We Learned the Hard Way That Hiring Writers Is Tough—You Don’t Have To!

Before we transitioned to Workello, we were an ambitious content agency that wasn’t afraid of going big. In 2019, we started what turned out to be one of the best content campaigns of all time—our client went from 0 to 1,000,000 organic visitors per month.

With the numbers growing rapidly, our agency had to follow. This meant hiring writers non-stop and scaling our content team from 1 to 45 writers and Editors in 18 months.

It turns out it’s incredibly difficult to hire a writer online—we learned that the hard way. To find a single top-performing writer that constantly delivers superb articles, we had to evaluate 100+ candidates. And this took a lot of time—our editors and managers had to spend up to two hours per day on hiring, rather than focusing on editing and publishing content.

That’s why, instead of doing everything manually, we decided to invest countless hours and $100,000+ in creating an optimized, automated hiring process that would allow us to hire better, more affordable writers faster.

In the next 10 minutes, we’ll show you how we did it and how you can copy the entire process by understanding:

1. Why it’s so difficult to hire writers that consistently perform
2. Where you can find candidates at every price point
3. How to automate and optimize your hiring process

Where To Find Writers—Our Top 15 Job Boards

Here’s our pick of the 15 best job boards where you can find professional writers:

Read the rest of the article to find an additional 30+ job boards you can use to find top-notch writers.

What Makes Hiring Writers So Incredibly Difficult

If you’re going to a basketball game, you need to get a ticket early if you want the best seat. The same applies if you want to hire a writer—you’re not the only one advertising, and the best candidates get hired quickly.

The best writers go off the market faster than any job board can source new high-quality candidates. This means that it doesn’t matter what job board (or how many) you use if you don’t have an efficient, automated system in place.

You’re not the only company that the best, most affordable writers apply to, and by the time you get to their application, they are already unavailable. In such circumstances, knowing how to find cheap, high-quality writers implies you understand that:

• A perfect hiring platform with only top-notch writers doesn’t exist
• The majority of your applicants won’t be up to the task
• The hiring process must consist of evaluating and testing hundreds of writers and weeding out the bad ones
• The process must be swift to avoid the best ones being hired by someone else

We started hiring on Upwork and soon realized we needed to expand across 20+ job boards. This sounds like a step in the right direction, but it only made everything worse.

It Went From Bad to Worse

Regardless of what job boards we used, the same issues persisted. They weren’t tailored for finding and testing writers. We also couldn’t know how accurate the writers’ edited portfolios were. We also had major difficulties with tracking candidates and knowing where they were in our hiring funnel.

Dealing with Upwork alone was tiresome enough, but when applications started rolling in from Craigslist, email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Glassdoor, and dozens of other hiring platforms, every problem became twentyfold.

Whatever we tried to do, we always struggled with:

• Tracking candidates by their application status
• Responding to applications (or even being aware of their existence)
• Losing track of applications we thought were great initially
• The majority of applicants were still unqualified for the job

At one point, we realized the approach was wrong, and we had to come up with something different altogether.

While we invested thousands of hours into creating content and traffic, we didn’t match the effort and spent only a few dozen hours developing a hiring system.

That had to change.

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

To create a better way to hire writers, we had to find out what exactly caused the problem in the first place. We broke down the entire process into the smallest increments we could:

1. Publishing a lot of high-quality content is a must if you want your website to attract millions of monthly visitors
2. Producing high-quality content requires hiring quality writers
3. Hiring quality writers means evaluating hundreds (if not thousands) of candidates
4. Filtering out unqualified ones and following up with top-tier writers need to be sped up if you have plenty of candidates
5. Filtering out poor candidates faster—that was the missing piece

We quickly realized that it’s easy to figure out where to find writers online—the difficult part was figuring out what to do when you find them.

What We Lacked

We couldn’t find any system that would separate good candidates from bad ones fast. So we asked ourselves: If such a system existed, what would it look like?

We figured out we needed:

1. A single platform that we could use to see all our candidates at once, regardless of the job board they applied through
2. A system that would allow us to sort candidates by application status to know how far down the funnel they are at all times
3. The ability to move candidates through our hiring funnel from a single dashboard—a system that would let us test, invite for interview, reject, and hire candidates without wasting time on manually informing them of status changes
4. The ability to send tests automatically and spot bad applicants with great portfolios
5. Automated communication to eliminate human error and reduce the time needed to move applicants through our hiring funnel

Before building our own automated funnel, we had a system of Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. While we still lacked the first item from the list above, it improved our hiring process and allowed us to create Workello.

Write Your Job Description Copy for Writers

As someone who’s looking to hire writers, you understand the value of quality copy. The first step towards removing bad candidates from your funnel is writing a job description that will deter them from applying.

Your job description should be as specific and clear as possible, without any vague or cliché copy.

When a Writer reads it, they should be fully aware of what the role entails, what responsibilities they will have, and what minimum qualifications you demand. If you won’t consider a candidate without at least 5 years of experience, state so explicitly.

You should also sell your company and specify why a top-quality Writer should choose you over others. State any career advancement opportunities, benefits, or potential salary increases you offer.

Job Description Templates

While it’s important to be specific, that doesn’t mean you have to stress about being original and thinking too much outside the box. If you don’t have a job description copy or don’t know what exact role you’re looking for—don’t worry!

We’ve compiled an extensive database of pre-vetted job descriptions for every role within a content team. All you need to do is adapt it slightly to fit your company’s needs and copy it to your job boards of choice.

Click on the title of the role you need, use our job description template, and watch applications from top-performing writers start rolling in!

• Writer
• Technical Writer
• Copywriter
• Content Writer
• Business Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Senior Copywriter
• Staff Writer
• Instructional Writer
• Senior Writer
• Course Writer
• Research Writer
• SEO Writing
• Catalog Writer
• Fashion Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

In the early days, our Content Managers and Editors were in charge of posting job ads on various boards and marketplaces. It’s no rocket science, but it takes time and effort—our Content Managers spent a couple of hours each day to post them.

If you’re focused on producing high-quality, high-volume content so much that you need several new writers, is it sensible for your Content Managers to waste their time on posting ads instead of producing content?

Of course not, but we had no other choice. Thankfully, you do! We have documented this entire process so you can learn from our experience and avoid going through the same trial-and-error period.

You can sign up for Workello for free today, and we’ll give you access to our knowledge base and show you how to delegate posting job ads to someone else.

Several Job Boards, Hundreds of Applicants, One Single Dashboard

The more job ads you post, the more candidates you reach, and with Workello, you won’t have the issue of not having all applications in one place.

Regardless of whether someone finds your ad on Facebook, Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, or anywhere else, once they decide to apply, they will receive the same Workello application form.

As every candidate will be required to fill the same form, applications will all be of the same format, and you won’t have to worry about some candidates leaving out any bits of crucial information you need to evaluate their applications.

Take a look at our application example.

Watch Candidates Stream In

No matter where you place your job ad, you can use Workello to automate every step—from the moment someone applies to the moment you hire them.

Workello allows you to review all the information in one place and change writers’ application status by selecting the appropriate one from the drop-down menu. Your candidates can have any of the the following statuses:

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

With this system, you’ll know exactly at what stage of your hiring process each candidate is, and you’ll know what steps you need to take. To help you even further, we’ve color-coded each status to sort candidates even faster.

Reject Unqualified Writers

Once a writer submits their application, you can review it in your Workello dashboard. Your editors and content managers can access the dashboard and go through submitted resumes and portfolios.

If the candidate is not up to par, your managers and editors can remove them from the picture by changing their status to “Application Rejected.”

When this happens, the simple change in status will trigger an automated email that will politely inform the candidate about your decision. Email automation will stop them from reaching out with “can I get an update” messages, and you won’t have to waste time manually responding to everyone.

Point, Click, Test

You can’t avoid bad writers sending in their applications. That said, poor candidates are not the biggest problem—bad candidates with great portfolios are!

We’ve all spiced up our CVs when we had the chance. Writing portfolios consist exclusively of polished and published content that’s gone through at least one editor’s hands.

While a portfolio gives you an insight into a writer’s experience, it doesn’t show you what their 1st draft actually looks like.

If you have no testing process and hire exclusively based on candidates’ portfolios, you’ll inevitably end up with unqualified writers on your payroll.

That’s what happened to us—before we introduced writing tests, we paid for plenty of content that was unusable, and our editors had to rewrite from scratch. One of the main features we wanted to introduce to Workello was automating the evaluation of candidates’ skills.

Once you’re happy with the application, all you need to do is change a writer’s status to “Test Candidate,” and they will receive an automated email that:

1. Informs them they’ve passed the initial evaluation
2. Sends them the link to the test (hosted on Workello)

When they submit their work, you’ll be able to tell what their 1st draft looks like and how much editing it requires.

When the writer receives the email and clicks on the test link, the tab they open will look like this:

How To Make a Good Test

Most writers are used to submitting tests to get hired, so you don’t have to worry about being too demanding. That is, up to a certain point.

A good test makes the right balance between:

• Thoroughness—The test must be complex enough to see whether a writer can handle briefs similar to the ones your employees get every day. The instructions need to be clear and show what exactly you expect of your candidate
• Willingness—It’s fine to ask candidates to make an effort and show they want to get the job, but there’s a limit to how much you can ask for. You can’t demand from a candidate to write 2,500-word articles and spend 8+ hours working for a job they may not get

When you make your test, you should tailor it so it lets you assess these aspects of candidates’ writing:

1. Research skills
2. Use of language
3. Article formatting (use of headings, internal and external links, etc.)

Workello can help you tilt the balance in favor of thoroughness.

When writers come across a vague job description and don’t get a follow-up email for a week, companies leave an unprofessional impression—writers won’t commit to demanding tests.

When you use Workello and go through the process we’ve shown you, the writer will feel like they’re being taken seriously and will consider your company worth their time.

Don’t know how to create a perfect test? Swipe ours! You can use the same test we used to assess hundreds of candidates.

Interviewing Candidates

Once a writer submits their test, Workello will automatically change their status to “Test Complete.” Your content managers and editors can filter candidates by this status to quickly see all the candidates who are at this stage in the hiring funnel.

After reviewing the test, you can change the status of candidates who haven’t lived up to your expectations to “Reject Candidate.” Workello will send an automated polite rejection email, notifying rejected candidates that you won’t be extending an offer.

As for candidates whose tests your team liked, all you need to do is update their status to “Invite for Interview,” and Workello will send an automated email with a link to schedule a Zoom call via Calendly.

The Candidate Status Page

Writers themselves can access Workello and see how their application is progressing through the Candidate Status page.

Here, applicants can see what your selection process looks like (in the What to expect next section) and can find answers to many transactional questions so they don’t need to email you about it.

With Workello doing the work for you, you don’t have to worry about missing out on a top Writer due to a lack of correspondence.

This page increases your transparency and professionalism, which makes writers feel more invested in their application.

You can find an example here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Hiring Writers sounds simple when there’s a program that does everything for you. When we started scaling our business, there was nothing like this, and we were in the same place you are now.

We missed out on many great Writers because we couldn’t keep track of all applications that would swarm in from various job boards. It was impossible to follow up with each candidate, and they would lose interest or find another job in no time.

Our Editors weren’t editing—they had to focus on job ads. We created manual tests, Writers submitted incomplete applications, and some of the best ones were gone before we could get to them.

It wasn’t great, it wasn’t productive, but we had no other option. You do!

Workello is a product of thousands of hours, $100,000+, and incremental improvements based on trial and error. You can get all of that for the price of a single page of content—and you can test it out for free!

With an automated hiring funnel dedicated to content teams, we:

1. Reduced the cost of quality content by 75%
2. Went from 1 to 45+ Writers in under 2 years
3. Created one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns of all time
4. Allowed editors to focus on content

Start using Workello for free now. It will take you less than 3 minutes to register and accept new candidates.

Additional Job Boards You Can Use

Now that you finally have an automated funnel that will cut your hiring costs and save you invaluable time on hiring Writers, there’s no reason to limit yourself to a handful of job boards.

Qualified Writers use every option they’ve got to find an adequate job. If you’re looking for additional resources to hire online Writers, check out the following job boards:

• WriteLife Facebook group
• Craigslist
• FinCon Community
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer group
• Editorial Freelancers Association
• The Writer Finder
• ContentGrow
• Society of Professional Journalists
• Virtual Assistant Finder
• Certified Writers
• Clarity
• NABJ
• NASW
• NAHJ
• ASJA
• Journalism Jobs
• Skyword
• HireMyMom
• Zerys
• CloudPeeps
• Copify
• Scripted
• Staffing agencies
• PeoplePerHour
• Storyhackers
• WriterAccess
• Freelancer
• Scribewise
• Muck Rack
• Pod Reacher
• Pitchwhiz
• Masthead Media
• Mediabistro
• Writers Work
• Alexis Grant Media