We Hired 45+ Copywriters and Editors—Learn From Our Mistakes! 

In 2019, we were ContentDistribution.com—a content agency that embarked on one of the most ambitious SEO projects of all time. We managed to grow from 0 to 1,000,000 organic visitors per month in 18 months.

This required high-volume, high-quality content. To deliver it, we had to hire over 45 writers and editors in record time. 

Scaling a content agency at such a rapid pace without an optimized hiring process was a nightmare. Candidates were submitting incomplete applications, contacting us via email, sending their portfolios in Word—everything was chaotic and all over the place. It didn’t take us long to realize there was a problem with our hiring process.

Now, countless hours of work and $100,000+ later, we have an automated hiring funnel that helped us find a copywriter for hire much more efficiently. In the next 10+ minutes, you’ll learn:

1. How to find a copywriter
2. What makes hiring a copywriter difficult
3. How automated testing can help you find the perfect fit faster

Where To Find a Copywriter—Top Job Boards

Check out the pros and cons of the top 15 job boards for hiring copywriters:

Read the rest to learn about the additional 15 websites where you can find top copywriters for affordable prices.

The Key to Hiring Copywriters Is Its Biggest Problem

The best developers go off the market quickly—the same goes for copywriters! You’re not the only company looking to hire a copywriter, and the best ones receive offers in no time. Hiring platforms can’t find new top copywriters as fast as they get hired.

Regardless of what job boards you’re hiring on, you will have to be quick about it and weed through bad candidates with pace.

All job boards have more underqualified candidates than top-performing ones, and they will flood your hiring funnel no matter what you do. To hire a copywriter that would reliably deliver great copy, you have to go through hundreds of applicants and evaluate and test each one as fast as possible.

When we first started hiring copywriters, we looked for them on Upwork and then spread out to many more hiring platforms. Every job website gave us the same problems:

• Portfolios didn’t match candidates’ true copywriting capabilities
• Websites didn’t have specific settings for copywriting listings
• We couldn’t sort candidates by their status in our hiring funnel

The Main Problems

Every time we’d post an ad on another job board, we’d have the same issues, and they only multiplied. We had applications coming in from a myriad of sources—Indeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, email, Craigslist, etc.

Regardless of where we tried to source candidates from, the same issues persisted. We couldn’t:

• Keep track of candidates by their status in the hiring pipeline
• Respond to and log every application
• Lower the number of bad candidates
• Keep note of candidates we initially liked
• Respond to top applicants on time (or at all)

Once we realized there was nothing out there that could address all of the issues at once, we realized it’s time to roll up our sleeves and create something new.

We decided to replicate our commitment to content and invest time, money, and brainpower into an automated hiring funnel designed for content teams. The end result was Workello.

Spot the Best Copywriter From Hundreds of Applicants With Pre-Hire Assessments

When you’re hiring a new copywriter for your team, you risk getting swamped by hundreds of unqualified candidates if you just post a job ad and ask for jobseekers to turn in their resumes and work samples. Portfolio pieces have likely undergone several rounds of editing before they ended up in your inbox, and an extensive resume with numerous projects listed doesn’t directly attest to the copywriting skills. None of that ensures that a candidate is qualified—a top-quality copywriter should be able to prove their worth even without a resume.

By far, the best method of selecting top-quality candidates is pre-employment testing.

While testing is great, it quickly becomes a mare to manage it once you have to assess hundreds (if not thousands) of candidates. Without skill assessment software, you’ll need to message candidates manually, keep track of their progress, and make sure tests don’t get mixed up or lost in a sea of others.

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that automates the entire hiring process and helps you keep assessments under control. Once you create a free account, you can:

1. Set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Post job listings on job boards with the Workello link
3. Wait for applications to show up in your dashboard
4. Test copywriters to see if their skills match their portfolios
5. Assess, reject, and invite candidates to interview from your dashboard

Test Candidates and Streamline Your Hiring Process With Workello

With Workello, you’ll be able to manage hundreds of candidates from the moment they apply until you decide to send someone an offer. Workello automates the entire process and allows you to move candidates through the funnel without ever leaving your dashboard. You can use the platform to test content writers and copywriters. If you’re looking for SEO copywriters, you can use testing specific to them.

Sign up for Workello for free and get to the best copywriter faster than other companies.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

The first step toward creating a new system is understanding what the system is. We broke down our entire working process into smallest partitions and this is what we wrote down:

1. Having the best copy ensures high conversion rates
2. Creating high-quality copy that converts requires hiring exceptional copywriters
3. Hiring a copywriter that will crush it every time demands evaluating hundreds of candidates
4. Finding the best ones demands spotting and filtering out bad ones quickly
5. Identifying bad candidates—this was our biggest problem

We never had an issue with receiving applications. The issue was what to do with them once they start piling up.

In comes Workello.

We needed an automated system that would enable us to overcome all the issues we’ve encountered while hiring copywriters. 

The main features we knew we had to have were:

1. A single platform that would display all applications regardless of their source (i.e., the job board they come from)
2. An optimized system that would let us sort candidates by status and move them through our hiring funnel with a single click
3. A dashboard as a single point of access for evaluating, testing, interviewing, and hiring new copywriters
4. An automatically-sent writing test that would let us spot bad copywriters with impressive portfolios
5. Communication automation to save us time on email correspondence and remove the possibility of human error

We first started with Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier, which was an improvement on what we had before, but it still fell a little short of our vision. Over thousands of hours and countless iterations, this improvised workflow evolved into the fully optimized system that is Workello.

Why Your Copywriter Job Description Is Important

Since you’re seeking a high-quality copywriter, you know the value of great copy. The same concept applies to job descriptions.

Every job ad will attract many unqualified candidates, but an ad with a great job description will see the number of such candidates plummet. A great job description must include details and specifics of what the job entails.

You have to explain exactly what the responsibilities of the job are, and you need to be clear about what qualifications and skill set you demand so that an unqualified copywriter gets discouraged. Explicitly state if experience in a particular niche is a job requirement.

Remember what we said about top copywriters getting hired quickly? You should use your description to also sell your company and attract top performers. Include any benefits they might get once they accept your offer, such as bonuses, salary increases, health plans, career advancement and learning opportunities, and other perks.

If you’re not quite sure how to write a description or what specific role you’re looking for, you can use our comprehensive database of pre-vetted templates. Click on one of the links below, copy and adapt our job description slightly to fit your company, and you’re ready to post your ad!

• Copywriter
• Technical Writer
• Writer
• Content Writer
• Junior Copywriter
• B2B Copywriter
• Senior Copywriter
• Pharmaceutical Copywriter
• Automotive Copywriter
• Social Media Copywriter
• Conversion Copywriter
• SEO Copywriter
• Fashion Copywriter
• Freelance Copywriter
• Medical Copywriter

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

Since there wasn’t anyone in our agency dedicated to hiring new people, our editors and content managers had to take time out of their day to deal with posting job ads. It’s not brain surgery, but it still took time that could have been invested into producing top-quality content.

The problem with hiring a Recruiting Coordinator was the fact that we had to document the entire hiring process and educate them before we could delegate the job. 

We spent hundreds of hours R&D-ing the process and iterating on it, but you don’t have to.

When you sign up for Workello for free, you’ll get access to our playbooks so you can delegate job ad distribution to someone else!

A Single Dashboard To Make Your Life Easier

Workello allows you to post ads on as many job boards as you like and cast a wider net without worrying about where copywriters apply. This is thanks to a unified dashboard and a Workello-hosted application form.

Regardless of the job board, all candidates will see the same form, which will result in applications of the same format going to the same place—your Workello dashboard. You will no longer have to track applications manually and reach out to candidates due to incomplete submissions.

You can find an application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

The dashboard will be your point of access for every step of the hiring process. You will use the same page to evaluate, send a test, review, invite for an interview, and extend an offer to copywriters of your choice.

The process of moving candidates through the funnel is done by changing their candidate status from a drop-down menu with the following options:

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

Each status is color-coded so that you can see how many candidates you have in each stage of your hiring funnel at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Copywriters

Once you receive an application, your content managers and editors can evaluate it. If they don’t like the candidate’s portfolio, they can remove them from your funnel by changing their status to “Application Rejected.” 

The change in status will result in Workello sending an automated email that will politely inform the candidate you won’t consider them this time.

This will help you save time by not having to send the email manually, and you won’t receive hundreds of emails from candidates wondering what the status of their application is.

Point, Click, Test

If the initial application looks good, that doesn’t mean that the candidate is the perfect fit for your organization. The problem is, portfolios are rarely an accurate representation of someone’s copywriting skills. The final copy that they show in their portfolios has likely gone through several iterations and has been fine-tuned after multiple feedback sessions. You can see their true work only through testing.

In our early days, we didn’t test our candidates and hired them based on their applications alone. Soon, we had several copywriters on our payroll that produced unusable copy. Our editors had to heavily edit their work or rewrite it entirely, and we wasted a ton of money.

This was unacceptable, and the only way to avoid it was to introduce testing.

With Workello, you can automate the process by changing an applicant’s status to “Test Candidate.” This will trigger an automated email congratulating them on reaching the next phase and sending them a link to a writing test.

When they click on the link, they will see something like this:

You can always adjust the writing test or plug in your own into Workello to gauge how good of a fit each candidate is for your organization.

How To Make a Good Test

When you are hiring a copywriter, you need to test them on three main aspects of their work:

1. Command of language
2. Understanding of the audience’s pain points
3. The ability to “sell” the biggest benefits of the product or service

You need to make a test that will challenge copywriters and let them demonstrate their qualities.

The test needs to be complex enough for you to be able to discern between great copywriters and unqualified candidates. At the same time, you mustn’t overdo it and give them something that would take them 8+ hours to complete. Most people wouldn’t be willing to spend a full day’s worth of work on a test, knowing there’s a chance they won’t get hired.

Making a test properly means hitting that sweet spot between applicants’ willingness to complete it and the complexity you need to gauge their skills. The good news is, Workello allows you to be more thorough.

As your candidates receive a fast response every step of the way and have all the necessary information, they will appreciate your professionalism and will be willing to invest more time into your company.

If you don’t know how to go about it, you can use our writing test as a starting point and modify it to test copywriting candidates.

Interviewing Candidates

Once candidates press the Submit Test button, their status will automatically change to “Test Complete,” and your managers and editors will be able to review their work. When they do so, they have two options:

1. Reject Candidate—Triggers an automated rejection email
2. Invite for Interview—Trigger an automated email with a Calendly link they can use to schedule a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

To make everything easier for the candidates as well, we’ve created the Candidate Status page that your applicants can access to find information about their application, instead of asking for it via email.

The page contains updates on the candidate status, as well as a “What to expect next” section that informs them about your selection process. 

With this page, they don’t have to reach out to your HR department, and it eliminates the need to worry about missing out on a great candidate because you failed to reply to an email.

You can see what the Candidate Status page looks like here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Hiring a copywriter sounds like a piece of cake when everything is automated and done for you. When we had to expand our team and hire new people, there was nothing that would optimize the process for us.

We couldn’t keep track of all applications that would swarm us from different job boards, and we missed out on many great copywriters because of it. They would lose their interest or find other jobs because we didn’t follow up with them in time.

Our editors were posting job ads instead of editing content. Our managers dealt with incomplete applications and writing tests manually instead of focusing on their primary job. We had no workaround for these problems, but you do!

We went through a trial-and-error process that required $100,000+ and countless hours of work to come up with Workello. You can get it now for the price of a single content page!

This is what we accomplished:

1. Scaled our business from 1 to 45+ employees in under 2 years
2. Lowered our cost of content by 75%
3. Worked on one of the greatest SEO campaigns of all time
4. Allowed our editors and content managers to focus on content and do what they do best

With Workello, you can replicate our success.

Try out Workello for free! It’s pre-configured so that you can automate your funnel and start accepting new candidates in less than 3 minutes.

How To Find A Good Copywriter—Additional Job Boards

With Workello at your side, you can spread out and post ads on all the best websites for copywriters out there. Take a look at some of the additional job boards for hiring a copywriter:

• Copify
• Pitchwhiz
• Mediabistro
• Pure Content
• Skyword
• ContentGrow
• PeoplePerHour
• Craigslist
• Zerys
• Muck Rack
• Pod Reacher
• Scribewise
• Freelancer
• Masthead Media
• HireMyMom