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

Before developing Workello, we were a small but ambitious content agency dedicated to producing high-quality content. In 2019, we took on a project for our client that was so successful that it became one of the greatest SEO campaigns of all time—our team was able to grow the client’s organic monthly visitors from 0 to 1,500,000.

To achieve this incredible feat, we needed to hire professional writer industry experts to develop content. In 18 months, we were able to build and scale our writing team from 1 to 45—but it wasn’t easy or straightforward, we faced plenty of challenges:

• Candidates sent in incomplete applications 
• Candidates sent in samples in Word that we had no way of verifying
• We couldn’t keep track of applicants and where they were in our hiring funnel
• There were no structured communication with applicants

The need for an automated hiring system was soon evident. We spent over $100,000 and hundreds of hours building a system that would automate and streamline the hiring process for industry expert writers. 

The result of our investment and hard work was Workello—a streamlined hiring system you can use to hire the best industry experts to create top quality content.

In this guide, you will learn about how Workello works and get answers to some key questions: 

1. Where you can hire good professional writers at any price point
2. Why it’s so challenging to hire good professional writer industry experts
3. How you can leverage automation to evaluate and test more candidates and cut hiring costs in half

Where To Look For Professional Writer Industry Experts—Top 15 Job Boards

The following table highlights the best job websites where you can find and hire top quality professional industry expert writers. 

Why Is It So Difficult To Hire Good Industry Expert Writers?

When hiring an industry expert for content, you should keep in mind that you’re not the only business looking for great writers with specialized knowledge. Every company is looking for a top writer, so good candidates are snatched off the job market fast. 

Job boards cannot source new writers as fast as the top writers are hired. As a result, most candidates on any job board are underqualified. 

This creates fierce competition for high-quality industry writers. To stay ahead of the competition and get excellent applicants, you need to evaluate lots of applicants fast. Screening dozens of applications, reviewing tests, and interviewing each candidate is time-consuming, especially if you’re doing everything manually.

When we began searching for writers, we started looking on Upwork and spread out to other websites to expand our talent pool. At this point, we encountered numerous challenges:

• We couldn’t track the application status of candidates (where they were in the hiring process)
• Most platforms lacked proper structures for recruiting writers such as writer tests
• We couldn’t keep track of candidates’ messages, inquiries, and feedback
• The candidates’ samples were significantly edited and didn’t reflect a writer’s true abilities
• We couldn’t communicate or respond to applicants on time

It was evident that we needed a structured system to recruit writers and soon we began investing time and money into building the perfect automated hiring funnel—Workello.

Find the Best Writer Among Hundreds of Applicants With Pre-Hire Assessment Software

Writing jobs are attractive to candidates from all walks of life, but many don’t understand there’s more to it than being on top of their grammar game. That poses challenges for recruiters as the candidates they receive are often unqualified for the role they’re hiring for. 

When you post a writing job ad, you’ll receive hundreds of applications. While some of the candidates will be obviously unqualified, others will have impressive portfolios with articles that have gone through several editing and QA processes.

The only way to learn about the quality of a candidate’s first draft is to test them before you hire them.

Testing will remove the doubt about their skill set, but it’s a struggle to keep everything under control, with hundreds of applicants needing to be tested simultaneously. If you want to hire the best candidates you need skill assessment software that will take assessment management off your hands.

You can use Workello for free to automate your testing and hire the best writers in five easy steps:

1. Use pre-configured settings to set up your hiring funnel in under 90 seconds
2. Post job listings on various job boards and add a link to your Workello job post
3. Use the dashboard to assess applicants
4. Send and review tests to spot bad writers with great portfolios
5. Reject, interview, and hire the best candidate

Test Candidates With a Single Click With Workello

In Workello, you get high-volume recruiting software that will let you manage your entire hiring process without leaving your dashboard. You can move candidates through the funnel with a single click by changing their application status. If you’re happy with their resume and portfolio, you can move a candidate to the testing phase. Use our platform to test content writers, copywriters, SEO copywriters, SEO writers, and technical writers.

Create a free account and hire the best candidates available for your content team, whether they are writers, editors, or content marketers.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

As we struggled with recruiting industry expert writers, we realized we had spent thousands of hours building a system to turn content into traffic and dollars, but spent little time building and optimizing our hiring funnel to source, test, and hire professional writers. 

Our team went back to the drawing board and broke down our entire hiring process to identify the main problems and solution strategies—here’s what the team found:

1. To generate millions of visitors in a month, we needed to publish high-quality content
2. Only experienced writers who are industry experts can create such content
3. To find a single expert writer, we needed to evaluate hundreds of candidates
4. Finding the perfect candidate in a sea of applications meant filtering out unqualified ones fast
5. We didn’t have a good system for filtering out bad candidates efficiently

After half a dozen brainstorming sessions, we came to the conclusion that our ideal hiring system had to have the following features:

1. A single place to review all candidate applications, regardless of what hiring website or job board they came from
2. The ability to easily sort candidates by their application status in our hiring funnel
3. A unified dashboard that would allow us to move candidates through our hiring funnel with ease (evaluate, test, reject, interview, and hire candidates)
4. A writing test to filter out bad candidates with good portfolios
5. Automated emails correspondence with candidates

With all our pain points and solutions figured out, we built the first iteration of an automated funnel which was a combination of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier. It was a step in the right direction, but still a far cry from the perfect hiring system we envisioned.

Countless iterations and $100,000, this patched-together system evolved into Workello!

A Well-Tailored Industry Expert Writer Job Description Can Make All the Difference

If you want to attract the right candidates for your business, you should tailor your job description according to the job requirements and responsibilities of the role in your organization. 

The job description should contain information on the niche of the writer you want, the day-to-day responsibilities in the role, the level of candidate’s experience, and the required skills and industry-specific knowledge. 

Including these details will attract seasoned candidates and discourage underqualified applicants from applying. 

To entice top-performers to choose you over other hiring companies, you should highlight all the benefits you offer to professional writers, such as bonuses, PTO, career-advancement opportunities, and possible raises.

If you are not entirely certain about the responsibilities and requirements for the role, you don’t have to spend time researching and developing a job description. 

We have a library of ready-to-use job description templates for similar roles that you can slightly adjust and use to recruit writers:

• Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Content Writer
• SEO Writer
• Senior Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Website Content Writer
• Technical Writer
• Legal Writer
• Marketing Communications Writer
• Business Writer
• Contract Writer
• Instructional Writer 

A Single Integrated Dashboard to Manage the Entire Hiring Process

Writer candidates can be found on various job boards and hiring websites including LinkedIn, Facebook, Craigslist, Problogger, and others. Once you’ve posted on multiple of these platforms, you’ll receive numerous applications that can be difficult to evaluate and manage manually.

With Workello, you’ll receive all applications in a single dashboard, regardless of what job board someone applied on. All you need to do is include a Workello-hosted application form in your job ad. 

This ensures all applications are in the same format and prevents candidates from submitting incomplete applications. It also saves you a ton of valuable time since you don’t have to log each application manually.

Here’s what our application looked like.

Watch Candidates Stream In

With all the relevant information displayed on the dashboard, you can evaluate applications and move candidates through the hiring funnel with ease. You can change their status and sort them easily with a few clicks. 

To update a candidate’s status, simply select the appropriate option from the drop-down menu from the listed candidate statuses:

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

The statuses are color-coded to easily tell the number of candidates in each stage of your hiring funnel.

Reject Unqualified Candidates

The truth is that you’ll be rejecting more applications than you will be accepting. Workello allows you to set permissions and give access to select members of your hiring team. Team members with access can then filter out unqualified applicants by changing the status to ‘Application Rejected’.

Once you update their status, Workello will automatically send them a polite rejection email, notifying them they won’t be moving to the next stage of your hiring process.

Point, Click, Test

As we evaluated hundreds of candidates, we realized that a lot of candidates were bad writers with good portfolios. The truth is, portfolios only feature someone’s best work, and in 95% of cases, these articles are heavily edited and polished to perfection by a third party. This tells you little about someone’s first draft capabilities. 

The only surefire way to assess a writer’s capabilities is by testing them.

Hiring solely based on candidates’ portfolios was the biggest mistake we made. We didn’t test candidates before hiring them and we ended up paying thousands of dollars for content that was completely unusable and had to be rewritten. This was a key driving factor for us to develop a writing test feature for our automated hiring system.

Workello’s writing test allows you to know the quality of a writer and the amount of editing their work needs before you can hire them.

Once you change the application status to ‘Test Candidate’, Workello automatically and immediately sends an email to the candidate with the following:

• A congratulations message for moving to the next stage
• A link to the writing test hosted on Workello

When the candidate clicks on the link, here’s what they see:

How To Make a Good Test

When testing candidates, there are three main areas to evaluate:

1. Language proficiency
2. Researching skills
3. Article formatting skills

Still, the perfect test for a professional writer must strike the sweet spot between thoroughness (how complex it is) and the candidate’s willingness to complete it. Writers who are also industry experts practically get to choose who they want to work for. They won’t be willing to write a full 2,500-word article on a complex topic as a test assignment for a job they might not even get.

Instead, you could ask them to write a 500-word piece. This will be more than enough to gauge their writing prowess and knowledge of the specific topic or niche. 

If you don’t know how to create a writing test, you can use the same one we used to evaluate hundreds of writers as inspiration. Click here to see our test example and learn how to set up your own in under 5 minutes.

Interviewing Candidates

As soon as a candidate completes and submits a test, their application status will automatically change to ‘Test Complete’. Your editors and content managers will be able to view the test from your unique Workello dashboard. 

Based on the quality of the test, they can update the candidate’s status to:

• Reject Candidate—This prompts the system to send a polite rejection email thanking the candidate for their time

• Invite for Interview—This sends an automated email with an invitation link to schedule a video interview via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

Workello doesn’t just optimize hiring for recruiters, it also simplifies the hiring process for candidates through a dedicated Candidate Status page. This page is crucial to the overall hiring process as candidates won’t have to wonder about:

• Whether you’ve received their application
• Whether you’ve reviewed their tests
• When they’ll hear from you
• The next steps

The Candidate Status page also features a ‘What To Expect Next’ section with all their questions and answers about the hiring funnel, so candidates will always know what stage of your hiring process they are in. 

With the Candidate Status page, you won’t have to worry about losing talented industry expert writers because you couldn’t manually reply to their inquiries on time. Lastly, the page increases the transparency of an organization around the hiring process, keeping good candidates invested in completing the process. 

Here’s an example of the Candidate Status page.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

When we were initially searching for writers, there was no optimized system or guide on how to recruit writers effectively. We were receiving applications from several job boards and couldn’t keep track of all of them. We lost many great writers because we could not reply to and follow up with them in time. 

Apart from that we also faced the following problems:

• Candidates often sent us applications that lacked the info we needed to evaluate them
• Changing the application status and testing candidates was manually done which was painfully slow and left a lot of room for human error
• Editors and content managers would spend way too much time on reviewing applications since the process was manual

We resolved these problems by investing in an automated hiring system. Our new hiring system helped us: 

1. Reduce our cost of quality content by 75% 
2. Grow our agency from 1 to 45 writers in less than two years
3. Enable editors and content managers to focus on producing great content
4. Develop one of the best SEO campaigns of all time

Workello cost us more than $100,000 and countless hours to build but you can have it for the price of one content page.

Try Workello for free and start accepting new candidates in less than 3 minutes!

More Job Boards You Can Use To Hire Professional Writer Industry Experts

Workello enables you to post your job ad on an unlimited number of job boards since all applications end up in your Workello dashboard—so we encourage you to post on as many websites as possible

Here are additional 15 websites to hire professional writer industry experts that fit your company’s needs:

• WriterAccess
• Writers Work
• Zerys
• The Write Life Facebook community
• FinCon Facebook community
• Certified Writers
• Journalism Jobs
• Masthead Media
• Mediabistro
• Editorial Freelancers Association
• Scripted
• Skyword
• Muck Rack
• ContentGrow
• Alexis Grant Media