We Hired 45+ Writers and Editors in Record Time—Learn From Our Experience

Before launching Workello, we were Content Distribution.com—a content agency devoted specifically to producing high-quality web content. Our agency ran one of the biggest SEO campaigns ever, growing one of our clients from 0 to 1,000,000 organic visitors per month. 

As our company grew, the demand for content kept growing too. In less than two years, we hired more than 45 team members. Along the way, we realized that our hiring process wasn’t optimized and efficient enough—applications were coming in from a dozen different job boards, we couldn’t keep track of candidates in our hiring funnel and had to inform them about their status manually.

We had soon realized we needed a reliable system to streamline our hiring process and allow us to hire writers more efficiently, which is why we invested over $100,000 and hundreds of hours into developing Workello—an automated system for hiring better and more affordable writers.

In the next 15 minutes, we’ll show you where you can hire a professional Business Writer and teach you how to use an automated system to evaluate and test more candidates, so you can find exceptional business writers faster. Don’t make the same mistakes we did and avoid the trouble we had to go through, managing the whole process manually.

Where To Find a Professional Business Writer—Top 15 Job Boards

Check out the pros and cons of the best 15 job boards you can use to hire a professional Business Writer:

Read through the rest of the article to discover 13+ additional job boards for hiring professional Business Writers.

Why Are Professional Business Writers So Hard to Find

Hiring professional Business Writers is difficult because the best ones are snapped up quickly. The best candidates are always hired faster than any platform can source them, so many companies settle for less qualified candidates.

Unskilled candidates abound on every job board, and there’s no easy way to weed them out. The only way to locate top talent is to go through hundreds of portfolios and resumes, carefully assessing each applicant. This process will take plenty of time and you will risk missing out on the best candidates because someone else will have already extended them a job offer.

When we first started hiring Business Writers, we looked for them on Upwork. In time, we had to expand across a couple of additional job boards to be able to test and analyze more candidates— and here’s where things started to go wrong. The following issues arose for us:

1. It was hard to keep track of our candidates as they progressed through our hiring funnel
2. The hiring sites we used didn’t do a good job of categorizing candidates based on their skill set and experience
3. The submitted portfolios did not reflect candidates’ true writing abilities

Issues We Had to Deal With

The issues mentioned above appeared regardless of which hiring site we used for posting job ads. Keeping track of all applications that were coming in daily from several different platforms had become a big challenge for us. 

We couldn’t seem to solve the following issues:

• Keep track of qualified writers and weed out unqualified ones quickly
• Respond to each candidate in a timely manner
• Categorize candidates based on their application status

After months of struggling to hire qualified writers, we opted to create our own hiring system. We began discussing ideas for an automated hiring funnel that would tackle all our hiring issues. Workello was the final result.

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

What we had to do first was figure out what was causing the problem before we could come up with a better strategy for hiring writers. We broke the entire process down to its smallest elements to understand what we were doing wrong and came up with the following conclusions:

1. Websites that publish a lot of high-quality content attract a large number of monthly visitors
2. Producing high-quality content requires high-quality writers
3. Finding professional Business Writers for hire requires a significant amount of time and effort spent evaluating a large number of applications
4. Weeding out unqualified candidates quickly is a challenging task

Our problem wasn’t the lack of candidates applying—we just needed to find a way to swiftly identify great candidates and eliminate those who were not qualified for the job from our hiring funnel. This is when we started to think about what our dream system for hiring qualified writers fast would look like. Here’s what we figured out we needed:

1. A system that allows us to sort our prospects according to their application status
2. A single place to view all of our candidates from all of our hiring channels
3. A place where we can test, hire and reject candidates without leaving our dashboard
4. A possibility to deliver writing tests automatically, allowing us to identify bad applicants with great portfolios
5. A finely tuned communications system that would automatically notify candidates of any status changes and help them in moving further down the hiring funnel with significantly less effort

We solved most of the difficulties mentioned above with an imperfect combination of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier but we still lacked a unified platform. Months later, this improvised workflow evolved into an automated hiring system known as Workello.

What Should a Good Job Description for Professional Business Writers Look Like?

To attract professional Business Writers, you must write an attractive job description that will provide prospective employees with detailed information on the responsibilities and qualifications required for the job. This way, candidates will know what to expect and a number of under qualified ones will give up on applying. You will save a lot of time, effort, and money reviewing fewer bad applications.

Besides explaining what you expect from your future employees, you should also specify what the employees can expect from you and why they should choose to work for you instead of your competitors. Also include information about salary, benefits, and career advancement opportunities the candidate will get once they join your team.

If you’re not sure how to write an effective job ad, don’t worry—you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We have created many different job description templates that you can quickly tailor to your company’s needs.

Click on the desired role in the table below, make a few changes to the template, and copy-paste it on any job board you like.

• Senior Writer
• Course Writer
• Product Writer
• Technical Writer
• Executive Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Content Writer
• Senior Proposal Writer
• Press Release Writer
• Nutrition Writer
• Blog Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Science Writer
• Development Writer
• Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When our company first started hiring writers, we didn’t have a Recruitment Manager that would be responsible for finding qualified individuals—our content managers were in charge of posting job ads on a variety of job boards. While posting ads isn’t a difficult task, it took a couple of hours each day. As our company grew, our content managers and editors began to feel the strain of these additional responsibilities—they took more and more time away from their primary responsibilities. 

Delegating recruiting of new writers to another person was a solution to this problem, but we first needed to document the entire process and give them proper training. That’s exactly what we did—we documented this entire process so you can learn from our mistakes and save yourself the trouble of going through the same trial-and-error period.

Sign up to Workello for free to get our playbooks for delegating job ads to someone else delivered to your inbox.

Receive Candidate Applications in Your Workello Dashboard

Candidates for the Business Writer role will find your job ad on Facebook, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Glassdoor, and anywhere else you’ve posted it. Our automated system will make your life easier by letting you handle applications coming in from all over the place from the same dashboard.

All incoming applications will have a consistent and standardized form, regardless of where they came from. They will contain all the details necessary for you to decide whether to move the candidate to the next stage.

Check out the application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

It’s much easier to evaluate each candidate and move them through your hiring funnel when you have all of their information in one place. You can use Workello to automate every stage of the process, whether it’s rejecting an application, sending a test automatically, or inviting a candidate for an interview—regardless of where you post your job ad.

If you wish to change a candidate’s status, all you have to do is choose the right option from a 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

This categorization will show you where each candidate falls in your hiring process and what you should do next. The statuses are color-coded, making it easy to see how many candidates are there in each stage of the funnel.

Reject Unqualified Candidates

Once a candidate submits their application, it will appear in your dashboard. You can give your editors and content managers access to Workello so they can log in and review the applications. They can quickly reject an applicant by changing their hiring status to Application Rejected if the writer does not meet your company’s hiring standards. The candidate will automatically receive a courteous rejection email which will drastically cut the amount of time you spend responding to follow-up emails from unfit candidates. Even if all you have to do is copy-paste the response, you’re still wasting time on a menial task.

Point, Click, Test

A portfolio can give you an idea of a candidate’s previous work experience, but it’s rarely an accurate reflection of their writing skills. Most portfolios will almost certainly be heavily edited, resulting in only showing you candidates’ best work—which is not an accurate representation of their 1st draft capabilities.

When we started hiring writers, we made a big mistake by recruiting people based solely on their portfolios. We ended up with poor candidates who weren’t qualified for the job and lost a lot of money on unusable content. Things drastically improved after we started testing candidates.  Automating the testing process was one of the major features we wanted to incorporate into Workello. 

When you change your candidate’s status to Test Candidate in the Workello dashboard, they  will receive an automated email that will:

• Congratulate them for progressing to the next stage of the hiring process.
• Include a link to a writing test hosted on Workello

This is what it looks like when a candidate clicks the test link in the automated email.

How To Make a Good Test

To assess their writing abilities, you should test your applicants’ proficiency in a foreign language (spelling, grammar, etc.), research, and formatting skills.

A good test will establish a balance between these two:

1. Thoroughness—It must be thorough enough to cover all of the skills required for the content writing position. The guidelines must be specific and state exactly what you expect of your candidate.
2. Willingness—Candidates should not be expected to write a 2,500-word article that will take them a whole day to complete. This is unreasonable, especially if they are employed at that moment

The test we created is just that—a balance between thoroughness and willingness. Transparency, openness, and effectiveness are all qualities that applicants value in the Workello hiring process. If candidates get the impression they’re dealing with a professional company, they will be more motivated to complete a more detailed test.

If you’re not sure what an adequate test should look like, have a peek at the one we use in our hiring process.

Interviewing Candidates

After the candidate submits the test, their status will automatically change to Test Complete, letting your editors and content managers know they can check it and choose what to do next. They will be able to select one of the following:

1. Reject the candidate—Changing the candidate’s status to Reject Candidate will trigger an automated email informing them politely that they haven’t been selected for the next stage of the hiring process
2. Invite the candidate for an interview—Changing the status to Invite for Interview will trigger another automated email with details on how to schedule a video interview using Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

Despite all of the optimizations we had implemented, we still spent a lot of time answering the same questions, such as:

1. Have you received my application?
2. Can I know the results of my test?
3. When can I expect to hear from you?

We designed an automated Candidate Status page where candidates can see where they are in your hiring funnel. As a result, you’ll  receive far fewer emails from candidates inquiring about their status and eliminate the possibility of missing out on great candidates because you were late to respond. A section of this page will also describe your hiring process and what candidates can expect next.

Workello’s Candidate Status Page not only saves you time, but also indicates transparency and professionalism. Click here to see an example.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

When our agency first started recruiting writers, there was no structure in place to help us find qualified candidates fast. Our company was rapidly expanding, and we needed to hire more writers. 

We began posting job ads on a variety of platforms, but issues arose as soon as we started receiving applications. We were unable to keep track of them, and as a result, we missed out on many qualified writers. 

Our content managers were overwhelmed, having to manually post job ads and prepare writing assessments but this wasn’t the end of our troubles. We frequently received incomplete application forms, and there was a lot of space for human error on our end as well.

It was then and there that we decided that we needed to invent a system that would make the hiring process simpler. After investing countless hours and more than $100,000 in research and development, we came up with Workello—a fully automated system that helped us:

• Grow our team from 1 to 45 writers in less than two years
• Reduce the cost of content production by 75% 
• Speed up our hiring process and make it more efficient
• Run one of the best SEO campaigns of all time
• Reduce the workload of our editors and content managers, letting them focus on creating great content instead of finding and hiring new writers

A product that cost $100,000 and took countless hours to develop is now accessible to you for the price of one page of content!

Try Workello completely for free. It’s pre-configured so you can start accepting candidates, and automating your hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes. 

Additional Job Ads You Can Use To Hire Professional Business Writers

You won’t have to worry about getting lost amid dozens of applications on different job boards if you use an efficient and automated hiring funnel. With Workello, you can use as many platforms as you like and receive as many applications as you need to find professional Business Writers.

Below are some more websites you can use to look for qualified candidates:

• PeoplePerHour
• WriterAccess
• Craigslist
• Freelancer
• Muck Rack
• Scribewise
• Pure Content
• Pitchwhiz
• ContentGrow
• Writers Work
• Pod Reacher
• Mediabistro
• Masthead Media
• Alexis Grant Media