Discover Our Process for Hiring 45+ Writers and Editors

Before developing Workello, we were a content agency named ContentDistribution.com. In 2019, we started working on a project that proved to be one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns of all time. The client grew from 0 to 1,000,000 organic monthly visitors.

We achieved such success through a high volume of top-quality content, which required us to scale our team from 1 to 45+ Writers and Editors in just 18 months!

We soon realized our hiring process was inefficient and doing everything manually was a loss of time, money, and good candidates.

Now, after investing $100,000+ and tons of effort, we have an automated hiring funnel that lets us find Editors with ease. In the next few minutes, we’ll show you:

1. How to find an Editor
2. What problems come with finding a top-notch Editor 
3. How an automated hiring process gets rid of those problems

How To Find an Affordable Editor—Top 15 Job Boards

Here’s our pick for the best 15 job boards where you can find an Editor:

Read the rest of the article to find additional 25+ websites that can help you find a cheap Editor.

Hiring Editors Is a Huge Pain in the Back—Here’s Why 

Top-quality Editors are not on the market for long—there are plenty of opportunities for them, and they find a job easily, to the point where job boards can’t keep up with the demand. The result is that the majority of applicants are underqualified.

To get to the best Editor, you need to evaluate and test each one and see whether they fit your company or not. The problem is, you can’t dawdle—you need to complete the process faster than your competitors.

That’s easier said than done once hundreds of applications start flying in. We’ve gone through the painful process of doing everything manually. We posted our first ad on Upwork and soon spread out to other platforms. Regardless of the job board, we always struggled with:

• Sorting applicants by their status
• Applying settings dedicated to hiring Editors
• Receiving portfolios that didn’t represent a candidate’s actual abilities

The Issues We Faced

Whenever we decided to use another job board, the issues wouldn’t go away but multiply. Once we started receiving applications from Facebook, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Indeed, Glassdoor, and various others, it became overwhelming.

No matter what we tried to change, we couldn’t get rid of the following problems:

• Reducing the number of bad candidates
• Tracking applicants through the funnel
• Logging each application and replying to every single candidate
• Responding to the best ones on time
• Keeping track of applications we liked initially

We realized that we couldn’t solve these problems without changing our hiring process radically. After taking a look at various ATSs and having none of them satisfy all our needs, we decided to make something that would work for us.

That “something” was Workello.

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

To change a system, you need to know how that system actually works. We took a step back and broke down our entire business process into five steps. They are:

1. Getting millions of visitors requires a high volume of top-notch content
2. Creating high-quality content can’t be done without high-quality Writers and Editors
3. Finding an Editor that will always deliver requires going through a sea of applications
4. Hiring the best candidate means putting aside bad ones quickly
5. Spotting bad candidates with good portfolios—that was the problem

Job boards held their side of the bargain—they brought us hundreds of applications each day. We realized that the problem lay in the way we handled those applications. 

We lacked a system that would allow us to overcome the obstacles we couldn’t get rid of ourselves. The must-have features of this system included:

1. A platform that would act as single repository of applications from all job sources
2. An automated system of changing candidate status and sorting candidates with a single click
3. A single-page dashboard for evaluating, testing, and hiring Editors
4. An automated testing system to let us spot bad Editors with impressive portfolios
5. An automated communication system to reduce time on manual email correspondence

Before we came up with Workello, we used Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was better than we had previously, but we still lacked some crucial features. This led to the creation of our own automated hiring funnel.

Write Your Job Description Copy for Editors

No matter what you do, you will always get applications from underqualified candidates—that’s unavoidable. Still, a good job description can help you reduce their numbers. Your job description has two purposes—to describe the role in detail and to sell your company to the best candidates.

Being specific with your job description will let the potential applicants know what exactly the role entails and whether they have the qualifications for it or not.

Try not to be vague about it and state all the responsibilities and requirements you can think of. This will deter many unqualified candidates from applying.

Don’t forget that the best candidates have many options to choose from. Your job description should also sell your company and attract the best Editors. Mention any benefits you offer, such as bonuses, advancement opportunities, salary increases, and so on.

Job Description Templates

If you don’t know how to write a job description or aren’t sure about what specific role you need, we can help you out!

You can check out our extensive database of job description templates. Click on the role title, adapt the template a bit to suit your company requirements, and you’re good to go:

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

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

In the early days, our Editors and Content Managers were in charge of posting job ads online. It didn’t demand extensive brainpower, but it did take the time they could have used to produce content.

We struggled with delegating the job to someone else because they didn’t know anything about our hiring process, and we had no documents about it to educate them quickly. Now, after hundreds of hours and countless back-and-forths, we do!

Once you register for Workello for free, you will gain access to our playbooks and will be able to delegate the job easily!

A Single Dashboard That Will Forever Change the Way You Do Hiring

Before Workello, one of the main issues was keeping track of applications that would come in from various job boards. Workello solves this thanks to its single-dashboard system and a Workello-hosted application form.

This way, all applications, regardless of the job board, end up in the same place—your Workello dashboard. Since you use the same form, the application will also have the same format, so you don’t have to worry about someone sending in an incomplete application and having to reach out for additional information.

Check out an application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Once candidates’ applications show up, you’ll be able to move candidates through your hiring funnel without ever leaving your dashboard. You can use the same page to evaluate candidates, test them, invite them for an interview, and extend an offer.

To do that, all you need to do is change their candidate status by choosing one of the following options 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

Candidate statuses are color-coded so that you have a visual representation of all the candidates in each stage of the hiring process.

Reject Unqualified Editors

When Editors apply, your Content Managers can evaluate their applications within Workello. If they spot an unqualified candidate, they can remove them from your funnel by changing their status to “Application Rejected.”

This will trigger an automated email to the candidate, informing them politely about the outcome, and will also remove unnecessary back-and-forth with them that you’d have to do manually.

Point, Click, Test

Even if your Managers deem the application good enough, that doesn’t mean the candidate is a good fit. The trouble is that portfolios are almost never an accurate representation of one’s skills.

An Editor’s portfolio consists of their best work, which has been written by the best Writers and may have been additionally polished during QA. You can’t know how good their work actually is before testing them.

In the beginning, we didn’t have a testing system and would use portfolios as grounds for hiring an Editor. We wasted tons of money on salaries for Editors who couldn’t do a proper job, and other Editors had to double their workload to fix the mistakes.

One of the first items on our list while creating Workello was automated testing. When you select the “Test Candidate” status, Workello sends an automated email to the candidate that:

1. Congratulates them on being chosen for testing
2. Sends a link to the test

When they click on the link, they will see something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

A good editing test has to be a balanced one so that both the company and the candidate are satisfied with it. It has to be thorough enough for the company to assess someone’s editing skills, but it can’t go over the line and misjudge the candidate’s willingness to complete it.

From your company’s point of view, the test should be complex enough to see an Editor’s skill level when it comes to:

1. Grammar and spelling
2. Spotting factual mistakes
3. Improving article flow
4. Article formatting

From the candidate’s point of view, it can’t be a novel riddled with factual and grammatical errors that would take 8+ hours to complete. Remember that you’re asking them to do a job for free for a company that may not hire them.

Luckily, Workello allows you to push these boundaries a bit. Candidates appreciate professionalism and transparency during the selection process. With Workello, they receive swift emails and get instant application status updates.

They will regard your company as one that’s worth putting the extra effort in for.

Don’t know how to create a test? Don’t worry—you can use the one we used to test our Editors successfully!

Interviewing Candidates

Once a candidate submits their test, their status will automatically change to “Test Complete,” allowing your Editors and Content Managers to access and review it.

When they finish with the review, they can change the candidate status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Workello will send an automated email informing the applicant of the outcome
2. Invite for Interview—The candidate will receive an automated email with a Calendly link they can use to schedule a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

Candidates, too, can use Workello by accessing the Candidate Status page. This page contains information about their application status, as well as the What to expect next section that informs them about all the different steps in your selection process.

Thanks to this page, they will no longer ask for information via email. Your Recruitment Manager won’t have to waste their time responding to countless emails. You won’t have to worry about missing out on a top-performing candidate because they didn’t hear from your company in over a week.

You can see the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

With Workello, hiring Editors has never been easier! All you need to do is post job ads and move candidates through the funnel by changing their status in the drop-down menu.

When we were in the hiring rush, we didn’t have anything even remotely close to Workello. Looking back, our system feels archaic now.

Hundreds of applications would swarm us from various job boards each day, and we couldn’t keep track of each one, especially as we had to look for them in different places.

We would miss out on top-tier Editors because we would get back to them too late or never. Our Editors and Content Managers had to post job ads and make tests manually instead of focusing on producing content.

We decided to be the change we needed and focused our resources on developing a hiring funnel dedicated to scaling content teams.

With Workello, we managed to:

1. Scale our business from 1 to 45+ Editors and Writers in 18 months
2. Develop one of the most ambitious SEO projects successfully
3. Decrease our cost of content by 75%
4. Let our Editors and Content Managers do their primary jobs

Workello cost us countless hours of work and $100,000+, but it was all worth it. That same Workello will cost you only the price of a single page of content!

Try out Workello now for free! It’s pre-configured so that you can start accepting new candidates in under 3 minutes.

How To Find a Quality Editor—Use Additional Job Boards 

Without having to go through each application manually, you can now spread out and use all job websites available to you. Check out this list of 25+ job boards for finding Editors:

• Clarity
• CloudPeeps
• ContentGrow
• Copify
• Craigslist
• Edit 911
• Edit Fast
• Editorial Freelancers Association
• FinCon Community
• Freelancer
• HireMyMom
• Journalism Jobs
• Masthead Media
• Mediabistro
• Muck Rack
• PeoplePerHour
• Pitchwhiz
• Pod Reacher
• Proofread Now
• Proofreading Pal
• Pure Content
• Scribewise
• Scripted
• Skyword
• Staffing agencies
• Storyhackers
• Virtual Assistant Finder
• Zerys