We Grew Our Team From 1 to 45 Writers and Editors in Less Than Two Years 

Before we created Workello, we were an ambitious content agency that successfully executed one of the best SEO campaigns of all time. We increased a client’s website traffic from zero to one million monthly visitors in less than two years! 

To achieve this, we had to scale our content production insanely fast. This called for a quick expansion of our team from 1 to 45 writers and editors, and it didn’t take us long to realize that our hiring process was extremely inefficient.

Some applicants used email to send their resumes and portfolios while others would send them in DMs on different websites and job boards. CVs, portfolios, and applications were scattered all over the place. Due to the different formats applicants used, our hiring funnel got chaotic rather fast. Keeping track of where applicants were in our hiring funnel was nearly impossible, and we struggled to respond to promising candidates in time. Our hiring managers and editors had to keep track of applications coming in from a dozen different websites, which only added to their already full plates. 

We realized that we needed to refine our hiring process, so we invested more than $100,000 and countless hours into creating Workello—an automated system for hiring better and more affordable writers.

In the next 10+ minutes, you’re going to learn all about the benefits of using an automated hiring system and find out which job boards you should use to hire Filipino writers.

Where To Find Filipino Writers—Top 15 Job Boards

Learn all about the pros and cons of the top 15 job boards for hiring writers in the Philippines:

The main reason why content agencies and other online businesses look for Filipino writers are their affordable rates. While there’s no doubt you can find an excellent writer with near-native knowledge of the English language and a solid vocabulary, you shouldn’t hire people based solely on their rates and online profiles. 

We’ve made the mistake of evaluating candidates based solely on their portfolios in the past, and we ended up with a ton of unusable articles that our editors often had to write from scratch. The truth is, most writers with really low rates are either extremely unreliable, aren’t proficient in English, or have next-to-no previous content writing experience. 

The only way to find great writers is to test and evaluate more candidates. That said, the Philippines aren’t the only place where you can find decent writers at affordable prices. Most of the job boards we listed in the table above feature international candidates, so you should expand your search to other countries with a lower cost of living. 

What Makes Hiring Good Writers So Difficult

Great writers are snapped up faster than any job board can source them. This is why you need a fully optimized hiring funnel. You must evaluate, test, interview, and hire top talent as fast as possible—before another company recognizes their talent and extends them an offer. 

There will always be bad applicants keen to apply for the job you’re offering. The key to finding good candidates is filtering the bad ones FAST.

We used to post our job openings on Upwork when we first started hiring writers. After a while, we expanded to a dozen other job boards in hopes of reaching a wider talent pool and hiring good writers faster. This didn’t turn out to be the smartest move—our problems didn’t go away, they just multiplied. 

No matter how many job boards we advertised our job openings on, the same issues persisted:

• It was impossible to keep track of where candidates were in our hiring funnel
• We were following up with good candidates too late
• We couldn’t keep track of the candidates we initially liked
• Most of our candidates continued to be unqualified

We soon realized that the problem wasn’t with the job boards themselves, but rather with our approach to hiring. There was nothing on the market that would help us solve all these issues at once, so we went back to the drawing board and came up with something unique—an automated hiring funnel dedicated to hiring writers.

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

We needed to figure out what was wrong with our hiring process before we could improve it. 

To do so, we broke down the entire process into the smallest segments. Here’s what we came up with:

1. Websites that publish a lot of content generate a ton of organic traffic
2. Publishing high volumes of good content requires a lot of good writers
3. Finding a lot of good writers requires evaluating a lot of candidates
4. Spotting the best writers requires filtering out bad ones quickly

The last item on the list is what we were struggling with. After a few brainstorming sessions, we realized that we needed an automated system that would enable us to filter out bad candidates more efficiently and connect with promising candidates faster. 

This was a list of features our dream applicant tracking system had to include:

• Automated testing to weed out bad writers with great portfolios
• A single dashboard for reviewing applications, testing, scheduling interviews, rejecting candidates, and extending offers to successful candidates from all of our hiring channels
• An automated email correspondence system that would reduce the risk of human error
• An easy-to-use dashboard that would let us sort applicants by their status, so we knew exactly what to do next

The system we built started off as Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. Over thousands of hours later, this improvised workflow evolved into what we now know as Workello.

Why Is a Comprehensive Job Description Copy Super-Important?

Writing a proper job description is the first step toward finding a good writer. An in-depth description with a thorough list of qualifications and responsibilities will deter unqualified candidates from applying and clogging your hiring funnel.

At the same time, you should highlight all the perks and benefits you offer. This includes bonuses, PTO, career advancement possibilities, etc. This will give top-performers an incentive to choose your company over other companies hiring for the same position.

You can always turn to our job description template database if you don’t know how to write an effective job ad. Click on any of the roles in the table below, copy our job description template, tweak it to meet the needs of your organization, and post it on any job board you like!

• Nutrition Writer
• Senior Proposal Writer
• Senior Writer
• Product Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Content Writer
• Development Writer
• Writer
• Executive Writer
• Technical Writer
• Course Writer
• Science Writer
• Blog Writer
• Press Release Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we first started scaling our team, we didn’t have a person in our company dedicated to recruiting new writers. It was up to our editors and content managers to handle the recruitment process, which included preparing tests and publishing job ads on a variety of job boards. They wasted up to two hours each day dealing with these additional responsibilities, which meant they could spend less time editing and publishing content.

After a while, we realized we had to hire a Recruiting Coordinator as soon as possible, but we needed to document our entire hiring process before delegating it to someone else. It took us hundreds of hours to prepare the necessary documentation—and we’re willing to share it with you for free!

Sign up to Workello for free to get our playbooks for delegating job ads to someone else delivered to your inbox.

A Unified Dashboard Where You Can See All Candidate Applications

Workello allows you to post job ads on as many hiring sites as you want, without having to fear how you’ll handle incoming applications from a dozen different places. Every application that a candidate submits will appear in your Workello dashboard, regardless of which website it came from. All applications will come in the same format, so you won’t have to worry about incomplete applications or missing portfolios. As a result, you will no longer have to follow up with candidates to remind them to provide crucial information that they failed to include with their application.

Check out an example application here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

The Workello dashboard will be your single point of access throughout the entire hiring process. You will use it to review applications, send writing tests, reject applicants or extend offers to qualified candidates.

You will be able to move candidates through your hiring funnel with a single click, by choosing one of the following options from a 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

Every status is marked by a different color, making it easy to see how many applicants are in each stage of the hiring funnel, at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Candidates

Your editors, content managers, or recruiters can easily reject applicants if they don’t fit your company’s employment criteria by changing their hiring status to Application Rejected.

The rejected applicant will automatically receive an email, politely notifying them that they will not be moving on to the next round of the selection process. This way, you won’t be spammed with hundreds of emails from unqualified candidates asking you for status updates.

Point, Click, Test

When recruiting writers, you should never make decisions based entirely on their portfolios. Most writers will include only their best work that has likely gone through several stages of editing and was polished to perfection. Portfolios don’t reflect the real quality of writers’ first drafts, which can only be seen through testing.

When we first started hiring, we made a rookie mistake of hiring writers solely based on their portfolios. As a result, we paid for a ton of unusable content our editors had to rewrite completely. 

The only way to prevent this from happening again was to introduce an efficient testing system—and it worked like a charm! 

When you change a candidate’s status in your Workello dashboard to Test Candidate, they will receive an automated email that will congratulate them for moving on to the next stage and invite them to complete a writing test hosted on Workello.

This is what it looks like when your candidate clicks the test link in the automated email.

How To Make a Good Test

When preparing a writing test, you need to make sure that it enables you to evaluate candidates on their:

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

A good test must strike the right balance between thoroughness and willingness—the more thorough your writing test is, the less likely a candidate is to complete it. At the same time, a test that’s too simple won’t help you accurately gauge the writers’ capabilities.

Keep in mind that it is pointless to create a 2,500-word test that no one will complete. Most applicants won’t be willing to spend a full day’s worth of work to complete an assignment for a job they may not even get. 

Workello lets you tilt the balance in favor of thoroughness. Since Workello’s automated features make the hiring process more fluid and transparent, qualified candidates will be more inclined to complete a slightly more thorough test. When you’ve made a good first impression and candidates recognize you as a serious, professional company, they’ll be willing to put in a bit more effort to join your organization!

If you’re having trouble creating a test on your own, get a test we used to hire excellent writers.

Interviewing Candidates

The candidate’s status in your dashboard will change to Test Complete as soon as they submit their test. After that, your editors and content managers will be able to assess their work and choose between two options:

1. Reject Candidate—The candidate receives an automated email politely informing them about their removal from the hiring funnel
2. Invite for Interview—Triggers an automated email that notifies the candidate that they passed the test and invites them to schedule a Zoom meeting via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

Your applicants will have access to their own Candidate Status page on Workello, enabling them to track their progress through your hiring funnel. This page also includes a What to Expect Next section that will let them know what’s awaiting them at the next stage of the selection process.

With Workello, you won’t have to worry about a top applicant slipping past you because you didn’t respond to them quickly enough. What’s more, you won’t have to waste time responding to emails from candidates inquiring about the status of their applications.

In addition to reducing transactional questions, the Candidate Status page also increases transparency around the hiring process.

Check out an example here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

When you have a system that automates everything for you, hiring writers is a breeze. There was no such system when we first started hiring, so we struggled with every aspect of it.

We couldn’t keep track of the hundreds of applications that flooded in from various job boards. As a result, we missed out on a lot of fantastic writers—by the time we got to their application, they were either no longer interested or had been hired by another company.

Instead of managing content, our content managers and editors had to focus on publishing job ads and reviewing applications. All this fueled our ambition to build a more efficient hiring system.

After investing over $100,000 and hundreds of hours of our time, we developed an efficient system that, today, looks very simple. Workello, our final product, allowed us to:

• Scale our team from 1 to 45+ Writers in less than 2 years
• Reduce our cost of content by 75%
• Execute one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time
• Let our content managers and editors focus on what they do best

What cost us a lot of time, effort, and money is now available to you for the price of a single page of content!

Try Workello completely for free. It’s pre-configured so you can start accepting candidates in less than 3 minutes.