The #1 Thing We Wish We Knew When We Started Hiring Writers

In 2019, we were a one-person content agency, called ContentDistribution.com. Being understaffed didn’t stop us from shooting for the stars and reaching our ambitious goals. We took on a client and managed to execute one of the most ambitious SEO projects ever.

Their website grew from 0 to 1,500,000 organic monthly visitors in less than 2 years thanks to our content.

To achieve such numbers, we had to produce 600+ pages of content each month, which meant we had to scale fast. We grew our team from 1 to 45+ writers and editors in just 18 months! In order to accomplish this, we had to evaluate thousands of people, interview a couple hundred, hire about 100, and keep the best 45.

As you can imagine, hiring a hundred people is a nightmare, especially when you’re doing everything manually. As soon as we posted job ads on a dozen or so job boards, we were swamped with applications. 

To make matters worse, half of them were incomplete, candidates often submitted portfolios that weren’t reflective of their actual writing skills, and we had no way to track where every candidate was in our hiring funnel. As a result, we were stuck in a never-ending hiring cycle. 

Our experience was dreadful, and we decided to do something about it. We invested over $100,000 and countless work hours in revamping our hiring system and creating an automated hiring funnel that enabled us hire better, more affordable writers faster.

With Workello, we managed to cut hiring costs in half and speed up our time to hire tenfold! In the next 10 minutes, we’ll show you:

1. Where to find professional social media writers
2. Why everybody struggles with hiring top-quality writers
3. How you can set up a fully automated hiring funnel and hire the top 1% of social media writers fast

Top 15 Websites for Hiring a Professional Writer for Social Media

We’ve tested out dozens of online job boards in our pursuit of writers. This is our top 15 pick:

Why It’s More Difficult To Hire Writers Than Anybody Else

Every company that wants to establish a strong online presence needs content writers. It’s one of the most sought-after positions, second only to developers.

With hundreds of companies looking to hire writers for social media at all times, the best candidates get off the market in an instant. Job boards can’t keep up with the demand, and as a result, the vast majority of candidates available are unqualified.

That doesn’t mean all the good ones are gone for good—it just means you need to test and evaluate hundreds of applicants to get to the top candidate, and you need to do it faster than your competition.

We initially looked for writers on Upwork, but soon expanded our list of job boards to various others—Craigslist, LinkedIn, Indeed, SimplyHired, etc. No matter which job board we used and how we approached it, we always faced the same issues. 

We’d always struggle with:

• Keeping track of all incoming applications
• Sorting candidates by their application status in our hiring funnel
• Responding to the best candidates on time (or ever)
• Logging candidates whose applications we liked at the beginning
• Decreasing the number of poor candidates

Since we couldn’t change how job boards operated, we had to change our hiring process. The trouble was, there wasn’t a single tool that would help us resolve all of these issues at once. We tested out several ATSs, and while they offered solutions to some problems, they weren’t specifically designed for hiring writers, so we always lacked a few key functionalities. That’s why we decided to create our own.

After putting countless hours, thousands of dollars, and all our brain power into developing the perfect automated hiring funnel, we finally came up with Workello!

Pre-Hire Assessments Allow You To Hire the Best Writer in Your Niche

You’ll never get an applicant that admits they have no idea how to write content for your niche. While their portfolios may include some industry-related articles, you’ll never know how good they are at it until you see their first draft. Don’t wait to hire them for that to happen—improve your hiring process with pre-employment assessments.

Coming up with a writing test is the easy part. What do you do when hundreds of writing samples start flooding your inbox? You need skill assessment software to keep the process organized and to avoid missing out on a top candidate due to an email you forgot to respond to.

Workello will entirely automate your hiring process and take care of assessment management. You only need to:

1. Create a free account and set up a pre-configured hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Add a Workello link to your job listings (works with all job boards)
3. Wait for applications to start coming your way
4. Send tests to spot bad writers with impressive portfolios fast
5. Reject, interview, and hire the best candidates with a single click

Streamline Your Testing Process and Hire the Top 1% of Writers With Workello

With Workello—high-volume recruiting software—you can automate your entire hiring process and cut costs by 50%. Use our platform to test content writers for whatever writing needs you have, be it technical, SEO, or any other type of writing. You can also assess copywriters and SEO copywriters.

Sign up for free and assess, test, reject, interview, and hire writers from your Workello dashboard effortlessly.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

We wanted to completely revamp our hiring process, but before we could develop a new system, we had to break down the existing process and see exactly what elements needed to change. 

This is how we saw it:

1. Growing your social media following and improving your engagement rates required consistent publishing of relevant, high-quality content
2. Only the top-quality social media writers can create premium quality content consistently
3. Hiring a top-performing at an affordable rate meant evaluating hundreds of candidates
4. Finding the best candidate among hundreds of applications required sorting out bad ones fast
5. Efficiently filtering out unsuitable candidates—that’s what we didn’t have an answer for

Finding writers looking to work for reasonable pay was never an issue. The problem was, most of them weren’t good enough.

We didn’t know how to manage candidates and go through thousands of bad applications to get to the few good ones fast. We needed a system that would do that for us.

A system that would allow us to get to the best candidate fast had to consist of:

1. A single access point to all applications, regardless of the job board that sourced them
2. Candidate-sorting capabilities that would allow us to track applicants by their status and move them through the funnel effortlessly
3. A single dashboard to evaluate, test, interview, and hire writers
4. An automated test we would use to spot bad writers with great portfolios
5. Automated communication to save time on email correspondence and avoid human error

Our initial solution was a mix of Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was a step in the right direction, but it was far from perfect. We wanted a fully-functional hiring system that would tick all the boxes. It took us thousands of hours and many iterative adjustments, but we finally came up with an automated system that worked like a charm—Workello!

What Makes Your Job Description Valuable

Most companies don’t invest enough time into drafting a super-specific job description and instead write vague job ad copy that doesn’t thoroughly explain the role they’re hiring for. That’s the first mistake in their hiring process.

You mustn’t forget that your job description is the first point of contact between your company and all interested candidates. A specific, in-depth one can be a powerful tool to deter underqualified candidates and attract top-performing ones.

A good job description goes into detail about what the role entails. You should specify what the responsibilities of the job are, as well as what requirements candidates must meet to be considered for the role. The more detailed you get, the less applications from unqualified candidates you’ll receive. 

Another goal of your description is to attract the best writers and get them to apply. As hundreds of companies seek writers, the best ones have a wealth of choices. That’s why you should highlight any benefits you offer, such as health plans, bonuses, career advancement opportunities, salary increases, and so on.

If you’re not sure what your job description should look like or you don’t know what the exact position you’re looking for is, you can go through our database of pre-vetted job description templates.

All you need to do is click on the role you’re interested in, copy the template for free, adapt it slightly to fit your company’s needs, and you’re good to go. We have templates for any role within a content and social media teams, including:

• Social Media Content Creator
• Social Media Copywriter
• Writer
• Copywriter
• Associate Writer
• Senior Writer
• Senior Copywriter
• Junior Copywriter
• Content Writer
• Marketing Communications Writer
• Social Media Content Coordinator
• Social Media Marketing Coordinator
• Multimedia Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Digital and Multiplatform Content Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started hiring, we didn’t have a recruiter to handle job ad distribution for us. Instead, our content managers and editors had to deal with posting job ads on various job boards.

It was no brain surgery, but it took a lot of time, and our managers had to take their focus off content production.

Still, we couldn’t go out and hire the first recruiter that crosses our path. We needed to document our entire hiring process before we could delegate it to someone else. And that required documenting every step. 

We spent dozens of hours on documentation, and now, you don’t have to!

When you sign up for Workello for free, you’ll get access to our comprehensive knowledge base so you can delegate the job to someone else with ease!

Why Workello Dashboard Will Be a Game-Changer for You

If you post your job ad on multiple job boards, you’d have to check each and every one of them daily and log all incoming applications, typically in a spreadsheet. This is not only tedious, but also a complete waste of time. Workello solves that problem by aggregating all applications in a single, unified dashboard, regardless of what job board the candidates applied from. 

Thanks to our Workello-hosted application form, every time someone applies, their application will show up in your dashboard. On top of that, all applications will be in complete and in the same format since Workello won’t let candidates submit them if they don’t fill the required fields.

This way, you won’t have to keep track of applications and log them manually. You also won’t have to follow up with candidates who leave out any necessary information.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Your unique Workello dashboard will be your one-stop shop for the entire hiring process. Without ever leaving the dashboard, you’ll be able to do it all—evaluate, send a test, review, invite for an interview, and extend an offer to the perfect writer.

To move candidates through the funnel, all you need to do is change their candidate status from the drop-down menu. The available options are:

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

With every status being color-coded, you’ll be able to tell how many candidates you have in each stage of your hiring funnel at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Writers

As soon as someone submits an application, it will show up in your dashboard and your managers will be able to evaluate it immediately. If they find the candidate unsatisfactory, they can remove them from the funnel by changing the status to “Application Rejected.”

This triggers an automated email that politely informs candidates about their unsuccessful application.

You will no longer have to notify unsuitable candidates manually, and they won’t clutter your inbox with questions about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

A great portfolio doesn’t automatically equate to a great candidate. Portfolios are rarely an accurate representation of a writer’s capabilities.

Candidates use only their best work for portfolios, and it’s work that’s been edited by at least one editor. Social media writers list successful campaigns they worked on, but you can’t tell how much they contributed to a campaign’s success. The only way to see how good they actually are is by testing them.

When we were in our hiring frenzy, we lacked this important step and hired people based on their portfolios alone. It was a mistake that came back to bite us.

We spent thousands of dollars on writers who turned in unusable content that our editors had to edit heavily or rewrite from scratch. That’s why we now use automated testing to see a writer’s first draft quality first-hand, before extending an offer.

Workello features built-in testing capabilities, automating the entire process. All you need to do is put together a test once, and it’ll be automatically sent to candidates once you select the “Test Candidate” option from your dashboard. All it takes is a single click, and they’ll receive an automated email congratulating them on moving on to the next stage of your hiring process, with a link to the written test assignment. 

When they open the link, they’ll see a page similar to this:

How To Make a Good Test

Testing has become common practice for writers, so they won’t be too surprised when you ask them to complete a test. This doesn’t mean you can go overboard with it and ask them to create a dozen different posts for your social media campaign. While nobody minds demonstrating their skills, writers are unwilling to spend a full workday on a test assignment, especially if it’s unpaid.

Making a good test means finding the balance between thoroughness and candidates’ willingness to complete the test.

Creating a complex test will be counterproductive as nobody will go through with it. Candidates know that the majority of them won’t land the job, and you’re asking them to do something for free for a company that may not hire them.

Still, the test needs to go into enough depth so that you can assess candidates’ skills on:

1. Command of language
2. Writing social media copy
3. Social media marketing knowledge
4. Stylistical adaptability for different platforms

Finding the balance between candidates’ willingness and thoroughness can be tough, but Workello makes it much easier.

With Workello, candidates will see your professional and transparent approach toward your hiring process, which they will greatly appreciate. They receive timely emails whenever their application status changes, and they’ll have all the information they need on the Candidate Status page . When applying for a company that cares about candidate experience, most people are willing to put extra effort into getting the job.

Need help with writing your test and finding that sweet spot between complexity and brevity? Check out the test we used to hire content writers and adapt it slightly to test writers for social media!

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate completes the test, their candidate status will automatically switch to “Test Complete.” When that happens, your content managers and editors will be able to access the test and review it.

When they assess the test, they can change the candidate status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Triggers an automated email with a rejection note
2. Invite for Interview—Triggers an automated email with a congratulatory message and a Calendly link the candidate can use to schedule an online meeting

The Candidate Status Page

The Candidate Status makes the selection process smoother on the candidates’ end as well. The page contains information about their application status, as well as a “What to expect next” section that lays out your entire selection process.

This way, candidates don’t have to reach out to your recruiter with questions such as:

• Did you receive my application?
• Did you receive my test?
• When can I expect the results?
• What are the next steps?

The page will keep the correspondence between your recruiters and candidates to a minimum. Your recruiters won’t waste their time composing unnecessary replies, and you won’t have to worry about missing out on a candidate due to an unresponded email.

Take a look at what the Candidate Status page looks like.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

With an automated hiring system that does everything for you, hiring a professional writer for social media is a breeze. When we hired writers, there was no ATS like Workello to make our life easier.

We bumped into problems every step of the way. It was almost impossible to track candidates that would come in from various job boards, and we’d take weeks to find their applications.

Many candidates would quickly grow disinterested or find a job elsewhere. We missed out on many top writers due to our inefficiency.

Our content managers had to spend a few hours each day doing a recruiter’s job instead of focusing on content production, and our whole company suffered because of it.

We did it the hard way—you don’t!

After thousands of hours that have gone into creating a perfect ATS, we’re now able to offer Workello to you. It cost us over $100,000 to make it—you can have it for the price of a single page of content. 

With Workello by our side, we succeeded in:

1. Growing our business from 1 to 45+ writers and editors in under 2 years
2. Dropping our cost of content by 75%
3. Pulling off one of the greatest SEO campaigns ever
4. Letting content managers and editors manage and edit content, not post job ads online

With Workello, you can do the same!

Try out Workello for free! It’s pre-configured so that you can start accepting new candidates in under 3 minutes.

Hiring a Professional Writer for Social Media—Additional Job Boards

When you have an ATS that puts all the applications in one place, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t expand your “hunting grounds” and post job listings on as many job boards. The best candidate may be looking for a job, but they may be looking for it on a website that’s not Upwork.

Check out these job boards to find great writer candidates:

• Pitchwhiz
• Certified Writers
• ContentGrow
• Craigslist
• Skyword
• Mediabistro
• Freelancer
• Masthead Media
• Muck Rack
• Pod Reacher
• HireMyMom
• The Writer Finder
• CloudPeeps
• Scribewise
• Storyhackers