficulties that hiring great writers brings
3. How to use automation to test and evaluate more candidates

Top 15 Job Boards Where You Can Hire Product Description Writers

Take a look at top 15 job boards for hiring product description writers:

Keep on reading to find more places where you can look for writers for hire. 

Why Is It Such a Struggle to Hire Good Product Description Writers

Content writing has become a popular job in recent years. More and more companies realize that they need a good content marketing strategy to rank well on search engines, improve authority in their field, and improve their bottom line. 

The demand for competent writers is high. Many people have recognized this demand and decided to jump on board this train. This is exactly the root of all problems. Most of these people are wannabe writers with no experience and mediocre skills at best!

Whenever you post a job ad, you will receive hundreds of applications, and you will have to review dozens before you can identify one qualified writer. Things get even more complicated when you need someone with experience in anything more specific, such as a product description writer. 

Writing product descriptions sounds easy on paper, which is why many freelancers gladly do it at very low rates. Things are not that simple, though. If you hire a wrong person, you will end up with generic, uninspiring product descriptions. What’s more, these descriptions will often be grammatically incorrect because cheap freelancers can’t flaunt very rich vocabulary. Such product descriptions can’t help you convert visitors into customers. 

Since the demand is so strong, you are not the only one looking for good writers. If another company uses automation and has a streamlined hiring funnel, they will beat you to those rare qualified candidates. 

We are not just saying this; we know from experience. We have been through all sorts of trouble before we realized what the main trouble with hiring skilled writers is.

The Core of the Trouble With Hiring Qualified Writers

You can use a dozen different hiring platforms to source applications, and you will always face the same issues:

• Gathering all applications and portfolios in one place
• Logging all applications and contacting all candidates
• Keeping track of where candidates are in your hiring funnel
• Maintaining efficient communication with candidates
• Filtering out unqualified candidates quickly

While you are responding to emails manually and trying to find that applicant you liked, great candidates slip through your fingers one by one. 

We know—it hurts when a perfect candidate you spent weeks trying to spot responds to your offer with a definitive NO! We have experienced it many times until we decided that something had to change. We realized that our hiring funnel needed as much care and attention as content production we were already so good at. 

Pre-Hire Assessments Allow You To Hire the Best Writer in Your Niche

You’ll never get an applicant that admits they have no idea how to write content for your niche. While their portfolios may include some industry-related articles, you’ll never know how good they are at it until you see their first draft. Don’t wait to hire them for that to happen—improve your hiring process with pre-employment assessments.

Coming up with a writing test is the easy part. What do you do when hundreds of writing samples start flooding your inbox? You need skill assessment software to keep the process organized and to avoid missing out on a top candidate due to an email you forgot to respond to.

Workello will entirely automate your hiring process and take care of assessment management. You only need to:

1. Create a free account and set up a pre-configured hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Add a Workello link to your job listings (works with all job boards)
3. Wait for applications to start coming your way
4. Send tests to spot bad writers with impressive portfolios fast
5. Reject, interview, and hire the best candidates with a single click

Streamline Your Testing Process and Hire the Top 1% of Writers With Workello

With Workello—high-volume recruiting software—you can automate your entire hiring process and cut costs by 50%. Use our platform to test content writers for whatever writing needs you have, be it technical, SEO, or any other type of writing. You can also assess copywriters and SEO copywriters.

Sign up for free and assess, test, reject, interview, and hire writers from your Workello dashboard effortlessly.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

We established that our hiring system was broken, but it wasn’t beyond repair. We just had to pinpoint what was holding us back exactly. We evaluated our entire system and broke it down into its basic elements:

1. If we want to increase traffic to a website, we need to produce a lot of great content consistently
2. To create top-quality content, we need to hire highly-qualified writers
3. If we want to find good writers, we have to go through a lot of applications
4. Evaluating applications primarily consists of weeding out unqualified candidates
5. To get to the best candidates fast, we have to weed out the bad ones fast—that was our stumbling block

This made it clear that getting people to send their applications was never our problem. Our greatest challenge was finding a way to deal with them efficiently. 

Then we wrote down what an idea hiring funnel should look like. A system that would reliably and efficiently solve all of our problems had to:

• Gather all of the applications in one place
• Enable us to keep track of where each candidate is in our hiring funnel
• Provide options to evaluate, test, reject, interview, and extend an offer to a candidate without ever leaving a page
• Support automated communication that saves time and eliminates mistakes

Our first attempt at such a system was a Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier combination. It worked, but it was far from perfect. Countless iterations later, we have an automated and fully-optimized system designed particularly for content teams—Workello!

Write a Good Job Description to Hire Product Description Writers

You can’t prevent unqualified candidates from submitting their applications, but you can significantly reduce their number by composing a good job description. 

A great job description not only discourages bad candidates from applying but also attracts good ones. A clear and specific ad will incentivize great candidates to apply because they will instantly know that the position is a perfect fit for them. They will get the impression that they are dealing with a serios and professional company that knows what they are looking for.

When writing your product description writer job ad, you have to include the following information:

• Requirements that candidates must meet—previous experience, specific skills, etc.
• Responsibilities the position in your company entails
• Compensation package and additional perks—salary increases, bonuses, health plans, paid time off, promotion opportunities, etc.

If you need more help writing job descriptions, Workello has many templates you can use. Adapt it to your needs in a few minutes and post it on as many job boards as you like.

• Content Writer
• Senior Writer
• Website Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Senior Copywriter
• E-commerce Content Writer
• SEO Writer
• Sr. Technical Writer
• Catalog Writer
• Fashion Writer
• Instructional Writer
• Staff Writer
• Business Writer
• Research Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started expanding our content team, our editors had to handle writing and posting job ads across the Internet. We didn’t have a designated person for this. 

It was not ideal because editors and content managers wasted time on posting job ads while their primary responsibilities—publishing great content—suffered. As our need for more writers grew, so did the amount of time they spent looking for suitable candidates. 

We had a way out—document our entire hiring process, hire a Recruitment Specialist, train them, and delegate hiring new writers. 

We spent hundreds of hours documenting our hiring process, but you won’t have to.

Sign up for Workello today for free, and you will get access to our playbooks and the entire knowledge base so you can learn how to delegate job ad distribution.

All Applications in a Single Dashboard

No matter how many different job boards you post your ad on, applications will all end up in the same place—your Workello dashboard. That’s because you will add a link to a Workello-hosted application form to your job ad. 

This will also ensure that all the applications are in the same format and contain all the necessary information. 

Click here to see what an application form looks like.

Watch Candidates Stream In

When applications start coming your way, you easily move candidates through your hiring funnel by selecting one of the application status options from the drop-down menu:

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

To make your life even easier, we color-coded each status. That way, you can see in an instant approximately how many candidates you have in each stage of your hiring process. 

Reject Unqualified Writers

If your editors decide that a candidate doesn’t meet the basic requirements, they can easily remove them from your hiring funnel by selecting “Reject Candidate” status. This will trigger a polite rejection email. 

Point, Click, Test

You will receive a lot of seemingly impressive portfolios, but you won’t know if they demonstrate candidates’ actual writing skills. Candidates submit heavily edited final drafts, which is only natural because they want to present themselves in the best possible light. 

The only way to see what the first draft will look like is to test them. 

We learned the hard way that hiring candidates without previously testing them is a recipe for disaster. At first, we hired writers based on their portfolios alone. This resulted in many subpar writers on our payroll, countless unusable articles, and our editors being overworked by rewriting them.

Very soon, we had to begin the entire hiring process from scratch. It was a vicious circle. 

To avoid this from happening again, we implemented a testing feature in Workello. If your editors decide that a candidate meets minimum requirements, they can choose the “Test Candidate” option from the drop-down menu. 

The candidate will receive an automated email that:

1. Congratulates them on moving to the next stage of your hiring process
2. Provides them with a link to a writing test

When the candidate clicks on the link, it will take them to the following page:

How To Make a Good Test

What you want from a candidate is to have:

1. Excellent command of the English Language
2. Great research skills
3. Ability to write correct and engaging product descriptions
4. Adequate formatting skills

You need to create a test exhaustive enough to actually test these abilities. However, you have to be careful not to make your test exhausting. 

The best way to gauge somebody’s abilities is to give them a task similar to what they would they would do once they join your team. That said, you can’t expect from a candidate to produce 30+ product descriptions as a test for a job they may not even get. At the same time, you won’t be able to accurately assess their skills based on three descriptions. 

It would be best to find a middle ground and go with about ten product descriptions, preferably from different categories. 

Another thing that will affect a candidate’s willingness to complete your writing test is their experience with your company up to this moment. If you wrote an informative job ad and responded to all emails promptly and transparently, the great candidate will not lose interest in your company. You will have come across as a professional and organized company worthy of their time. 

Interviewing Candidates

When candidates complete their test, their application status will automatically change to “Test Complete.” This will signal your editors that they can review the test article and decide what to do next.

If a candidate’s work is up to your company’s standards, editors can select the “Invite for Interview” option. The candidate will receive an email containing instructions to set up a Zoom interview via Calendly. 

If the test article is not satisfactory, editors can select “Reject Candidate,” which will trigger a polite rejection email.

The Candidate Status Page

Despite all our efforts to optimize our hiring process to the maximum, we still received dozens of emails every day from unqualified candidates wanting to know:

• Have we received their applications?
• When can they expect to hear from us?
• Did we have the time to review their test?
• What are the next steps?

To stop wasting time on responding to such emails, we implemented a Candidate Status page into Workello. This is where candidates can find all the information about your hiring process, so they always know the next steps. 

Candidates will also be able to track where they are in your hiring funnel. Every time you change their application status, it will show on their end. 

Here is what a Candidate Status page looks like.  

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

We had no optimized system, which cost us a lot of time and money. Our experience was very close to the plot of Groundhog Day. 

We would hire writers who would quickly turn out mediocre at best. Our editors wasted hours on end rewriting their work. Then they had to waste more of their time posting new job ads and looking for new supposedly skilled writers. It was a never-ending cycle of hiring writers, training them, getting disappointed, terminating cooperation with them, and repeating the whole process.  

And every hiring cycle brought us the same problems:

• Our editors neglected their primary duties—they were busy with tedious, repetitive hiring tasks
• Dozens of applications kept streaming in from numerous sides and remained scattered everywhere
• We had no clue where our candidates were in our hiring funnel
• We failed to contact many of the candidates, and we were often too late to reach out to the good ones
• Most candidates were unqualified, no matter where we looked for them
• Many applications were incomplete
• We did everything manually and wasted incredible amounts of time

The result was always the same—the best candidates kept escaping us!

This nightmare scenario prompted us to create something that will streamline the process of hiring writers and editors. 

With Workello, we managed to:

1. Scale a team of 45+ writers and editors in under two years
2. Run one of the best content marketing campaigns ever
3. Lower content production costs by up to 75% by hiring non-natives
4. Let out editors and content managers go back to their primary responsibilities

Countless hours of work, numerous iterations, and thousands of dollars went into developing an optimized system you can get for the price of one quality page of content.

Register with Workello for free today and start accepting applications and automating your hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes! 

More Job Boards to Hire Product Description Writers

With Workello in your corner, you can post your job ad on as many job boards as you want without worrying about how you will keep track of all applications. Wherever candidates apply, they will have to complete the same form, and their applications will go to the same place—your Workello dashboard.

Here are some more places where you can hire product description writers:

• Guru
• Scripted
• Freelancer
• Redditors for Hire
• The Writer Finder
• Writers Work
• Zerys
• ContentGrow
• Certified Writers
• Writer Access
• Mediabistro
• HireMyMom