Hiring Professional Writers Is Hard—We Learned How To Do It the Hard Way

Before we developed Workello, we were a successful content agency that ran one of the best SEO campaigns of all time. With this ambitious project, we grew our client from 0 to 1,500,000 organic visitors per month in less than 24 months!

To do that, we had to produce a considerable amount of high-quality content. That meant we had to hire over 45 highly qualified Writers fast. During the hiring process, it didn’t take us long to realize that it was deeply flawed.

Finding a single top-performer meant evaluating dozens of candidates. A fair share of this workload fell on the backs of our Editors and Content Managers. It required a lot of time they could have used more productively. 

We received a lot of applications via email. Many candidates contacted us through DMs on various platforms. A lot of portfolios were Word documents. We felt as if we were drowning in a sea of applications and disarrayed candidate details across numerous platforms. All of this had to be dealt with manually. 

Countless hours and over $100,000 later, we have an optimized and automated hiring process that allows us to hire exceptional Writers faster. In the next 10 minutes, you will learn:

1. Where to find Sports Writers
2. Why it is so tough to find qualified Sports Writers for hire
3. How automation can help you test and evaluate more candidates

Where To Find Sports Writers—Top 15 Job Boards

Check out the pros and cons of the most popular job boards for hiring Sports Writers:

We’ve prepared even more job boards where you can look for Sports Writers for hire

What Makes Hiring Sports Writers So Tough 

Finding qualified candidates for any position is tough. It takes a lot of your time and can be a burden to your company’s budget. When you are looking for a person to fill a niche-specific position, hiring can get even more challenging. 

To find one suitable candidate, you have to go over more than 100 applications. In most cases, you will do everything manually:

• Move candidates through your hiring funnel
• Keep track of their status at any given time
• Send dozens of emails every day

The problem is that the best Sports Writers get offers practically the moment they appear on hiring platforms. The competition is fierce. You and many other companies are looking for capable Writers. 

The more time you waste reviewing piles of applications, most of which are bad, the faster qualified Sports Writers get hired by someone else. If you want to improve your chances and snatch the next great candidate before others get the opportunity, you need an efficient system in place.

The Core Problem

This is what posed the greatest difficulty:

• There is no hiring platform where all candidates are qualified
• Most Writers are not good, regardless of where you look
• You must act fast to get a good candidate before others

We realized we had to expand our search and evaluate more candidates. Instead of looking for Writers only on Upwork, we started using other platforms too. This got us into a world of trouble. 

We got what we wanted—a larger talent pool and more applications—but they were scattered across multiple platforms, and keeping track of them all was close to a nightmare. 

It’s Always Darkest Just Before Dawn

We used many different platforms and received piles of applications, but we still dealt with the same issues:

• Tracking candidates by their status in our hiring funnel
• Logging and responding to every application
• Reducing the number of bad candidates
• Following up with good candidates too late or not at all
• Keeping note of candidates we remembered liking

Months of struggles later, we realized that we approached hiring the wrong way. We invested a lot of time and money in content production but nowhere near as much in setting up a functioning hiring system. 

We learned the hard way that this had to change, so we put our funds, time, and brainpower into developing an automated hiring funnel specifically designed for content teams. What we ended up with is 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

To create a new system, we first needed to understand the old one.

We broke our process down into the smallest elements, and this is what we came up with:

1. Producing a lot of excellent-quality content increases conversion
2. Creating high-quality content demands hiring capable Sports Writers
3. Hiring a single qualified Sports Writer requires evaluating dozens of candidates
4. Finding capable Writers means having to spot and eliminate bad candidates fast
5. Identifying unqualified candidates—that was the problem

Not getting enough applications was never the issue—we had way more than we could handle. What we lacked was a system that would allow us to deal with them efficiently. That is exactly what Workello does—it lets you keep track of all your candidates, filter out bad ones, and identify and connect with great candidates faster. 

We learned that an ideal system that would help us solve all of our issues at once had to have these features:

• Unified platform that displays all applications wherever they come from
• Ability to move candidates through our hiring funnel with a single click
• Single dashboard from which we could test, evaluate, reject candidates, or invite the ones we like for interviews
• Ability to send writing tests automatically to identify bad Writers with excellent portfolios
• Automated communication that saves time on email correspondence and eliminates human error

Our first set-up was a combination of Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was a step in the right direction but still a far cry from what we needed. Countless trial and error sessions later, this initial set-up evolved into a fully-optimized and automated system that is Workello. 

Why Is a Good Sports Writer Job Description Copy Important?

Just like you need good-quality copy to drive traffic and increase conversion, you also need a good job description copy to hire Sports Writers who are qualified. 

No matter how great your job ad is, you will receive applications from bad candidates, though. Still, a good ad will drastically increase the number of excellent applicants. 

To write one such job ad, you have to be specific about the responsibilities of the job and be clear about the qualifications and skills you require from candidates. Since you are hiring Sports Writers, you will want to specifically state that experience in this niche is mandatory. This will discourage Writers with no experience in writing about sports from applying. 

A good job description should also sell your company to the best candidates. Top-performers get hired quickly, so you need to give them a reason to consider your company. 

Besides your requirements, specify what candidates will get from you if they accept your offer. Mention the benefits, such as bonuses and health plans, paid time off, career advancement opportunities, etc.

You may also want to write a sentence or two about your company values to ensure the candidates are a perfect match for you. 

If you are struggling with creating a Sports Writer job description or you aren’t sure what role you are looking for, we have a comprehensive base of pre-vetted templates. It will take you less than ten minutes to customize the template to suit your company’s needs and copy-paste it to a job board of your choice:

• Content Writer
• Website Content Writer
• Digital and Multiplatform Content Writer
• E-Commerce Content Writer
• Law Firm Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• SEO Copywriter
• Marketing Communications Writer
• Science Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Senior Writer
• Nutrition Writer
• Senior Copywriter
• Quality Assurance Technical Writer
• Press Release Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

We didn’t have a person whose sole responsibility was hiring new people, so our Editors and Content Managers handled job ad posting. Although it is a simple task, it took a lot of the precious time they could have used to produce high-quality content. 

Hiring a Recruiting Coordinator was a possible solution, but it required documenting the entire hiring process and teaching it to them. Only then would it be possible to delegate the job. 

That’s precisely what we did. It took us a lot of trial and error, but you don’t have to go through this painstaking process.

Sign up for Workello for free, and you will get access to our knowledge base, which will teach you how to delegate job ad distribution to someone else.

See All Your Candidate Applications in the Workello Dashboard

With Workello, you can post your job ad on as many platforms as you want without worrying that you will miss any of the applications. Regardless of where candidates see your ad, if they decide to apply, they will use the same form. 

As a result, all the applications you receive will be uniform and will go to a single place—your Workello dashboard.

You will not have to waste time contacting candidates who submitted incomplete applications or track them manually. 

Check out our application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Your Workello dashboard will be a single point of access for every step in your hiring process. From there, you will be able to evaluate applications, send writing tests automatically, and reject candidates or invite them for an interview. 

With a single click, you can move candidates through your hiring funnel. All you have to do is change their application status by clicking on the appropriate option from the drop-down menu:

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

To make your life even easier, we color-coded each status. This will help you evaluate how many candidates you have in each stage of your hiring process at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Sports Writers

When you receive an application, it becomes available for your Editors and Content Managers to review. If they find a candidate’s portfolio unsatisfactory, they can easily remove them from the funnel by changing their status to “Application Rejected.”

This will trigger a rejection email, notifying the candidate politely that they won’t be moving on to the next stage. You won’t have to waste time sending these emails manually. You will also avoid responding to candidates’ queries about their status. 

Point, Click, Test

Bad candidates will always send you their applications. With Workello, this is no longer a problem as you will easily spot and filter them out. 

Some candidates will send you polished portfolios that don’t reflect their true capabilities. Such candidates will cause you trouble as you will go through edited and proofread articles and will have no idea how good their content really is. The only way to assess applicants’ skills is to test them. 

When we started out, we didn’t test our candidates. We based our decisions on their applications alone. This led to us paying for unusable articles our Editors had to spend hours editing or rewriting completely. We wasted a ton of money and time. 

When we introduced testing, everything changed. 

Workello allows you to automate the testing process by changing an applicant’s status in the dashboard to “Test Candidate.” This triggers an automated email that congratulates the candidate on moving on to the next stage in your hiring funnel and gives them a link to a writing test. 

Once the candidate clicks on the link, they will open a tab that looks something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

When you start creating the test, you have to keep two things in mind:

1. Thoroughness—The test must be detailed and complex enough for you to gauge a candidate’s writing abilities
2. Willingness—The test shouldn’t demand too much. Don’t expect anyone to spend a whole day writing 2,500 words for a job they might not get 

Finding a perfect balance between these two is your goal.

As for what you need to test, there are three main aspects you need to pay attention to:

1. Command of language—Accuracy, range, consistency, cohesion, etc.
2. Research skills—Can a candidate produce factually accurate content?
3. Formatting—Article structure, optimization, etc. 

If you have done all the steps right so far, candidates will stay motivated to complete the writing test. Since they will receive automated emails every time their application status changes and your job ad is informative enough, candidates will get a good impression of your company. 

If you are unsure how to create a good test, check out the one we used to evaluate hundreds of candidates and modify it so you can use it to hire Sports Writers. 

Interviewing Candidates

Once the candidates submit their tests, their application status will automatically change to “Test Complete.” You Editors can then review the articles and decide what to do next. They can choose between the following:

1. Reject candidates—Triggers an automated, polite rejection email
2. Invite for Interview—Triggers an automated email with instructions to schedule a Zoom interview via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

Despite our best effort to optimize and automate the system, we still received a lot of emails that all revolved around the following three questions:

1. Have we reviewed a candidate’s application?
2. When are we going to contact the candidates?
3. What will the next steps be?

To make things even easier and save you more time, we designed the Candidate Status page. This is where candidates can see exactly where they are in your hiring funnel. Once you change their application status in your Workello dashboard, they will be able to see it on their end.

With this feature, you won’t have to worry about losing a great candidate because you failed to contact them on time. 

The Candidate Status page also explains how your hiring process works, so applicants will always know what to expect next. 

Here is what the Candidate Status page looks like.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

While reading about our hiring process now, everything sounds light and breezy. It even sounds like common sense. When we were starting out and needed to hire Sports Writers and all other niche Writers, there was no Workello or anything remotely similar to help us out.

We felt entrapped in a vicious circle of posting job ads, hiring new Writers, training them, realizing they were no good, and starting over. We understand what you are going through because we have been there: 

• Our Editors didn’t edit but wasted time reviewing applications
• Applications streamed in from numerous platforms, and we had no way of grouping them in a single place
• We lost many good candidates because we were late to respond
• The applications submitted weren’t uniform, and they often lacked critical information
• There was no way to track candidates by their application status
• We had to do everything manually

This hellish experience served a good purpose. It made us realize that we needed to create a unique hiring system that would solve all these issues and more at once. 

The investment we made into developing this automated and optimized system is the single most important one we have ever made. The benefits we reaped and continue to enjoy now are incredible:

• With a team of non-native speakers, we reduced the costs of content production by 75%
• We worked on one of the greatest SEO campaigns ever
• We grew from 1 to 45 Writers in only 18 months
• We enabled our Editors and Content Managers to do what they do best—create excellent content

What we spent thousands of hours and over $100,000 building is available to you at the price of one quality article. Plus, you get a free trial period.

Try Workello now completely for free and start accepting applications in less than 3 minutes.

More Job Boards You Can Use for Hiring Sports Writers

With Workello, you don’t have to limit your search for qualified Sports Writers to only a handful of job boards. You can place your ad wherever you want and receive as many applications as necessary to find that one good Writer.

Here are some more places to look:

• Writer Access
• Freelancer
• Guru
• BloggingPro
• JournalismJobs
• Hire Writers
• Freelance Writing
• Freelance Writing Gigs
• Constant Content
• Writers Work
• Scripted
• Mediabistro
• Online Writing Jobs
• Be a Freelance Blogger