We Turned Hiring a Content Manager Into a Breeze—You Can Do the Same!

In 2019, we were a one-man content agency, ContentDistribution.com. We had no Content Managers, Editors, or a team of Writers, but we took on a client and a project that turned out to be one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time.

Our client grew from 0 to 1,500,000 organic monthly visitors in 24 months.

We couldn’t have achieved this without growing rapidly as a company. Our goal was to hire 45+ Writers and Editors in under 2 years to be able to produce 600+ pages of content each month. We also needed Content Managers to keep our content machine running smoothly.

At the time, we thought hiring someone was as easy as posting job ads online and hiring candidates with the best portfolios. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Applications would flood in from multiple sources, and we couldn’t keep track, often missing many of them. Candidates would contact us via email, we didn’t know what information we shared with which candidate, and they would submit incomplete applications or a Word portfolio. Everything was off.

We dissected our hiring process and realized we had the wrong approach. We lacked automation—a system that would get rid of having to do menial tasks manually and help us find the best candidates with ease.

We needed such an automated hiring funnel, but there wasn’t one that provided a solution to all of our problems. That’s why we decided to make our own.

Countless hours of work and $100,000+ went into Workello—an automated hiring funnel dedicated to hiring content agency team members.

In the next 10 minutes, you’ll learn:

1. Where to find and hire a Content Manager
2. What makes hiring a Content Writer with a manual hiring process so difficult
3. How to hire a Content Manager that will suit your company the best using automated testing

Job Boards To Use When You Need To Find a Content Manager

We looked for Content Managers on multiple websites, and this is our pick of the top 15 job boards you should use. Learn about their pros and cons:

Check out the rest of the article to find another 15 websites for sourcing Content Managers.

The Grueling Truth Behind Hiring a Content Manager

Content Managers are in high demand—so many companies have a Content Manager job opening even if content production is not their primary industry. When you visit any job board, you’ll find countless job ads for this position. The best candidates looking for a new job can pick and choose between offers and get off the market in a matter of days.

This means that the majority of job seekers on each platform are unqualified candidates who struggle to land a job quickly. That’s what you have to deal with.

That doesn’t translate into having to settle for a mediocre candidate. Top-notch ones are still available, but to find them, you will need to evaluate and test hundreds of applicants, and you’ll need to do it faster than your competition.

When hundreds of applications start coming your way from multiple websites, you’ll soon realize how difficult it is to go through each one.

When we started hiring new people, we posted an ad on Upwork and soon added many other platforms to our job-listing portfolio.

Regardless of the website we used, we always struggled with the same problems:

• We couldn’t apply any settings to optimize our Content Manager hiring process
• We had no means of sorting candidates by their status in the hiring funnel
• Portfolios submitted were not an honest portrayal of candidates’ skill sets

We would receive applications from SimplyHired, Monster, Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and so on, but no job board offered a way to eradicate any of the issues. Every website made it difficult to:

• Track candidates
• Log applications and message candidates
• Contact candidates that show promise in a timely fashion
• Keep note of applications that piqued our interest
• Lower the number of unqualified applicants

We were searching for a system that would get rid of all these issues, but we couldn’t find one that would do everything the way we needed it to. Instead of settling for something that did an alright job, we decided to create an ATS that would focus on hiring content team members. That’s how Workello came to be.

Don’t Hire a Content Manager Before You Test Their Skills

When you’re hiring for a senior content management role—whether it’s a content director, head of content, content manager, or content strategist or publisher—you’ll be faced with a specific recruitment dilemma. Chances are most of your applicants will submit portfolios with impressive lists of content campaigns they worked on. How can you tell what their contribution to the successes of those campaigns was?

You can’t know for certain by looking at their CV. The only way to know how skilled they actually are is to test them even before you spend time interviewing them.

When you have tens or hundreds of applicants, testing each one quickly becomes impossible to manage unless you have skill assessment software. Workello removes the issue of having to send and store tests manually by automating the entire process and keeping everything organized. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for free and create your hiring funnel with our pre-configured settings in under 3 minutes
2. Create your Workello job ad and use the link to post on as many job boards
3. Wait for applications to start showing up in your single-page dashboard
4. Test candidates to assess their skills 
5. Use the dashboard to assess, reject, and interview candidates and send an offer to the best one

Speed Up the Testing Phase and Hire the Top 1% Candidates With Workello

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that automates the entire hiring process. You can use the dashboard to assess, test, interview, and reject candidates. All you need to do is change their application status. 

Besides content managers, you can use the platform to test content marketers and other content team members, such as technical writers, copywriters, and content writers. If your SEO team needs new members, you can also test SEO writers and SEO copywriters.

Sign up for free and enjoy the fastest and most efficient pre-employment assessment process with Workello.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

When we tasked ourselves with revamping our hiring process, we had to take a step back and figure out what the process consisted of and what its weak points were.

Here’s how we saw it:

1. Turning content into traffic requires executing a bulletproof SEO strategy
2. Executing an SEO strategy successfully requires Content Managers to optimize content production
3. Hiring a Content Manager who knows how to handle business requires evaluating hundreds of candidates
4. Spotting the best candidate demands filtering out the bad ones swiftly
5. Filtering out bad candidates—that’s what we struggled with

Our job ads always attracted hundreds of applicants on multiple job boards. The problem we had was figuring out what to do with them once they arrived.

The only way to improve the way we handled applications was to remodel our entire hiring process. We wanted to introduce a hiring system that would provide us with a:

1. Platform that lets us access all applications from the same dashboard
2. System that allows us to sort candidates according to their status in the funnel with a single click
3. One-page layout to evaluate, test, interview, and hire Content Managers
4. Test sent automatically to candidates to let us spot bad Managers with impressive experience
5. Email messaging automation that saves time and removes the chance of human error

At first, we worked with Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It wasn’t ideal by any stretch, but it showed us how we could optimize our hiring process and highlighted what our ideal ATS needed to have. It allowed us to create Workello.

Why You Should Write a Top-Notch Job Description

No job ad is ideal—you’ll always receive applications from inadequate candidates. That is unavoidable. If you write a quality job description, though, you will lower the number of underqualified candidates significantly.

A good job description goes into detail about the requirements of the role and the responsibilities that your new employee will have. You need to specify what exactly you expect from your ideal employee. The more specific you get, the fewer unqualified candidates will apply.

Your job description should also serve as your selling point. Remember that the best candidates are sought after by multiple companies. You should use your job description to attract the best candidates and make them choose your organization over someone else’s.

To do that, you should list all benefits you offer, including career advancement, salary increase, learning opportunities, health plans, and so on.

If you don’t know how to write a job description or you’re not certain about which role you should hire, you can access our database of pre-vetted job description templates and copy them.

All you need to do is click on the job title, adapt the template slightly so that it matches your organization’s needs, and you can start posting job ads on every job-listing website you can find!

• Content Manager
• SEO Content Manager
• B2B Content Manager
• Social Media Content Manager
• Content Operations Manager
• Editorial Manager
• Content Delivery Manager
• Senior Content Marketing Manager
• Senior Web Content Manager
• Sports Social Content Manager
• Technical Writing Manager
• Editorial Project Manager

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started expanding our company in 2019, our Managers were in charge of posting job ads on every job board we could find. It wasn’t a mind-boggling task, but it was time-consuming.

Instead of focusing on content production that would deliver new visitors to our clients’ websites, our Managers had to focus on seeking new Writers.

This impacted our primary goal, which was executing SEO strategies that would stand out.

The problem was that we couldn’t hire someone new and delegate job ad distribution to them without documenting our hiring process and educating the new employee on how we hired new Content Managers.

Creating documentation about our hiring process was a pain in the backside that took us months to do, but you don’t have to go through the same process.

When you register for Workello for free, you’ll be able to use our documentation and delegate job ad distribution to someone else without any trouble!

Workello Dashboard Gathers All Applications in One Place

Before we started using Workello, every job board would have its own database of applications, and we had to access each website to get to candidates’ CVs and portfolios.

Workello makes this easy.

Our dashboard gathers all applications in one place, and all you need to do is log in to your Workello account to find every candidate’s application, regardless of the job board they found your job ad on.

When you post a job ad on a job board, you can use the Workello-hosted application form. This way, every candidate has to submit all documents that you require. You will no longer have to reach out to candidates that sent their applications without a resume or a portfolio.

Take a look at an application example.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Workello’s dashboard allows you to evaluate, test, and invite candidates for an interview—all with a single click. When you find the perfect candidate, you can extend an offer to them just as easily.

With Workello—a fully-automated hiring funnel—you can move candidates through different stages of your hiring funnel by choosing the adequate option from the drop-down menu. The options are as follows:

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

The statuses are color-coded, allowing you to see how many candidates are in every stage of your hiring funnel.

Reject Unqualified Content Managers

The majority of candidates that apply for the position in your company will be underqualified. When an application appears in your dashboard, your Content and HR Managers can review the application and see whether the candidate is good enough to enter the next stage of your hiring funnel.

If the candidate is not good enough, your Managers can change their status to “Application Rejected,” removing the unqualified applicant from the funnel.

When this happens, the candidate will receive an automated email that informs them politely that you won’t move them to the next phase of the selection process.

The automated email removes the need for your Managers to notify candidates manually, and applicants won’t send unnecessary messages inquiring about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

When you receive an application that seems great on paper, you need to test the candidate’s skills before you can be sure they’re good enough for the job.

When a candidate submits their portfolio, you can’t be sure how much influence they had on the SEO campaign they say they worked on.

Most agencies use more than one Content Manager on their SEO projects, and you can’t be certain to what extent the candidate affected the outcome.

Making important decisions is the crux of a Content Manager’s position, and you need to assess a candidate’s capabilities to create strategies and manage Writers.

When we were on the hiring spree initially, we didn’t test our applicants, and we hired people based on their portfolios. Hiring Managers without testing their skills resulted in thousands of dollars spent on content that couldn’t be published.

Our Writers would create content on a given topic, and our Editors would edit and prepare it for publishing, only for us to figure out that the topic didn’t match with our target audience or was way overpopulated. 

That’s why automated testing was the first bullet on our to-do list when we started working on Workello.

When your Managers deem an application good enough, they can change the candidate’s status to “Test Candidate,” which will trigger an automated email that:

1. Congratulates the candidate on reaching the next stage
2. Includes a link to the test they have to complete

A Writer’s test looks like this:

How To Make a Good Test

Testing candidates is not uncommon—most job seekers are used to it. Still, you can’t create an overcomplicated test that no candidate will be willing to complete.

A good test creates a balance between an applicant’s willingness to complete it and the thoroughness of testing.

If you overdo it and create a test that takes 8+ hours to finish, most candidates won’t do it, and you will miss out on great applicants due to their lack of motivation. Don’t forget that they’re completing the test for free—most candidates won’t even receive an offer from you.

That doesn’t mean that your test should be easy to complete. The point of testing is to assess their skills.

Your test should include a real-life scenario that your company has faced in the past to allow you to see how the candidate would act.

For instance, you can ask them how they would ensure content production doesn’t stall when the agency moves to a different project that includes writing articles your Writers aren’t accustomed to.

Another example would be testing your candidates on how they would deal with a significant backlog and motivate Writers to keep up with the production demand.

Luckily for you, Workello allows you to create a test that’s more thorough.

When your candidates apply for the job, they will receive emails that inform them about their application status and share insight into your selection process.

This contributes to your company’s perceived transparency, and most job seekers are willing to put in extra effort for companies that deal with candidates professionally.

Check out the test we use to hire Writers and see how demanding you can be when creating a Content Manager test.

Interviewing Candidates

When an applicant submits their test, their candidate status automatically changes to “Test Complete.”

You and your employees responsible for hiring a Content Manager will be able to access the test and review it.

After the review, Workello offers you two statuses to select for the candidate:

1. Reject Candidate—Triggers an automated email that notifies the candidate they failed the test
2. Invite for Interview—Triggers an automated email that includes a Calendly link the candidate can use to schedule a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

Workello has a page for candidates as well. The Candidate Status page allows applicants to learn about their application status without having to send an email asking for information. 

The page also includes a “What to expect next” section that informs candidates about the next stages in your selection process.

The Candidate Status page lets applicants know what’s going on with their application every step of the way. Most candidates are reluctant to contact the company to ask about their application status and give up on the job opening due to the lack of transparency. This page changes that.

Thanks to the page, you won’t have to worry about missing out on a top-performing candidate due to an unresponded email.

Check out the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Finding people that apply for a Content Manager position is easy. Finding a quality Content Manager that will contribute to your company is difficult.

An automated hiring funnel makes everything trouble-free. When we started hiring, we had no automated system to rely on.

After posting job ads on multiple websites, hundreds of applications would come our way, and we couldn’t keep track of them. We had to access every individual job board to find applications, and that took more time than we expected.

Weeks would go by before we reached out to a candidate. By then, they would get a job at a different company or grow disinterested in the position we were offering.

Our Content Managers had to cope with distributing job ads across the internet instead of focusing on their primary responsibility—content production.

We realized we had to come up with an automated hiring funnel from scratch, and we were ready to invest money and brainpower into it. After $100,000+ and countless hours, we created Workello, which allowed us to:

1. Scale our company from 1 to 45+ employees in under 2 years
2. Reduce the cost of content by 75%
3. Produce one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever
4. Let our Content Managers focus on content production instead of hiring new Writers

It took us years to create such a system, and it cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to create it. For you, it will cost less than a single page of content!

Try out Workello for free! When you sign up, you will be able to accept new candidates in less than 3 minutes.

Hiring a Content Manager—Other Websites You Can Use

With an automated hiring funnel that optimizes your hiring process by your side, you have no reason not to post a job ad on as many job boards as you can find.

Check out the following websites Content Managers use to find a job:

• PeoplePerHour
• Scribewise
• Copify
• CloudPeeps
• Craigslist
• Pitchwhiz
• Mediabistro
• HireMyMom
• Masthead Media
• Pod Reacher
• Storyhackers
• ContentGrow
• Scripted
• Freelancer
• Journalism Jobs