We’ll Share Our Secret to Hiring the Best Editors at Any Price Point! 

A few years back, we were a one-man content agency ContentDistribution.com. We may have lacked staff, but we never lacked ambition. Together with our client, we started working on one of the most ambitious SEO projects ever.

The result? Our client’s website grew from 0 to 1,500,000 organic monthly visitors in less than 2 years.

We did this by putting together a content team of 45+ top-quality Writers and Editors who were capable of producing a large volume of high-quality content. Scaling from 1 to 45+ team members in under 2 years can be a daunting task, especially with how difficult it is to hire top performers.

We struggled with incomplete applications, bad candidates with great portfolios, and an inefficient hiring process from day one.

Instead of sitting around and lamenting, we invested $100,000+ and countless work hours into producing an automated hiring funnel that would optimize our hiring process and reduce the cost of hiring an Editor.

In the next few minutes, we’ll show you:

1. How much it costs to hire an Editor
2. Where to find them
3. What the problem with hiring them is
4. How to use automated testing to secure the best Editors

How Much Does It Cost To Hire an Editor?

When determining the price point of an Editor, you need to consider a plethora of factors. The salary candidates will be satisfied with depends on the industry you’re in, their geographical location, level of expertise and experience, type of employment, etc.

In the United States, Editors ask for salaries anywhere between $29,000 and $110,000. If this sounds a bit too much, that’s because it is. You can cut your overall content costs by up to 75% if you decide to hire remotely.

There are hundreds of online job boards that you can use to access a global talent pool and hire an Editor for 500 dollars or less.

Finding the best Editor for your organization is not a simple case of hiring a candidate that costs the most, hoping they’re the best. Just because someone has high rates doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the most experienced and will do the best job. Plus, you can find a candidate from another country that will do a better job for less money.

The only way to tell if a candidate will deliver is to test them before you pay for their work. You will need to test tens (if not hundreds) of candidates to get to the best one, and you’ll need to do it fast. That’s where test automation becomes a necessity.

Read the article in full to learn how to take advantage of Workello’s automated testing to find better, more affordable Editors fast. 

Top 15 Job Boards To Hire Editors Remotely

We’ve used many different websites to find Editors. Here’s our pick of the best 15:

Why Hiring a Top Editor Quickly Seems Undoable

The best Editors don’t dawdle around. Hundreds of companies seek Editors all the time, and the best candidates receive offers in the blink of an eye. Job boards can’t source new top-notch candidates fast enough.

No matter whether you hire in the United States or opt for a more affordable, remote option, you will face the same issues.

Every job board you place your ad on has more unqualified candidates than high-quality ones. Whenever you post an ad, you will always receive countless applications that don’t meet your criteria.

The problem is—underqualified candidates are hard to spot. Many of them have great portfolios and seemingly remarkable work experience. The only way to get to the best candidate is to evaluate and test hundreds of applicants—and you’ll need to do it faster than your competition.

When our hiring spree began, we tried to source Editors from Upwork but soon posted listings on various other job boards. Wherever we posted an ad, we faced the same issues:

• We couldn’t sort applicants by their status in our hiring funnel
• Websites didn’t offer settings specific for Editors
• Portfolios weren’t a true representation of their skills

Tracking Candidates Became Impossible

Whenever we added another job board into the mix, our issues would only multiply and none would get solved. We would receive applications from everywhere—email, LinkedIn, Indeed, Facebook, Craigslist, and so on.

Regardless of the changes we tried to introduce, we could never:

• Log applications properly and respond to candidates fast enough
• Keep track of candidates by their status in our hiring funnel
• Get back to the best applicants on time (or ever)
• Keep track of candidates that initially caught our eye
• Reduce the number of unqualified applicants

We soon realized the problems lay in the way we approached our hiring process. Instead of trying out new job boards hoping they would get rid of our issues, we needed to resolve them ourselves.

We lacked a system that would optimize the way we hired Editors and would allow us to find the best candidates through automated processes. We decided to invest time and money into creating such a system, and that’s how Workello was born.

Use Pre-Employment Assessments To Test Editorial Candidates

Most job boards are swamped with unqualified candidates. You need to sift through tens, if not hundreds, of applicants to find just one qualified editor.

You cannot be certain whether a candidate is up to par by just looking at their portfolio or conducting a simple interview. The only way to know for sure is to assess their skills.

Pre-employment testing has proven to be the most effective selection method, as you can see here.

What’s even better than testing is having one place where all your applicants’ tests will show up once they’re ready for review. Good skill assessment software should reduce the amount of time and manual work you need to put into your hiring process.

Workello allows you to sift through hundreds of portfolios and test just as many candidates in record time. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for a free Workello account and launch your pre-configured hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes
2. Post your job ad on any job board or hiring website and link to your unique Workello job ad
3. Watch all the applicants stream into a single dashboard
4. Send automated tests to filter out unqualified candidates with good portfolios
5. Reject candidates, invite them to interviews, and send offers in just one click

Eliminate Manual Work and Improve Your Pre-Hire Assessment Strategy 

With Workello, you don’t need to use multiple platforms to assess, test, interview, and hire any role on your team. You can test a technical writer, content writer, SEO writer, or copywriter and then move them through the funnel in just one click with our high-volume recruiting software.

Start your Workello free trial today to discover the fastest way to conduct pre-hire assessments.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Before we could start working on a system, we needed to find out the exact root cause of our problems. We broke down our business layout, and here’s what we wrote down:

1. Attracting millions of monthly visitors requires a high volume of high-quality content
2. Producing high-quality content requires hiring the best Editors and Writers on offer
3. Hiring a top Editor at an affordable price point means evaluating hundreds of candidates
4. Finding the best candidate in a sea of applications requires sorting out bad ones fast
5. Spotting bad candidates—that’s what we needed a system for

Finding Editors willing to work for a reasonable salary was never an issue—but most of them weren’t good enough.

We didn’t know how to handle a pile of bad applications to get to the few good ones fast.

In this instance, necessity was the mother of Workello.

To get to the best candidate fast, we needed an automated system that would remove the same old issues we couldn’t avoid. Such a system had to have:

1. A single point of access to all applications regardless of which job board they came from
2. Candidate sorting system that would let us track applicants by their status and move them through the funnel effortlessly
3. A single dashboard to evaluate, test, interview, and hire Editors
4. An automated editing test to let us single out bad Editors with great portfolios
5. Automated communication to avoid human error and save time on email correspondence

Before we came up with Workello, we worked with Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was better than what we had before, but it wasn’t ideal. We wanted nothing short of perfection.

After thousands of hours and even more tweaking iterations, we finally had a fully automated system that answered our hiring prayers.

Who Cares About Job Descriptions? Candidates Do, and So Should You!

Most companies neglect job descriptions and write some vague paragraphs that don’t do a good job describing the role they’re hiring for. You should be different.

Your job description is your only channel of communication before candidates apply. You should use it to good effect—to deter underqualified candidates and attract top-performing ones.

A good job description goes into detail about what the role entails. It specifies what the responsibilities of the job are, as well as what requirements candidates must meet to be considered. The more specific you get, the more unqualified Editors you will dissuade from applying.

The other objective your description should fulfill is to attract the best Editors. Remember—hundreds of companies seek Editors, and the best ones have an array of choices.

You should highlight any benefits you offer, such as bonuses, health plans, salary increases, career advancement opportunities, and so on.

If you’re struggling to write a great job description by yourself or you’re uncertain of the exact role you should hire, you can take a look at our extensive database of pre-vetted job description templates.

Click on the role title that interests you, copy our template, adapt it a bit to suit your needs, and you can start posting your job description across the internet:

• Editor
• Social Media Editor
• Remote Copy Editor
• Senior Editor
• Financial Editor
• Technical Editor
• Chief Editor
• Legal Editor
• Executive Editor
• Newsletter Editor
• Content Editor
• Online Editor
• Managing Editor
• Scientific Editor
• Web Editor

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started hiring, there was no Recruitment Officer to handle job ad distribution for us. Instead, our Content Managers and Editors had to deal with posting job listings on various websites.

Although not an incredibly difficult task, posting job ads was an added responsibility in our Managers’ already busy schedules, and content production suffered as a result.

Still, we couldn’t hire a Recruitment Officer just like that. We needed to document our hiring process and educate a new member of our team on it—that takes time.

We took that time, and now, you don’t have to!

When you register for Workello for free, you’ll get access to our comprehensive knowledge base so you can delegate the job to someone else right away!

Every Application Assessed Using the Same Dashboard

Thanks to Workello, you can now post your ad on as many job boards as you wish without worrying about losing track of your candidates and having difficulty finding applications.

This is thanks to Workello’s dashboard that collects applications from all job boards. Regardless of where an applicant finds your job ad, they will use the Workello-hosted application form, and their application will show up in your dashboard.

This way, all applications will be in the same format. As a result, candidates won’t be able to submit incomplete applications, and you won’t have to follow up to ask for additional information.

Check out an application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Once applications start coming in, you’ll be able to handle every step of the candidates’ journey through your hiring funnel from the same dashboard. Your Workello dashboard will be the place where you evaluate, send a test, review, invite for an interview, and extend an offer to the Editor that fits the bill.

To move candidates through the funnel, all you need to do is change their status by choosing an appropriate option from the drop-down menu. The options are as follows:

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 figure out how many candidates you have in each stage at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Editors

When an application comes your way, the first step is to let your Content Managers take a look and evaluate it. If they don’t like someone’s resume or portfolio, they can remove the candidate from the funnel by changing the status to “Application Rejected.”

Updating the status triggers an automated email that politely informs candidates about their unsuccessful application.

You will no longer have to notify bad candidates manually, and candidates won’t get your inbox cluttered with emails asking about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

If you receive a great portfolio, that doesn’t mean you’ve received a great candidate. Portfolios are seldom a true depiction of an Editor’s skills.

Candidates use only their best work for portfolios, and it’s work that’s been written by great Content Writers and QA’d by Senior Editors. The only way to find out how good someone actually is at editing is to make them go through an editing test.

We may sound smart about it now, but back when we were hiring for the first time, we didn’t have any testing in place. We would hire Writers and Editors based on their portfolios alone.

The outcome was expensive. We wasted $1,000+ on unusable content that our Editors had to edit heavily or rewrite from scratch.

Now, we know the value of testing and hire only Writers whose 1st draft quality we’ve seen first-hand. After struggling to hire Editors, we decided to promote internally. Writers who are familiar with our quality standards have to complete two separate tests before we offer promotion to the best candidate.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hire Editors outright. It means that you can’t rely on their portfolios and must test their skills before you decide to hire them.

Testing candidates has never been easier. All you need to do is plug your test into Workello.

Whenever you change someone’s status to “Test Candidate,” they will receive an automated email with a congratulatory message and a link to your test.

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

How To Make a Good Test

No candidate will be shocked to see you have a test—it’s common practice. That doesn’t mean you can be too demanding and create a 2,500-word editing test that would be a whole day’s work.

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

There’s no point in creating a complex test if nobody’s willing to complete it. Bear in mind that you’re asking candidates to do something for free for a company that may not hire them in the end.

Still, the test needs to be thorough enough so that you’re able to assess candidates’ skill sets regarding:

1. Editing grammar and spelling
2. Contextual editing
3. Spotting factual mistakes

Hitting the sweet spot between being thorough and not being overdemanding gets easier if you use Workello.

With Workello, candidates receive emails throughout the selection process, and you can provide them with all the information they require. This shows your company is professional and transparent, and candidates will know to appreciate that.

When you apply for a company that cares about its business, you’re willing to put extra effort into landing the job.

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate finishes the test (i.e., they press the Submit Test button), their candidate status will change to “Test Complete” automatically. From this point onward, the candidate won’t be able to access the test, and your Content Managers will be able to review it.

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

1. Reject Candidate—Sends out an automated email with a rejection note
2. Invite for Interview—Sends out an automated email with a congratulatory message and a Calendly link used for scheduling a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

We’ve created a page dedicated to candidates so that everything becomes easier on their part as well. They can use the Candidate Status page to find information about their application and see what’s going on without having to reach out to your HR department.

The page also has a “What to expect next” section that educates candidates on your entire selection process so that they know what awaits them.

This will massively reduce the correspondence between candidates and your Recruitment Officers. 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

When you have a hiring funnel that does everything for you, hiring a top Editor sounds easy. When we started out, there was no ATS that would optimize our hiring process the way we wanted it, and we had to do everything manually.

We struggled with every aspect of hiring Editors. We couldn’t track candidates that would come in from various job boards and would take weeks to find their applications.

Candidates would quickly lose interest or find a job elsewhere. We missed out on many top Editors because of this.

Our Content Managers couldn’t focus on producing content because they had to spend a couple of hours each day posting ads on job boards.

We didn’t have any means to do it differently. You do!

After thousands of hours and $100,000+ invested, we have Workello. You can have it instantly for the price of a single page of content. 

With Workello by our side, we managed to:

1. Scale our company from 1 to 45+ Writers and Editors in under 2 years
2. Cut our cost of content by 75%
3. Implement one of the greatest SEO campaigns ever
4. Allow our Content Managers and Editors to manage content and edit—not recruit new employees

You can now do the same.

Try out Workello for free! We configured it so that you can start accepting new candidates in under 3 minutes.