Hiring Skilled Writers Is a Challenge—Learn From Our Mistakes

Before we developed Workello, we were a successful content agency known as Content Distribution. A few years ago, we landed a client that matched our ambitions, and we started working on a project that would become one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever.

The campaign grew the number of organic visitors to our client’s website from 0 to 1,000,000 per month in only 18 months!

Such an accomplishment demanded that we create a vast number of top-quality articles in a relatively short time. To do that, we had to scale our content team insanely fast. 

We started hiring on Upwork but soon expanded to a dozen different job boards as well in hopes of finding top-tier writers faster. We soon realized that our hiring process was deeply flawed. While we invested all our efforts in producing excellent content, we almost entirely neglected our hiring system. It brought us a lot of problems when we started hiring at a rapid pace:

• We received dozens of applications every day from a dozen different sources
• Candidates contacted us via email and DMs
• We received portfolios and applications in various formats
• It was near-impossible to log all the incoming applications manually
• We couldn’t keep track of candidates nor move them through our hiring funnel easily
• We had to follow up with every single candidate manually

Our scraped-together hiring funnel was ill-equipped to handle such an influx of candidates. Things got chaotic fast and we felt like we were stuck in a never-ending hiring cycle with only a handful of good writers to show for it.

We regularly missed out on great candidates because they would either lose interest in us or get hired by another company by the time we followed up with them.

After a few months, it became painfully obvious that we had to revamp our entire hiring system. There was no ATS that was specifically designed for content teams, and none of the solutions on the market could simultaneously solve all the problems we faced. So, we decided to create our own. 

We invested over $100,000 and countless hours of R&D until we were completely satisfied with the final product—Workello!

In the next 10 minutes, we will show you how you too can enhance your hiring process, and you will learn:

1. How to find professional writers for articles
2. What the top 30+ websites for hiring professional writers are
3. Why it’s so hard to hire professional writers
4. How automation can help you test more candidates and hire better writers faster

How To Find Great Professional Writers for Articles

Before you can start searching for professional article writers, you have to know what exactly you are looking for. There are particular qualities that every competent professional writer must have:

• Ability to choose the right words—Rich vocabulary sets great writers apart from subpar ones. These writers are also easily adaptable to different industries and topics, so they’re always an excellent choice for content agencies that cover a wide variety of topics
• Superb attention to detail—Professional writers don’t require heavy editing. They have superb flow, pay attention to every sentence, keyword, and link, and ensure the article is 100% factually correct, informative and engaging, and easy to read
• Excellent command of grammar and syntax—Good sentence structure, accurate use of punctuation, and everything in between is a must for someone to be called a professional writer 
• Focus on what’s important—Audiences like to read informative articles that provide the answers they’re looking for. While a little “artistic freedom” is fine, professional writers will never stuff their articles with unnecessary fluff. With short attention spans of today’s website visitors, short, sweet, and to the point is the name of the game

While you should look for all these qualities in a professional article writer, you should also consider the needs of your company and brand. What kind of style aligns with your brand, what message you want to convey, what kind of relationship you want to establish with your visitors, how complex the topics you want to cover are, etc.

You should emphasize all these elements both in your job ad and during interviews, to ensure that the writer you end up hiring has the required industry-specific knowledge, sufficient content marketing experience, and is a good fit for your organization.

Where To Find Professional Writers for Articles

Check out our list of the top 15 job boards for hiring professional article writers at any price point and learn about their pros and cons:

Read through the article to find more websites for hiring writers and learn how to find professional writers for articles more quickly.

Hiring Professional Writers for Articles Is Tough

Hiring professional writers for articles is difficult because the best ones get hired so fast that hiring platforms can’t source them quickly enough to keep up with demand. 

Every business that wants to establish a solid online presence and drive qualified organic traffic to their website is looking for experienced writers. At any given point in time, you’re competing against thousands of other companies for the same writers.

You will quickly realize that most of the candidates on all job boards are unqualified, and they will not hesitate to send their applications. To find a single top-performer, you will have to evaluate and test a hundred applicants. The more candidates you test, the better the chances you find a competent writer, but the longer each hiring cycle will be.

Without an optimized hiring funnel, you will unavoidably waste a lot of time. We know because we were in that same exact position. 

When we first set out on our hiring spree, we used only Upwork. We thought that we would be able to evaluate and test more candidates if we used more job boards, so we started posting job ads on several more hiring platforms. 

That’s when things started to go a little crazy:

• Most of the platforms lack an option to evaluate and test writers
• It’s borderline impossible to keep track of where each candidate is in your hiring funnel
• We often didn’t respond to candidates in time
• We received heavily embellished portfolios that didn’t match the writers’ actual skill
• We spend a lot of time filtering out bad candidates
• Wherever they came from, most candidates were still unqualified

We tried to find a better hiring system, and we hit the wall every time. Enough was enough—we had to create our own funnel. 

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

To design a hiring system that would solve all of our problems, we had to understand exactly why our existing process crumbled. We broke it down into the smallest elements and concluded the following:

1. Increasing the number of organic website visitors is only possible with large volumes of high-quality content
2. Creating a lot of high-quality content is only possible with a team of experienced, professional writers
3. Finding great professional article writers requires evaluating hundreds of candidates
4. Hiring top-talent requires filtering out bad candidates quickly and efficiently

Weeding out bad candidates reliably and efficiently is what we didn’t have a solution to. We needed a system that would help us filter out unqualified applicants and identify good ones faster. 

We started thinking about what features our ideal Applicant Tracking System needed to have. Here’s what we jotted down:

• A single dashboard to view candidates from all job boards that we use
• An option to sort our candidates by application status effortlessly
• A single platform to test, reject, invite for interviews, and hire candidates
• An automatically sent writing test to help us weed out bad candidates with good portfolios quickly
• An automated communication system to save time on email correspondence

Our first makeshift system consisted of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier. It was a good starting point but it was still far from what we envisioned. Thousands of hours and countless iterations later, this improvised funnel evolved into a fully-automated and optimized hiring system—Workello.

A Good Job Description Is Vital for the Success of Your Hiring Cycle

Regardless of how good your hiring system is, you’ll always struggle to find qualified candidates if you post a vague job ad that fails to explain the responsibilities of the role and the requirements candidates must meet to be considered for the job. 

Your job ad has to be tailored to your specific needs and include a detailed description of all the responsibilities the role entails. You must also clearly state your minimum hiring criteria, or you’ll be swamped with applications from newbie writers, unqualified candidates, and students looking to make some money on the side. 

Since you’re looking for professional writers, you should also specify the industry they must be familiar with. Explain what topics they’ll be covering and what you expect their daily output to be. You can’t hire just any writer, particularly if the writers will be composing articles on more complicated topics such as law, medicine, finances, etc. 

To ensure that the best candidates stick with you until the end of your hiring process and pick you over your competitors, you should include the salary range in your job ad. On top of that, mention any perks and benefits they’ll enjoy once they join your team, such as bonuses, PTO, learning and career advancement opportunities, team-building events, etc. 

If you are not sure what type of writer you need or don’t know how to put together a job description that will attract top-tier candidates, you can tap into our extensive database of templates. 

Pick the role you think would best suit your company, adapt our template according to your needs, and post your job ad on as many job boards as you like, and watch candidates stream in.

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

In the beginning, we relied on our editors and content managers to post job ads on dozens of different hiring platforms. While this wasn’t particularly difficult, it kept them away from their primary duties—publishing great content.

When we realized that our content production was slowing to a crawl, we knew it was time to hire a Recruitment Officer. This was easier said than done because it required us to document our entire hiring process and train the new employee.  

We spent weeks creating all the necessary recruitment documentation, but you don’t have to!

Sign up for Workello for free to get access to our entire knowledge base and learn how to delegate job ad posting to someone else.

See All Your Applications Grouped in One Place

Workello allows you to post your job ad on as many job boards as you like, without having to worry about checking every single job board daily and manually logging applications. 

All you have to do is include a Workello-hosted application form in your job ad. This form ensures that all applications end up in the same place—your Workello dashboard! On top of that, all applications will be in the same format and you’ll have all the necessary candidate information at your fingertips. 

The screenshot below shows you an example of a candidate application form. 

Watch Candidates Stream In

As soon as a candidate clicks the “submit” button, their application will show up in your Workello dashboard. You’ll be able to review it and move the candidate through your hiring funnel with a single click—by selecting the appropriate option from a drop down-menu.

Here are the available application statuses:

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

Each status is color-coded, making it easy to see how many applicants are in each stage of the hiring process.

Reject Unqualified Candidates

It won’t be necessary to test all the candidates—some of them will obviously be unqualified. You can immediately remove those candidates from the race by changing their status to Application Rejected. 

This action triggers an automated rejection email, so you won’t have to reach out to each candidate manually or waste time replying to their emails. 

Point, Click, Test

Candidates whose applications and portfolios meet your basic requirements should go to the next stage of your hiring process—testing. 

This step is crucial because that is the only way to see if a candidate’s portfolio matches their actual writing skills. Candidates often submit the best samples of their work, but you have to keep in mind that these articles have gone through at least one round of editing and have been polished to perfection. They are rarely (if ever) an accurate representation of the writer’s first draft capabilities. When we started hiring, we hired many candidates based on their portfolios alone. It often cost us a lot of money because the content they created was unusable or required extensive rewriting. 

With Workello, you can easily send writing tests to selected candidates. All you have to do is change their application status to Test Candidates, and they will automatically receive an email that:

1. Congratulates them on making it to the testing stage of your hiring process
2. Provides them with a link to the test

When candidates click on the link, they will see a tab that looks something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

Testing candidates is more than just assigning them a random topic to write an article about. For a test to be effective, it has to tick a few boxes:

1. It must be detailed enough so you can see how good a writer a candidate is
2. It mustn’t be too demanding, or candidates may not be willing to complete it
3. You have to provide clear instructions (keyword variations, word count, internal linking, etc.)

Three main areas you want to evaluate are:

1. Language proficiency
2. Research skills
3. Article formatting (subheading distribution, internal links, external links, sentence length, etc.)

Since Workelloo ensures your candidates receive fast responses whenever their application status changes and gives them all the necessary information, they will be impressed by your excellent organization. You will come across as a professional and serious company, and they will be willing to invest more effort in completing your test. 

If you are having trouble creating a test, you can use the template that helped us scale our content team from 1 to 45+ members. Click here to access our writing test template and learn how to set up your own test in 5 minutes.

Interviewing Candidates

Once candidates submit their test, they won’t be able to access it anymore, and their application status will automatically change to Test Complete. That will signal your editors that it’s time to review the test article. 

If an article meets your company’s standards, your editors can change their application status to Invite for Interview. The candidate will receive an automated email that contains a Calendly link and instructions on scheduling a video interview at their convenience.

If you don’t find the test article satisfactory, your editors can quickly remove the candidate from your hiring funnel by changing their application status to Reject Candidate. This will trigger an automated polite rejection email, informing the candidate politely that they will not be moving on to the next step. 

The Candidate Status Page

No matter how much we optimized our hiring processes, we still received many transactional questions, and we wasted a significant amount of time responding to these emails manually. The most commonly asked questions were:

• Have you received my application?
• Have you reviewed my test?
• When can I expect to hear from you?
• What are the next steps?

We were sometimes too late to respond or missed the inquiry altogether, and it often led to us missing out on fantastic candidates. To ensure this doesn’t happen again, we implemented an automated Candidate Status page which contains answers to all the frequently asked questions. The What to expect next section also explains how our hiring process works.Check out what the Candidate Status page looks like here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Hiring professional writers for articles really is simple with an optimized and automated hiring funnel that does all of the repetitive tasks for you. 

When we set out on our hiring quest, we didn’t have such a funnel to streamline our hiring process. We ran into trouble every step of the way:

• We couldn’t keep track of the candidates
• Applications came dozens at a time from various sides
• Many submissions we incomplete
• Portfolios often didn’t match candidates’ actual writing skills 
• We contacted each applicant manually
• We sometimes reached out to candidates too late, and sometimes we missed an applicant altogether
• There was a lot of room for human error when moving candidates through our hiring funnel
• We couldn’t filter out unsuitable candidates fast enough
• Our editors and managers were overwhelmed, and they neglected their primary duties

It was chaos, but it motivated us to create Workello—an automated hiring funnel designed with content teams in mind. 

It was the best decision we have ever made, and it helped us achieve incredible things:

1. We grew our team from 1 to 45+ members in under two years
2. Our content production costs were reduced by 75% thanks to a team of non-native writers
3. Our agency executed one of the greatest and most ambitious SEO campaigns ever seen
4. Content production didn’t stagnate anymore because our editors and managers could go back to their actual jobs

We invested over $100,000 and thousands of working hours in creating a product you can get for the price of a single page of content!

Try Workello now completely for free. It’s completely set up so you can start accepting candidates and automating your hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes. 

How To Find Professional Writers for Articles—More Places To Look for Them

Go ahead and post your job ad to as many job boards as you like—after all, applications will all go to a single place. No more checking DMs on different websites and logging each candidate manually. 

Check out some more job boards and other websites where you can find qualified professional writers for articles:

• Freelancer
• Guru
• Scripted
• HireWriters
• PeoplePerHour
• Craigslist
• Muck Rack
• Pure Content
• ContentGrow
• Pod Reacher
• Scribewise
• Journalism Jobs
• Certified Writers
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer Facebook Group
• What’s Your Plan B? Facebook Community
• FinCon Facebook Community
• The Write Life Facebook Community