Hiring Writers Is a Challenge—Learn From Our Experience

Before we developed Workello, we were a content agency with big goals and ambitious projects. As Content Distribution, we ran one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time. We managed to grow one of our client’s organic website traffic from 0 to 1,500,000 a month in just a year and a half!

To pull this off, we had to create a lot of top-quality content, fast. Naturally, creating large volumes of high quality content demanded that we hire dozens of exceptional writers. In under two years, we scaled our content team from 1 to 45 full-time team members. 

Hiring so many writers in such a short time wouldn’t have been possible without a streamlined hiring system. We know because we didn’t have such a system initially, and we ran into problems every step of the way.

Our editors and content managers spent hours creating job ads, composing tests, reviewing applications, and sending emails to applicants, while our content production drastically slowed down. 

We couldn’t log and reach out to every applicant, and keeping track of where all candidates were in our hiring funnel was wishful thinking. Most of our applicants turned out unqualified.

It was clear that our hiring system was broken. We needed an automated funnel that would allow us to evaluate and test more candidates faster and help us find the best candidates before other companies hire them.

We invested $100,000+ and thousands of hours into R&D, until we finally created the ultimate applicant tracking system for hiring writers—Workello!

In the following 15 minutes, we’ll show you:

1. Which websites you can use for hiring remote freelance writers
2. Why hiring remote freelance writers is hard
3. How you can optimize your hiring funnel and avoid the trouble we had to go through

Top 15 Job Boards for Hiring Remote Freelance Writers

There are hundreds of job boards, marketplaces, and websites online where you can find writers looking for a job. 

To help you save valuable time, we’ve put together a list of our top 15 job boards for hiring remote freelance writers: 

Read on to discover more places for hiring remote freelance writers and learn how automation can help you streamline your hiring process.

Why Is Hiring Remote Freelance Writers So Hard

You want to find the best and the most professional remote freelance writers. The problem is—so does everyone else. 

What we learned from experience is that hiring writers functions on a “first come-first served” basis. This means you have to be the first one to find and identify great writers and extend them an offer before another successful company does. The demand for exceptional writers is at an all-time high, so businesses with the most efficient hiring funnels come out on top.

Since the best freelance writers don’t stay “available” for long, the vast majority of candidates will be unqualified, no matter what hiring platform you advertise the job on. Consequently, you will have to evaluate hundreds of candidates before you can identify and hire one excellent writer. 

We know all of that from experience. When we used several job boards, we had the same problems as when we used one:

• It was hard to track candidates according to their application status
• None of the hiring platforms had a suitable option to categorize applicants
• Submitted portfolios didn’t match candidates’ actual writing capacity, and we didn’t have a reliable system to filter out bad candidates efficiently and reliably
• We couldn’t reach out to each candidate on time because we did everything manually

We couldn’t find anything on the market that would resolve every single problem, so we decided to create it. We pooled our resources and started devoting our efforts to designing an automated hiring system that would make hiring remote freelance writers a breeze. The result was—Workello!

Pre-Employment Testing Is Difficult—You Can Make It Easy

With every job listing, you get a bundle of applications from unqualified candidates—with writing positions, the number of such candidates grows exponentially.

It’s difficult to understand how good someone is at writing from their portfolio alone—nobody shares their worst examples and unedited work. You need to introduce pre-hire testing to gauge your candidates’ skill set. If they can’t write a stellar test, how can they create high-quality content?

If you go down this route, you’ll need assistance. Keeping track of hundreds of candidates, sending and collecting tests, taking care of correspondence—it quickly turns into a disaster if you do it manually. Reliable skill assessment software will keep you organized and allow you to focus on other tasks. 

Workello is a high-volume recruiting solution that will help you automate assessments and the hiring process in general. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for free and set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Post job ads on your favorite job platforms and add a Workello link
3. Review applications from your dashboard
4. Send tests to filter high-quality writers from bad ones quickly
5. Reject, interview, and hire the best applicants

Hire the Top 1% Fast With Workello’s Pre-Hire Assessments

With Workello, you can assess, test, reject, interview, and hire candidates with a single click—all actions are available on your single-page dashboard. Move candidates through the funnel by changing their application status, and Workello will do the rest.

You can use our platform to send out copywriting, content writing, and technical writing tests automatically. If you’re looking for someone in the SEO department, make sure to test your SEO writers and SEO copywriters. Workello also supports content marketer testing.

Use our free trial and cut your hiring costs in half with an automated hiring funnel.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency 

After we realized that the problem was not with the job boards we were using but with our own hiring system, we prioritized identifying what we were doing wrong. We broke our working processes into the smallest elements. 

This was our thought process:

1. The number of monthly visitors directly correlates with the number and quality of published articles
2. Only the best writers can create great content consistently
3. Finding one great writer requires evaluating dozens of applications
4. Hiring remote freelance writers capable of writing top-quality content requires filtering out bad candidates quickly
5. Filtering our unqualified applicants required something we didn’t have

We never had a problem receiving writer applications—we always had more than we could handle. The problem was that we couldn’t go through them efficiently enough. 

The Features of an Ideal Hiring Funnel

We wanted to develop a system that would encompass all the features necessary for an efficient and reliable hiring process, specifically designed for content teams. We started brainstorming what such a system should have, and we jotted down the following:

1. A single platform that groups all applications in one place, regardless of where they come from
2. An option to sort candidates according to their application status and easy=ily track where they are in our hiring funnel
3. A unified dashboard that lets us evaluate, test, reject, interview, and hire candidates with a single click and without leaving the page
4. An option to send writing tests automatically so we can quickly spot bad candidates with outstanding portfolios
5. An automated communication system that saves time on email correspondence and eliminates human error

The first attempt at such a system was a combination of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier. It was a step in the right direction but far from ideal. We wanted nothing short of perfect, so we invested more time and conducted countless more iterations until we were satisfied—until we had Workello!

A Good Job Description Helps With Hiring Remote Freelance Writers

Bad writers will always send their applications—there is nothing you can do about it. What you can do is reduce their number to a minimum. 

The way to dissuade unqualified candidates from applying and encourage the best ones to do so is to write a super-specific job description copy.

When listing the requirements, be as detailed as possible regarding your minimum hiring criteria. State the required previous experience, industry-specific knowledge, the word count they’re expected to meet daily, and any other specifics of the job in your organization.

To increase your chances of attracting the best candidates, you have to motivate them to apply and pick you over your competitors. The best way to do this is by highlighting:

• Salary information
• Career advancement opportunities
• Learning opportunities
• Benefits (paid time off, pension and health plans, etc.)

If you need help writing a job description that will help you hire great remote freelance writers, tap into our extensive job description template database. Choose the template you like, customize it to your needs, and post it wherever you want. Here are some examples:

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

Hiring is always easier with a Recruitment Specialist in your team. At first, we didn’t have one, so our editors and content managers handled job ad posting. It wasn’t easy to delegate this task to somebody new because they were unfamiliar with our processes.

Training the new employee required us to document our hiring process, which was a massive undertaking. Still, it was unsustainable to continue to rely on our editors because our content production suffered. 

We created complete documentation necessary for hiring and training a recruitment specialist. When you register for Workello for free, you’ll gain access to it and learn how to delegate job ad distribution. 

A Unified Dashboard for Easier Recruitment Process

You can post your job ads on a dozen hiring platforms, and you won’t have to check each one individually to see applications—Workello gathers them all in your dashboard. 

Thanks to a Workello-hosted application form, all the submissions will be complete and uniform. There will be no need to contact candidates who failed to provide all the necessary information.

Check out an example of an application form here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

You can seamlessly move candidates through your hiring funnel right from your Workello dashboard. All you need to do is select one of the application status options from a drop-down menu. There are seven statuses you can assign each candidate:

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

Each status is color-coded, so you can instantly assess how many candidates you have in every stage of your hiring process. 

Reject Unqualified Remote Freelance Writers

You won’t need to test all the candidates who apply for the position of the remote freelance writer. Some of them will not meet your basic requirements, which will be evident from their applications. 

When you spot an unqualified candidate, you can easily remove them from the funnel by changing their application status to Application Rejected. Workello will automatically send them a polite rejection email, so you never have to contact the candidate manually. 

Point, Click, Test

A portfolio is rarely an accurate reflection of someone’s writing capabilities. Portfolios typically consist of the best articles a candidate has written, and these articles have usually gone through at least one round of editing and QA. 

The only way to see if a candidate is qualified and a good fit for your company is to test them. 

When we first started hiring, we made many mistakes. Not testing our candidates was the biggest and the most expensive one. We often ended up hiring writers whose work required extensive editing. We often received unusable articles that had to be re-written from scratch.

It cost us a lot of time because every candidate we hired needed training, but no amount of guidance can turn a bad writer into an excellent one. Writing is not only a matter of knowing the language—the best writers have a style, tone, and a way with words that can only be attributed to talent.

That’s why we made it a priority to include a built-in testing feature in Workello. If you spot a candidate with a great portfolio, select the Test Candidate option. They will receive an email congratulating them on making it to the testing stage and providing them with a link to the writing test.

Clicking on the link opens a tab that looks like this:

How To Make a Good Test

Seasoned writers have gone through many hiring cycles and are used to doing tests. They know you have to assess their:

1. Language proficiency (grammar, range, spelling, punctuation, etc.)
2. Formatting skills (subheading distribution, linking, sentence length, metadata, etc.)
3. Research abilities
4. Style

Although writers typically have no problem with writing a paid test article, you have to be careful not to make it too demanding. No writer sure of their abilities would be willing to spend an entire working day doing a test for a job they might not get. You need to find a perfect balance between test thoroughness and candidate willingness. 

Still, Workello allows you to be a bit more demanding with your requirements. Due to automated communication, candidates will receive swift responses after every step. Your killer job ad was what motivated them to apply in the first place. You came across as professional, well-organized, and transparent, so candidates will be happy to demonstrate their skills at this point. 

If you need help creating a good test, take a look at the one we used to test hundreds of candidates. You can modify it to suit your needs—change the topic, specify formatting requirements, style guidelines, etc. 

Interviewing Candidates

Submitting a completed test immediately changes a candidate’s application status to Test Complete. Your editors/content managers can access the test articles from your unique Workello dashboard and review them at their convenience.

Depending on how well a candidate did, they can choose one of the following two options:

1. Reject Candidate—Triggers a rejection email that politely informs the candidate of an unsuccessful outcome and thanks them for their time
2. Invite for Interview—Triggers an email that congratulates the candidate on making it to the final step of your hiring process and provides them with a Calendly link and instructions to schedule a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

Inefficient candidate communication was one of the most persistent issues that plagued our every hiring cycle. Manually keeping track of every email, responding to every transactional question, and updating candidates of every application status change was a nightmare. We often responded late or not at all—and we missed dozens of great candidates because of it.

That’s why we designed a Candidate Status page, allowing candidates to track their application status in real time and find information about our hiring process. Coupled with automated emails that are triggered with every application status change, your candidates will know exactly where they are in the hiring process and what they can expect next. 

This feature has saved us hundreds of hours we wouldn’t otherwise spend writing thousands of emails answering the same questions and providing the same updates.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Now, our hiring system works like a well-oiled machine—but things were much different when first we started hiring writers. There was nothing like Workello that could solve all of our problems and had features suitable for hiring writers. 

We were trapped in a never-ending hiring cycle. Every round started and ended the same way—posting job ads, evaluating applications, hiring writers, training them, realizing they were no good, letting them go, starting all over again. 

It had to stop, so we developed a system that allowed us to:

• See all the applications in a single place, no matter where they come from
• Move candidates through our hiring funnel effortlessly
• Stop wasting time contacting candidates manually and asking them to provide the information they skipped in their applications
• Keep note of candidates that made a good impression
• Communicate with all applicants efficiently
• Let our editors and content managers go back to their primary duties

All of these benefits allowed us to accomplish incredible things in under two years:

• Growing our content team from 1 to 45+
• Reducing our content production costs by up to 75%
• Executing one of the most outstanding content marketing campaigns ever

We spent over $100,000 and countless hours developing a system you can get at the price of a single page of content—plus, you get to test it for free!Sign up for Workello for free today and start receiving new candidates in less than 3 minutes!

More Websites You Can Use for Hiring Remote Freelance Writers

With Workello, hiring remote freelance writers won’t be a pain. You can cast a wider net and increase the chances of finding top talent in the writing world at any price point. You can post your ad on as many job boards as you like and see all the applications in a single place—your Workello dashboard.

Explore some more places you can look for qualified remote freelance writers:

Facebook groups:

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

Additional job boards:

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

Content creation platforms and portfolio websites:

• Contently
• Scripted
• Skyword
• Pitchwhiz
• Zerys
• Muck Rack
• Writers Work
• WriterAccess
• Scribewise
• The Writer Finder
• Copify
• Storyhackers
• Clarity
• Certified Writers
• Masthead Media
• Alexis Grant Media
• ContentGrow

Various associations:

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