Learn From Our Mistakes and Hire Professional Writers More Easily

Before we created Workello, we ran a highly successful content agency. With one of the best SEO campaigns ever, we helped our client get from 0 to 1,500,000 organic visitors per month. 

To achieve such success, we needed a team of highly skilled Content Writers. That meant scaling our content agency from 1 to 45 Writers and Editors in only 18 months! 

It was not an easy endeavor, especially when looking for professional Writers specializing in a particular niche. 

To hire a single Writer capable of producing high-quality articles consistently, we had to evaluate over 100 candidates. This took us tremendous amounts of time that we could have used more productively.

After more than $100,000 and countless hours of developing a systemized process to hire exceptional Writers, we succeeded. We now have an optimized and automated hiring process that enables us to hire top-performing professional Writers faster. 

In the next 10 minutes, you are going to learn how to copy our system, and you’ll get answers to some critical questions: 

1. Where can you hire good professional Writers at any price point?
2. Why is it so challenging to hire good professional Writers?
3. How can you use automation to evaluate and test more candidates?

Where To Look For Professional Writers—Top 15 Job Boards

Here are our picks of the 15 best job boards where you can look for professional Writers:

At the end of the article, you will find more job boards where you can look for professional Writers.

Why Is It So Hard To Find Good Professional Writers?

Finding suitable candidates for any position is challenging, time-consuming, and draining on your company’s budget. That is because you have to evaluate dozens of applicants before you can select top-performing ones. Also, you have to do everything manually, from keeping track of all the candidates and moving them through your hiring funnel to responding to dozens of emails day after day. 

While you struggle with your hiring process, the best candidates will get snatched right under your nose. Job boards can’t keep up with this demand, and excellent candidates get hired faster than they can source them. 

No matter how many job boards you use and no matter how much you optimize your hiring process, you are not the only company looking for professional Writers. Additionally, there is no magic wand that will prevent unqualified candidates from sending in their resumes. You will still have to review piles of applications to find one suitable candidate. 

By the time you are done, the best candidates will have been hired by your competitors. To get a fighting chance, you need an automated and efficient system in place.

Here is what you have to understand:

1. No platform can guarantee that all the candidates are qualified
2. Most of the candidates are not good Writers and won’t be suitable additions to your company
3. To find that one top-performer, you first have to filter out the bad ones by evaluating and testing them
4. You have to be fast to get to the good candidate before your competitors

We understood we needed to evaluate more candidates to find the right fit. We expanded our search onto multiple platforms to widen the talent pool and thought this was a clever idea, but it got us into more trouble. The same problems as with one job board persisted but at a much larger scale. 

Before Things Can Get Better, They Have To Get Worse

We thought using multiple job boards was a clever idea, but it got us into more trouble. We had the same problems as with one job board but at a much larger scale. 

The platforms we used had no built-in testing features. This is a huge issue as many candidates submit portfolios that consist of heavily edited articles and are by no means a reflection of their true abilities. 

Instead of dealing with all these issues on one platform, we now had to do so across 20 others, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Upwork, email, etc.

The problems we kept struggling with were:

• Tracking candidates by their application status
• Seeing and responding to candidates
• Following up with qualified candidates too late or failing to respond to them altogether
• Looking for Writers that we remember seemed qualified and being unable to find them
• Realizing that most candidates were still unqualified

After months of hardship, we realized we had to change our approach. We needed to invest a comparable amount of time and money we spent on producing content in developing a hiring system that worked. 

We learned the hard way that we needed an optimized hiring funnel that would solve all our problems at once. There was nothing like that on the market, so we built it! 

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

We took a step back and observed how we used to do everything, trying to identify room for improvement. First, we defined the issue and broke it down to its smallest elements:

1. Websites that produce a lot of good-quality content attract a substantial number of visitors every month
2. Producing good-quality content requires good-quality Writers
3. Finding good-quality Writers necessitates a lot of time to evaluate many candidates
4. Evaluating a lot of candidates means weeding out unsuitable ones and leaving only the best ones
5. Weeding out unsuitable candidates—that was the missing piece of the puzzle

We needed a reliable way to weed out unqualified candidates to find good professional Writers faster. 

To do so, we jotted down the qualities of an ideal system for filtering out bad Writers:

• A unified platform where we could see all the applicants, regardless of which platform they applied on
• An option to sort candidates by their application status 
• The ability to test and reject applicants and schedule interviews from the same dashboard
• An option to send tests automatically, allowing us to spot unqualified candidates with excellent portfolios
• Automated communication that eliminates human error, such as failing to contact good candidates or sending an email to the wrong address

What started as an imperfect combination of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier solved most of the issues above. We still couldn’t solve the problem of lacking a unified platform, though. This was a springboard for Workello. 

How To Write a Job Description To Hire Professional Writers

Writing a good job description goes a long way. A good job ad must be tailored to suit the needs of your organization. You have to be specific about the responsibilities and the requirements you expect from the applicants.

If you give this crucial information and ensure your job ad is clear, candidates will know what to expect. It will also help you deter unsuitable candidates from applying, so you won’t waste time reviewing hundreds of bad applications. 

In addition to what you expect from your future employees, you should also specify what they will get from you. Keep in mind that you are competing with other companies for the best Writers, so you have to give them a reason to pick you over your competition.

Make sure you include information about the compensation and benefits package, as well as learning and career advancement opportunities. 

If you are not entirely sure how to go about writing a job ad, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We have a comprehensive list of job descriptions you can customize to suit your organization. 

Click on the role you need in the table below, make a few changes so it aligns with your company needs, and copy-paste the ad on the job boards of your choosing:

• Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Executive Writer
• Business Writer
• Research Writer
• Content Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Copywriter Intern
• Instructional Writer
• Technical Writer
• Website Content Writer
• Senior Copywriter
• Senior Writer
• Entertainment Writer
• Legal Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

At first, our Editors and Content Managers posted job ads on various job boards. This is a simple task, but it is highly time-consuming. 

The problem was that the people who were supposed to handle content production spent much of their time on this menial process. 

Delegating this to another person of a Virtual Assistant is a solution to this problem, but it requires documenting the entire hiring process and teaching it to them. 

That’s exactly what we did, so you don’t have to waste your time and do it the hard way. 

By signing up for Workello for free, you will get access to our knowledge base and learn how to delegate this repetitive task to someone else. 

A Unified Dashboard With All Candidate Applications

It is not important where writing candidates see your ad—if they decide to apply, they will receive the same application form hosted on Workello. While they can come from Glassdoor, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other platform, you will see their applications in a single, unified dashboard. 

The application form is consistent and standardized and contains all the details necessary for you to decide what next step to take. 

See our application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Having all information in one place makes it much easier for you to review each candidate and move them through your hiring funnel. Wherever you place your ad, you can use Workello to automate every step of the process—reject an application, send a test automatically, or invite a candidate for an interview.

When you want to change the status of a candidate, all you need to do is select the appropriate option from the drop-down menu:

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

This categorization will show you where each candidate is in your hiring funnel and what you need to do next. All statuses are color-coded, which makes everything even easier. It will take a swift glance to see how many candidates you have in each stage. 

Reject Unqualified Candidates

The moment a candidate submits their application, it becomes visible in the Workello dashboard. You can give your Editors and Content Managers access to the dashboard so they can review the applications. They can weed out unqualified candidates by changing the status to “Application Rejected.”

When they change the status, the candidate will receive an automated, polite rejection email. This will reduce the time you spend responding to follow-up emails from unsuitable candidates. Even if you only need to copy-paste the response, you still lose valuable time. 

Point, Click, Test

No matter what you do, there is no guarantee that only qualified candidates will apply. Bad Writers will send in their applications, but they’ll be much easier to spot and filter out.

Some applicants will seem like a perfect fit. These candidates will have sent fantastic portfolios that by no means demonstrate their 1st draft capabilities. 

You have to understand that these portfolios consist of heavily edited and proofread final drafts. While you will get some information about their experience from that portfolio, you won’t see whether those candidates are qualified professional Writers.

That’s why you need an optimized system that weeds out bad candidates. Otherwise, you will face the same costly problem as we did—you’ll hire bad Writers and pay for unusable articles, or you will waste time trying to make such content publishable. 

All of that will delay the entire content production. 

When we started testing candidates, the process improved drastically. This is a feature we wanted Workello to have. It allows you to see what a candidate’s first draft looks like, which will show you how much time editing their work requires. 

Once you change the status to “Test Candidate,” they will automatically receive an email with a link to a short writing test and all the instructions. 

When the Writer clicks on the link, they will open a tab that looks like this:

How To Make a Good Test

Creating a good test is a balancing act between two things:

1. Thoroughness—The test needs to be detailed and complicated enough so you can test the candidate’s writing abilities adequately. Don’t forget to include detailed instructions
2. Willingness—The test shouldn’t require candidates to produce a 2,500-word article that will take them an entire day to compose. This is unrealistic, especially if they already have a job they are thinking of changing. 

You should determine how much you can ask from a candidate to ensure they want to complete the test.

These are the three main areas you need to evaluate your candidates on:

1. Language proficiency—Is the candidate’s level of the English language high enough to produce quality articles that don’t demand extensive editing?
2. Research skills—Is the candidate capable of conducting thorough research to produce a factually accurate article?
3. Formatting—Does the candidate possess basic knowledge of article structure and optimization, including the use of headings, internal and external links, etc.?

How you handled the hiring process up until this moment will determine whether a candidate is willing to complete the test. If the job ad you composed is vague and uninformative, they feel like they have a million follow-up questions, and it takes you days to respond to an email, candidates will probably be unimpressed and less eager to do the writing test.

If you did all the previous steps right, though, candidates will get a good impression of your company. You will come across as a well-organized and professional business, serious about the work you want to be done. They will be motivated to complete the writing test. 

If you are having trouble designing a perfect test, snatch the test we used to evaluate hundreds of candidates and find a team of excellent Writers. 

Interviewing Candidates

When candidates submit the test, their status will change to “Test Complete.” Your Editors and Content Managers can check the test and choose what to do next. They will have two options:

1. Reject candidate—If the Editors don’t like the article, they can change the candidate’s status to “Reject Candidate,” which will trigger an automated email informing the candidate politely that they haven’t been selected to move on to the next stage of the hiring process
2. Invite candidate for an interview—If the Editors like the article, they can change the status to “Invite for Interview,” triggering an automated email containing instructions to schedule a video interview via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

Although we did our best with automation and optimization, we still received countless emails with the same questions from candidates:

• Have you received my application?
• When can I expect to hear from you?
• What are the next steps?

To prevent the need to respond to such emails and waste more time, we created an automated Candidate Status page where candidates can see where they are in your hiring funnel. The moment you change their status in your dashboard, it will show on their status page. This will also eliminate the chance of losing a great candidate because you were too late to respond. 

The page also contains a section that explains what your hiring process looks like and what candidates can expect next.

Aside from saving you time, this page also demonstrates transparency and professionalism, which will encourage qualified candidates to continue with the hiring process. 

Here is an example of it. 

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

We were stuck in a never-ending hiring cycle, so we understand exactly what you are going through. Sometimes, finding a qualified candidate feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. 

With an optimized and automated hiring system, we were able to hire excellent professional Writers in 10x less time. We invested thousands of hours in Workello—a system that makes the whole hiring process seem simple.

Without this system, we struggled with some big issues:

• Our Editors didn’t edit; their talent was wasted on these menial tasks
• We missed many fantastic candidates because we failed to contact them on time
• We received incomplete applications 

• There was a lot of room for human error

Then we developed Workello, which became the single most important investment we have ever made. It paid off big time:

• The cost of quality content dropped by 75%
• We ran one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever
• We grew our content team from 1 to 45 employees in less than 2 years
• Our Content Managers and Editors can focus on creating great content

We suffered through this painful ordeal, so you don’t have to!

A product that received an investment of $100,000 and countless hours of building is available to you at the cost of one page of content—and you get a free trial period!

Sign up with Workello now for free. Our pre-configured system will take you no more than 3 minutes to set up so you can start accepting applications.  

More Job Boards You Can Use To Hire Professional Writers

With an optimized and automated hiring funnel, you don’t have to be afraid of getting lost among dozens of applications across multiple job boards. You can use as many platforms as you want and receive as many applications as necessary to find qualified professional Writers. 

Below are some more places you can use to look for qualified candidates, including Writer and Editor associations, Facebook groups, and staffing agencies:

• 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
• 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