We Know First-Hand That Hiring Writers Is Difficult

Before we had Workello, a fully optimized and automated hiring funnel, we were a seriously under-staffed content marketing agency, known as Content Distribution. We realized we lacked skilled writers when we took on a client who needed a lot of high-quality content produced fast. 

It was an ambitious project that resulted in two significant events:

1. We ran one of the best SEO campaigns of all time
2. We scaled a team from 1 to 45 qualified writers and editors in only 18 months

The path to these two major wins was a bumpy one. To create high-quality content that would grow our client from 0 to 1,000,000 organic visitors per month, we needed to find those qualified writers and editors fast. It didn’t take us long to learn that we were going about the hiring process all wrong.

It was a painful ordeal. Finding one good writer involved evaluating a hundred candidates. Our editors and content managers had to dedicate up to two hours per day to hiring, while their primary responsibilities suffered. 

We received piles of applications that were often incomplete. What is more, they came from various sources—emails, DMs, etc. Some of the portfolios candidates submitted were Word documents. It was impossible to keep track of the candidates and know where they were in our hiring funnel. 

Now, tens of thousands of hours and dollars later, we have Workello. Our automated and optimized hiring platform allows us to find and hire competent full-time writers, part-time writers, and different niche writers fast! 

In the next 10 minutes, you will find out:

1. Where to find part-time writers
2. What makes hiring part-time writers so hard
3. How to leverage automation to test and evaluate more candidates

Where To Find Part-Time Writers—Top 15 Job Boards

The following are the most popular job boards for hiring part-time writers. Check out the pros and cons of each option:

Read the rest of the article to find 30 more job boards and learn how to hire qualified part-time writers faster at any price point.

Why Is Hiring Part-Time Writers Tough

Finding top-performers for any role is difficult. It is costly, it takes time, and it can get terribly confusing without a proper system in place and without automation. 

You have to move candidates through your hiring funnel manually and send dozens of emails every day. Keeping track of candidates under such circumstances is extremely challenging and leaves a lot of room for error. 

While you are struggling with mountains of applications, typing emails, and trying to remember which candidates seemed promising, the best ones get hired instantly by someone else. 

The issue is that there is no magical job board where all applicants are great. You will receive a lot of applications, but most of them will be bad. So, to find one good writer, you will have to go through dozens. If you do it manually, you are destined to fail. 

We Learned Everything the Hard Way, But You Don’t Have To

Figuring out that we needed to widen our talent pool to find good writers was the easy part. So, instead of using Upwork as our only source, we expanded our search to multiple platforms. This got us into a world of trouble. 

All the issues we were facing before grew manifold. We now had a lot more applications, but on many different platforms, and we had no idea how to deal with them. 

Our main issues were always the same:

• We couldn’t track candidates by their status in our hiring funnel
• It was impossible to log and respond to every application
• We had no way to reduce the number of unqualified candidates
• We kept losing great candidates because we followed up with them too late or not at all
• It was challenging to keep note of candidates we remembered liking

It became apparent that we needed to find a solution fast. And that solution was an optimized hiring funnel that makes evaluating candidates, filtering out bad ones, and finding that top-performer faster and easier.

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 went back to our drawing board and broke down our process to the smallest partitions:

1. We need to create a lot of great content if we want to increase the number of visitors to a website
2. To create such content, we need to hire competent writers
3. Hiring one skilled writer demands evaluating a hundred
4. Evaluating a hundred candidates boils down to eliminating bad ones
5. How do we identify unqualified candidates fast?

We never had a problem with receiving applications. In fact, we had more than we could handle. What we didn’t have was an efficient system that would help us deal with those applications. So, similarly to the previous step, we set and wrote down what features a system that would solve all of our problems at once should have. After several brainstorming sessions, we agreed that our idea hiring system should:

• Be a unified platform that will display all applications in a single place, regardless of where they came from
• Allow us to easily move candidates through our hiring platform
• Have a dashboard from which we can evaluate, test, reject, and invite for interviews
• Allow for automated email communication, which will save time and eliminate human error
• Have the option to send tests automatically so we can spot unqualified candidates with exceptional portfolios

The system we created first was a combination of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier. It solved many of our problems, but it was still not exactly what we needed. Countless iterations later, we have Workello.

A Good Part-Time Writer Job Description Copy Goes a Long Way

To attract qualified candidates, you must write a good job description—it has to be specific and tailored to your needs. 

This means you have to write a clear list of requirements. If you are looking for a niche-specific writer, you have to clearly state that. It will discourage unqualified candidates from sending their portfolios. Remember that stating the list of responsibilities will also go a long way in deterring unsuitable candidates from applying. 

If you are looking to hire part-time writers, you should specify that. It will save you a lot of time and disappointment in case an excellent candidate looking for full-time employment drops out of the game at the very last step. 

Finally, it is also crucial to include what candidates will get from working for you. What kind of benefits do you offer? Are there any learning and career advancement opportunities? It would also help to say a few words about the company climate and values to ensure you and the candidates are a good fit.

If you are not sure how to compose a job ad or you are uncertain what role you are looking for, Workello has got you back there too. We have a bunch of job descriptions you can modify in a few minutes and post on any job board of your choosing.

• Content Writer
• Senior Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Website Content Writer
• Writer
• Blog Writer
• Technical Writer
• Copywriter
• Business Writer
• Financial Writer
• Fashion Writer
• Travel Writer
• Lifestyle Writer
• Political Writer
• Case Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

Posting job ads on different job boards is not brain surgery. The problem is that this menial task takes a lot of time. Since we didn’t have a dedicated person for this job at first, our editors and content managers handled it. 

Sometimes it took them as little as 30 minutes, and sometimes, they spent several hours on ad posting. No matter how little time went on this, it still could have been used more productively. 

This problem can easily be solved by delegating this job to another person. However, that would imply that you have documented the entire hiring process and can now train that person. 

But you don’t have to waste your time figuring this out and learn the hard way. We did it all for you. 

When you register with Workello for free, you get access to all our playbooks. You can easily delegate job posting to someone else. 

All Applications in One Dashboard

What makes Workello awesome is that it allows you to see all applications from all hiring channels you use in a single place—your Workello dashboard. 

When candidates apply, whichever platform they use, they will all see the same Workello-hosted from. That way, you will receive consistent, standardized applications. What is more, all those applications will have all the necessary information for you to decide what next step to take. 

Here is what an application form looks like.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Your life will be so much easier with all applications in a single place. Then, with a single click, you can choose whether you want to reject, test, or interview a candidate. 

As candidates move though your hiring funnel, they can get one of the following application status options:

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

You will know at any given time exactly where each candidate is in your hiring funnel so you can easily decide what to do next. What is more, we color-coded each status. This will let you know how many candidates you have in each stage just by looking at your dashboard. 

Reject Unqualified Part-Time Writers

You can give access to your Workello dashboard to your editors and content managers. They can log in a few times per week and evaluate the submitted applications. Filtering out bad candidates is easy as all they will have to do is select “Application Rejected” from the drop-down menu. 

The applicants will receive an automated rejection email. This will save you from dozens of emails from unqualified candidates asking for updates on their application status every day. 

Point, Click, Test

No matter how well you optimize your hiring process, you will receive a lot of applications from unqualified candidates. Even worse, you will receive applications from candidates that seem fantastic on paper. These can waste a lot of your time. 

What happens is that candidates submit heavily edited portfolios that hardly reflect their actual first-draft capabilities. If you fail to filter these out, you risk hiring bad writers and paying for articles you can’t use. 

A week later, you’ll end up with a few unusable articles, and you will have to go back to the beginning. If you don’t change your approach, you’ll get stuck in a never-ending hiring cycle, wasting your time and money. We know, we have been there. 

With Workello, you can reliably weed out such candidates by sending them a writing test to complete. This will show you candidates’ actual writing skills and save you time, money, and energy. 

All you need to do is choose the “Test Candidate” option from the drop-down menu, and the candidate will receive an automated email with instructions and a link to the writing test. 

When candidates click on that link, they will open a tab that looks like this:

How To Make a Good Test

Creating a good test is far from simple. You have to balance test thoroughness and willingness of the candidates to complete it. This means that you can’t ask candidates to produce a 2,500-word article for a job they might not get so you can accurately assess their level of skill. At the same time, you have to make it detailed enough so you can actually gauge how well they can write.

Also, how you handled the steps so far will affect a candidate’s willingness to complete the test. If your job description was informative and you responded to emails promptly (which automation allowed), candidates will have no resistance to doing the writing test. 

Workello allows you to heave a streamlined hiring funnel that will signal to the candidates that you are a serious, well-organized company. They will want to work for such a company, and they will stay invested in finishing the process. 

When candidates submit completed tests, pay special attention to:

1. Language proficiency
2. Research skills
3. Formatting skills

If you are unsure what the test should look like, get the same one we used to scale our team of highly-qualified writers from 1 to 45+ team members. Modify it to suit your needs, and start hiring part-time writers now!

Interviewing Candidates

When the candidates complete the test and submit it through the app, their status will change to “Test Complete.” The test will be available for your editors or content managers to review. Once they do, they can decide whether to reject candidates or invite them for an interview. 

If the test article doesn’t meet your company’s standards, your editors can change the candidate’s application status to “Reject Candidate.” This will trigger a polite rejection email. Alternatively, if the editors like the test and select “Invite for Interview” from the drop-down menu, the candidate will receive an automated mail with instructions to schedule a video interview via Calendly. 

The Candidate Status Page

Although we did our best to optimize our hiring process, we still received dozens of emails from candidates asking about their application status and next steps. To mitigate this, we implemented a Candidate Status page. 

Here, candidates can check exactly where they are in our hiring funnel. The moment you change their application status, it will show on their end. Not only will you save time on responding to candidates’ queries, but you will also avoid losing great candidates because you were too late to respond. 

The Candidate Status page also shows how your hiring process works, so candidates will always know what to expect next. This also indicates transparency that they will appreciate. 

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

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Looking at our hiring system now, it all seems simple and intuitive. But when we were at the beginning, we had no Workello, nor anything similar, to solve all of our problems. 

We were caught in a never-ending hiring cycle. We wasted so much time posting job ads, evaluating applications, hiring writers, training them, realizing that no amount of coaching would help unqualified writers get to where we needed them, and starting the whole process from scratch. 

But something great came out of this experience. We gathered the knowledge that helped us develop a system that solved all of our biggest issues:

• It allowed editors to go back to their primary duties
• All the applications arrived at a single place, regardless of where they came from
• All the applications were uniform and contained all the necessary information for us to evaluate them properly
• It allowed us to track all the candidates by their status in our hiring funnel
• Most of the communication with candidates was done automatically

This considerable investment is the single most important one we have ever made as it allowed us to accomplish incredible things:

• We hired a team of non-native speakers and reduced content production costs by up to 75%
• We ran the most successful SEO campaign of all time
• Our team grew from 1 to 45 in only 18 months
• Our talented editors and content managers focused on producing excellent content

We spent over $100,000 and countless hours building a system you can get at a price of a single page of content. And you can test it for free!

With our pre-configured platform, you can start accepting candidates and automating your hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes. 

More Job Boards You Can Use for Hiring Part-Time Writers

With Workello, you don’t have to worry about how many platforms you use to find qualified part-time writers. All the applications will go to your unified dashboard, where you can easily review them. 

Here are some more places where you can look:

Facebook groups:

• The Write Life
• FinCon
• What’s Your Plan B? 
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer

Different associations:

• EFA
• SPJ 
• NABJ
• NASW
• NAHJ
• ASJA
• AAJA
• AHCJ
• SEJ
• NLGJA
• NAJA
• Association of Ghostwriters

Various job boards:

• Journalism Jobs
• Mediabistro
• HireMyMom
• CloudPeeps
• PeoplePerHour
• Freelancer

Content creation platforms and portfolio websites:

• Contently
• Scripted
• Skyword
• Pitchwhiz
• Zerys
• Muck Rack
• Writers Work
• WriterAccess