Hiring a Blogger-Savvy Copywriter Is a Difficult Task—Learn From Our Exploits How To Make It Easier!

Before creating Workello, we were a small, but ambitious content agency—Content Distribution.com. Back in 2019, we took ona project for a VC-backed client that resulted in one of the greatest SEO campaigns of all time!

In under 2 years, we succeeded in growing our client from 0 to 1,500,000 monthly visitors. This required us to scale our content team from 1 to 45+ full-time members in just 18 months.

Without an automated hiring process, scaling a team this fast led to all sorts of troubles. 

As applications started arriving in droves from a dozen different job boards, we quickly became overwhelmed and had tremendous difficulties logging and reviewing them all. 

What’s worse, applications would come in varying formats through email, Facebook DMs, and different job boards. Candidates would submit portfolios as Word documents. We spent hours every day sending follow up emails. As time went on, we had to spend more and more time on hiring, to the point where our editors and content managers couldn’t keep up with their primary responsibilities.

It became apparent that our hiring system was outdated, and we had to do something about it or else it would collapse entirely—taking our business with it!

After investing more than $100,000 and spending many months on meticulous R&D, we finally got what we so desperately needed. A fine-tuned, fully automated hiring funnel—Workello!

In the following 10+ minutes, we’ll show you the best 28 job boards to find a Freelance Copywriter for your blog. You’ll also learn how to set up a fully automated hiring funnel with Workello and cut your hiring costs in half!

Where To Find a Freelance Copywriter Bloggers—Our 15 Favorite Job Boards

In the course of our hiring spree, we used many different platforms. Below is a selection of our 15 favorite ones:

Continue reading this article, and we’ll share with you an additional 13 job boards you can use to find a top-performing copywriter!

Why Is It Such a Struggle To Find a Good Freelance Copywriter

Top-performing Freelance Copywriters—especially those who know how to write copy for blogs—tend to go off the market rather quickly. This is because their services are in huge demand among companies wishing to build up their online presence.

Consequently, the vast majority of candidates on any job board will be unqualified. So, the question isn’t where you should look but rather how fast you can sort through all the bad applications and identify those few top-performers.

Without an optimized, automated hiring funnel, finding the best candidates before they accept an offer from a different company is borderline impossible. We learned this the hard way.

The first platform we used was Upwork, but we didn’t find many great writers there. We thought expanding on other job platforms was the solution. 

Posting on a dozen different websites didn’t solve any of our problems—it just multiplied them. No matter where we looked for writers, we couldn’t:

• Log all applications efficiently
• Sort candidates by their application status in our hiring funnel
• Filter out bad writers with good portfolios
• Follow up with candidates on time (or event)
• Keep note of the candidates we initially liked

Our SEO campaign had been so successful because we put all our effort in it—while no effort went into improving our hiring funnel!

This had to change, so we immediately got down to work. With the same dedicated effort we had for content, we fully immersed ourselves in R&D in order to devise a new, better, fully automated system tailored for hiring copywriters!

After many months of tireless work, we succeeded and Workello was born!

Use Pre-Hire Tests To Overcome the Struggle of Hiring a Skilled Copywriter

Hiring copywriters often turns out a mess. You get hundreds of applications, most of which are from underqualified candidates. You go through their resumes and portfolios, without ever knowing how true their portfolios are to their actual first-draft quality—you are well aware that the submitted samples have likely been heavily edited. Without testing your applicants, you risk hiring someone unqualified based on their solid interview skills—not their copywriting prowess.

To bypass this issue and hire only the top 1% of talent, you need to introduce pre-hire assessments.

When you do so, another issue will occur. How do you manage testing hundreds of candidates at once without losing your bearings? The only way to do it is to get reliable skill assessment software. Workello will automate the assessment process and facilitate your communication with candidates. All you need to do is:

1. Sign up for free and use the pre-configured settings to set up the hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Post job ads on job platforms using the Workello link
3. Assess applications within your dashboard
4. Send tests to candidates to evaluate their skills
5. Reject or invite for interview and hire candidates without ever leaving your dashboard

Test Hundreds of Candidates Hassle-Free With Workello

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that automates your hiring funnel and speeds up the entire process, allowing you to save time and money. Most importantly, you won’t miss out on top candidates.

You can use Workello to test copywriters and SEO copywriters for any industry and niche. If you need a boost in your content team, use Workello to test content writers with ease. It’s an all-in-one platform that will meet all your needs. You only need to create a free account and hire top-quality copywriters in no time.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

In order to build a hiring system that works, we first had to figure out what was wrong with the existing one. We broke down our business process into the smallest parts, and this is what we came up with:

1. To attract large numbers of monthly visitors, we had to consistently publish high volumes of top-quality content
2. Producing relevant, engaging, valuable content required us to hire talented, experienced writers
3. Hiring a single top-performing writer meant going through dozens of sub-par applications
4. Filtering out hundreds of unqualified writers quickly and efficiently—this is what we didn’t  have the answer for

We never had a problem with receiving applications—the real issue was handling them efficiently. Everything was manual, and our hiring process deteriorated into a disorganized mess. We couldn’t keep track of where each candidate was in our hiring funnel and we spent hours each day sending follow-up emails and replying to the same questions.

To solve all of these issues at once, our ideal hiring system had to have the following features:

1. A single platform that will gather applications from all job boards in one place for us to view
2. A well-integrated ATS that would allow us to sort candidates by their status in our hiring funnel
3. A single page used to review, test, set up interviews, and finally hire the best Freelance Copywriter
4. An automated testing system to spot poor candidates with excellent portfolios
5. Email automation that would reduce manual correspondence while also reducing the chance of human error

Our first model used the combination of Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was a step in the right direction, but still miles away from what we had envisioned. Workello would only arrive hundreds of iterations later. 

To Get the Right Copywriter for Your Blog, You Need a Super-Specific Job Description

When hiring a freelance copywriter for your blog, you have to be super-specific with your job description. 

Content and copy are two different categories of writing, so it should be obvious to interested candidates that they need to be proficient in both. Tell them exactly what type of content they’ll be expected to write—including the industry, the type of blog posts, and word count. Explain whether the copy they’ll be required to create pertains only to pitching products within the content itself or if it includes banners, pop-ups, and metas as well. 

Be sure to state the preferred work experience in a content and copywriting role, level of education, and any additional skills required to succeed in the role (e.g., knowledge of SEO best practices or the ability to do keyword research). 

Lastly, you should state the rate you’ll be willing to pay. Don’t just write “competitive salary” or promise high rates—provide the exact pay range. Freelancers appreciate transparency, and the best freelance writers won’t look at your job ad twice if you’re vague and are withholding crucial information regarding the job.

If you’re not sure where to begin with your job ad, don’t fret—you can leverage Workello’s vast database and swipe one of our pre-configured job description templates!

Check out our most popular copywriting job description templates, select the one you like, adapt it according to the needs of your organization, and start hiring today:

• Freelance Copywriter
• Copywriter
• Junior Copywriter
• SEO Copywriter
• Conversion Copywriter
• B2B Copywriter
• Fashion Copywriter
• Pharmaceutical Copywriter
• Beauty Copywriter
• Automotive Copywriter
• Medical Copywriter

All Candidate Applications in a Single, Unified Dashboard!

The Workello dashboard acts as a single entry point for all the applications that come in regardless of which job board someone applied on. You can view them all on one page and oversee every aspect of your hiring process without ever having to leave your account!

You also no longer have to deal with incomplete applications, as our Workello-hosted application form ensures all applications are submitted in the same format and only after all the required fields have been filled.

This way, you don’t have to waste time manually writing emails and asking candidates to send in the missing information.

Take a look at Workello’s application form here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

The Workello dashboard provides all the features required to review candidates’ portfolios, distribute tests, schedule interviews, and ultimately hire the Freelance Copywriter who demonstrates the greatest skill.

To move a candidate from one stage to the next, you only need to pick the appropriate status from the drop-down menu. The list of options includes:

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

For additional ease of use, we’ve color-coded each status so you can easily see how many candidates there are and at what stage of the hiring process.

Reject Unqualified Copywriters

No matter what you do, there will always be unqualified candidates—some will fall short of even the most basic hiring criteria! When you spot such a candidate, you can easily eliminate them from your funnel by changing their application status to Application Rejected.

Doing so will trigger an automatic message that politely informs the candidate that their application has been rejected. 

Point, Click, Test

Regardless of how good a candidate seems based on their portfolio, you shouldn’t hire them without evaluating their skills properly.

This is because copywriters will send you only samples of their best work, which is usually edited and polished to perfection by a skilled copy editor.

The only way to accurately assess someone’s copywriting skills is by testing them.

Before implementing a strict testing system into our hiring funnel, we hired writers based solely on their portfolios. This proved to be a terrible mistake, and we threw away thousands of dollars on poorly-written articles that our editors had to rewrite from scratch!

To prevent this from happening again, we included a built-in testing feature into Workello.

To send out a test, all you need to do is change a candidate’ status to Test Candidate. Upon doing so, Workello sends them an automated message:

1. Informing them that that your recruiters are satisfied with their portfolio
2. Providing them with a link to the copywriting test

When they click the link, they will open a page that looks a bit like this:

How To Make a Good Test

To make a well-rounded copywriting test, you need to make sure that it can be used to evaluate the following skills:

1. Language fluency
2. Understanding of SEO (keywords rankings, variations, etc.)
3. Ability to stress the perks and advantages of your product/services
4. Formatting

While you should strive for your test to be challenging, it shouldn’t be unfair or unreasonably long. Whatever skill you want to assess, you can easily do it with a manageable 500-word test. After all, no candidate will be willing to set aside an entire day to complete a novel-length assignment.

Fortunately for you, Workello allows you to create slightly more elaborate tests! 

All your candidates will receive timely replies due to our automated communication system, which will provide them with instructions on what to do in each stage of the selection process. They will take this as a mark of professionalism, and consequently—they will have more enthusiasm to complete even a longer test!

Learn how to set up a test in Workello in just 2 minutes.

Interviewing Candidates

Once a candidate completes the test article and clicks the Submit Test button, their status will automatically update to Test Complete and they will no longer be able to make any changes to it.

You can then find the test in your dashboard and assess the candidate’s copywriting skills. Depending on the quality of the test, you can select one of two options:

1. Reject Candidate—Sends the candidate a message that politely informs them of their failure to pass the copywriting test
2. Invite for Interview—Sends the candidate a message that congratulates them on passing the test along with an invitation to schedule an interview via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

To ensure your candidates are well-informed about every aspect of your hiring process, Workello has integrated a Candidate Status page. Here, they can learn what they want to know about the status of their application without having to send emails to your HR team.

We also have a What to expect next section, which contains useful information about each stage in your hiring funnel.

This page makes tedious manual correspondence obsolete, with the added benefit of not having to worry about missing out on a great copywriter because you couldn’t provide an answer to their questions on time.

Click here to see an example of the Candidate Status page.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Hiring Freelance Copywriters seems like a mundane chore when you’ve got a highly optimized system with automated features that require only minimum input to perform their tasks.

We had no such system to fall back on and so we faced tremendous difficulties with every single task that could be automated.

Myriads of applications flooded our hiring funnel, and it quickly became impossible to log them all in a proper manner. Because of such mishaps, many top-quality copywriters skirted past us while others just lost interest because we weren’t responding quickly enough (or at all).

Our editors had a tough time balancing their main role—editing articles—with their secondary responsibility of posting job listings, composing tests, and evaluating candidates.

We had no other option but to come up with our own solution. That’s why we now have Workello—because necessity drove us to create it!

With our new system, we succeeded in:

1. Scaling our team from 1 to 45+ copywriters in under 18 months
2. Lowering the cost our producing content by 75%
3. Working on one of the most ambitious SEO projects ever
4. Allowing our editors to devote their full attention to editing and polishing our content

We spend countless hours and thousands of dollars developing Workello! You can enjoy all of the benefits it provides for the price of a single page of quality content!Try out Workello for free! Create an account, set up your test, and start receiving applications today!

An Additional 13 Job Boards To Hire a Freelance Copywriter

Using Workello, you can distribute your job listings freely and on as many websites as you can handle! There’s no longer a limit since each application will unmistakably arrive in the same place—your dashboard.

Check out the following job boards to find the ideal Freelance Copywriter for your business:

• Copify
• Society of Professional Journalists
• The Writer Finder
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer group
• WriteLife Facebook group
• PeoplePerHour
• Storyhackers
• National Association of Black Journalists
• Pitchwhiz
• National Association of Science Writers
• CloudPeeps
• Certified Writers
• Craigslist