We Scaled Our Team From 1 to 45 Writers and Editors in just 18 Months

Before launching Workello, our team executed one of the greatest content marketing campaigns on the internet (0 to 1,000,000 organic visitors per month). To achieve this, we had to grow our content agency from 1 to 45 writers and editors in less than two years.

We spent hundreds of hours and over $100,000 developing a fully-automated system for hiring better and more affordable writers. By investing 10 minutes of your time in reading this article, you’ll get answers to the following questions:

1. Where to find good Blog Writers?
2. Why is hiring good Blog Writers so difficult?
3. How does automated testing work?

Where To Find Good Blog Writers Fast—Top 15 Job Boards

We’ve put together a comprehensive list of the best job boards for hiring writers. Check out the advantages and disadvantages of the top 15 job sites for hiring Blog Writers:

Read through the article to discover 7+ additional job boards and learn how to find writers for your blog as fast as possible.

Finding Good Blog Writers is a Challenging Task

Hiring good Blog Writers is not an easy task because the good ones are snapped up quickly. Every hiring site has the same inherent problem—not being able to source high-performing Blog Writers as fast as they get hired. It doesn’t matter if you’re hiring from LinkedIn, Facebook, Craigslist, Glassdoor, or Upwork—whichever job board you choose, you’ll need to be quick. Great writers are hard to find and get snapped by companies like ours in a flash.

On all job sites, there are more under qualified candidates than top-performing ones, and they will swamp your hiring funnel regardless of what you do. To find a Blog Writer who can consistently provide you with top-quality content, you must go through hundreds of applicants and test them to weed out bad writers. The more candidates you evaluate and test, the bigger are the chances you’ll find a good writer.

When we first started hiring Blog Writers, we used UpWork as our only job board. To be able to test and evaluate more candidates, we had to expand across a few more job boards—and this is where things started going downhill. We experienced the following issues:

• We used platforms that aren’t designed for testing and hiring writers
• We had no way of knowing where candidates were in our hiring funnel
• Many good candidates didn’t receive our response or received it too late
• Candidates submitted heavily edited portfolios that did not accurately reflect their writing abilities
• Most of our candidates continued to be unqualified

A light bulb went off after months of bashing our heads against the wall trying to find a better hiring system—we decided to create our own. The end result was Workello—an automated hiring funnel designed for content teams.

Use Pre-Hire Testing To Find the Best Writer

Regardless of what job boards you advertise on, you’ll always end up with more unqualified candidates than top ones. No applicant will admit they don’t know what they’re doing, and their portfolios will inevitably paint a positive story.

If you don’t want to hire someone and discover they’re underqualified the hard way, you need to enhance your hiring process and introduce pre-hire testing.

Tests will let you gauge the candidates’ writing quality first-hand. The issue is—with hundreds of applicants to deal with, you’ll quickly lose control and won’t know where in the funnel each candidate is. You need skill assessment software to sort that out for you. 

Workello automates the entire hiring process and provides support for hassle-free testing. You only need to create a free account and:

1. Set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes with the pre-configured settings
2. Add a Workello link to all your job ads (existing or new)
3. Wait for applications to arrive
4. Send tests to filter out poor candidates with impressive portfolios
5. Interview, reject, and hire candidates from your dashboard

Streamline Your Candidate Assessment Process With Workello

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that will help you set up your job post, assess candidates, send and log tests, and review them. You’ll be able to reject candidates, invite them for an interview, and extend offers without ever leaving your dashboard.

Workello can help you test content writers, regardless of your specific needs. With our pre-hire assessment software, you can test copywriters, SEO copywriters, SEO writers, and technical writers. Need to fill other roles on your content team? Test content marketers and related roles in Workello effortlessly.

Sign up for Workello for free and streamline your hiring process effortlessly.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

We went back to the drawing board and looked at how we used to do things, hoping to find areas where we could improve. We broke down our entire working process into little chunks and jotted down the following:

1. To attract millions of visitors per month, we need to publish huge volumes of top-quality content
2. Creating a lot of high-quality content requires hiring a lot of good writers
3. Finding good writers requires evaluating hundreds of candidates
4. Finding the best writers requires swiftly spotting and filtering out the bad ones

Filtering out the bad candidates is where we got stuck. We had realized that we needed a systematic approach to weed out unqualified candidates and find skilled ones faster. This is when we started working on our dream system for hiring qualified Blog Writers fast and here’s what we knew we needed:

• A single place to view candidates from all of our hiring channels
• A system that allows us to sort our candidates according to their application status, so we know what to do next
• A place where we can test, reject, invite for interviews, and hire candidates without leaving our dashboard
• An automated writing test that can be used to weed out bad candidates with good portfolios
• Automated communication to help us move candidates writers through our hiring funnel more quickly and efficiently

The system we built started off as Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. This was a good start, but it was still miles away from our goal. Over thousands of hours and numerous iterations, this improvised workflow evolved into the system now known as Workello.

Why Is Writing a Detailed Job Description Super-Important?

Writing a good job description is crucial when hiring for any role. To attract the right candidates, you need to customize the job ad for the specific role you’re hiring for. You should make it crystal clear what qualifications the prospective employee needs to have and what tasks they’ll be performing once they join your company. It is important to specify the niche your Blog Writer will be writing about—you can’t just hire any Blog Writer if you’re writing about something complex themes like crypto, medicine, banking, etc.

Another thing you should clarify is why top-performing candidates should choose to work for you, in addition to describing what you’re searching for in an ideal employee. Describe what it’s like to work at your organization, outline its mission and goals, and state career advancement opportunities the candidate will have once they join your team.

If you’re not sure what role you’re looking for or haven’t created a job description yet, the good news is that you don’t have to start from scratch. We’ve come up with a complete list of resources, including ready-made job descriptions for all of the major jobs that you can easily tailor to your needs.

Click on the role of your choice in the table below, slightly adapt the pre-made job description to meet your company’s needs, and copy-paste the job ad on your favorite job boards.

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

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

In the beginning, our Content Managers and Editors used to post our job ads all over the internet, which took a lot of time. Eventually, we realized that our Content Managers were wasting a lot of time publishing job ads instead of focusing on creating great content. 

We wanted to delegate this task to someone else but transferring the knowledge to them required us to document the entire process. You now have the opportunity to access these documents and save hundreds of hours figuring out this process on your own.

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

Watch Candidate Applications Pile In

Workello lets you post ads on as many job sites as you like, allowing you to reach a bigger audience. You don’t have to worry about handling applications coming in from all over the place since our platform provides you with a unified dashboard where you can see all of them at once. This way, you will save yourself time and effort tracking applications manually.

Check out an example application here

Watch Candidates Stream In

Since you’ll have all the information in one place, regardless of where your candidates find your job ad, you’ll be able to review job applications and change their status hassle-free. Candidates are sorted by their application status:

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

The application statuses are color-coded, making it easy to see how many of them are in each stage of the hiring process.

Reject Unqualified Candidates

A candidate’s application is visible in the Workello dashboard as soon as they submit it. You can grant access to Workello to your editors and content managers, allowing them to log in and assess the applications. By changing the status to Application Rejected, they can filter out unqualified candidates. This will trigger an automated polite rejection email, so you won’t waste time and effort responding to follow-up emails from unfit candidates.

Point, Click, Test

Many of your candidates will turn out to be bad writers with impressive portfolios. You need to be aware that portfolios are rarely a true representation of a writer’s abilities since most candidates include heavily-edited content in them. It is hard to tell how much editing your candidate’s articles included in the portfolio went through before they were published, but their quality will often be drastically different from what you receive in a 1st draft. This is why the only way to see if a writer is skilled is to test them.

We had wasted a lot of money paying for articles that required complete rewriting to be usable before we started testing our candidates. If you don’t filter out the bad ones, you’re going to make the same mistake we did and spend a significant sum of money on unusable content.

With Workello, the testing of writers’ first draft quality is super easy and helps you get an idea of how much editing the candidate’s content will need in the future. 

When you update a candidate’s status to Test Candidate, they will instantly receive an email with a link to a writing test, along with detailed instructions.

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

How To Make a Good Test

The more complex your writing test is, the less likely a candidate is to complete it. A good writing test maintains a balance between complexity and the candidate’s willingness to invest their time and effort in it. Three main areas you want to evaluate your candidates on are:

1. Language proficiency
2. Research skills
3. Article formatting (internal links, headings, etc)

By receiving fast responses every step of the way and having all the necessary information, your candidates will be appreciative of the excellent organization of your hiring process and your professionalism. They will feel good about investing their time into completing the application process and potentially working for your company.

If you’re having difficulties creating an adequate test, take a look at the one we used to assess hundreds of candidates and build a team of talented writers. Get the exact copy here. 

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate completes a writing test and submits it through Workello, their status changes to Test Complete. This signals to your content managers that it’s time to review the test.

If the candidate passes, you can change their status to Invite for Interview and they will automatically get an invitation to schedule a video interview via Calendly.

If, on the other hand, the candidate fails the test, you can update their status to Reject Candidate and they’ll receive a polite rejection email thanking them for their time.

The Candidate Status Page

Despite the automated processes and optimizations we had implemented, we still spent a significant amount of time answering the same questions over and over. The most frequently asked questions were the following:

• Did you receive my application?
• Did you review my test?
• When will I hear back?
• What are the next steps?

We were sometimes late to respond or missed the inquiry altogether, inadvertently missing out on great candidates at the same time. This is what motivated us to build an automated status page to address the most frequently asked questions candidates have during the hiring process.

In addition to reducing transactional questions, our innovative system enhances transparency and organization around the hiring process, keeping good candidates invested in completing it. 

Check out what the Candidate Status page looks like here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

When we started ContentDistribution, we didn’t have an automated hiring system. Nothing could help us make the hiring process easier and less time-consuming. We couldn’t keep track of all the applications that flooded in from various job boards, which resulted in missing out on many great writers. Another problem was that every candidate submitted their application differently—very few of them included all of the information we considered necessary. 

Instead of editing content, our talented editors spent up to two hours each day posting job ads while our managers updated candidates’ statuses manually (leaving a lot of room for human error).

All these difficulties motivated us to automate our hiring funnel and create Workello. This is the most important investment our agency has ever made, costing more than $100,000. Thousands of hours and iterative improvements over thousands of applications went into developing a system that now appears to be incredibly simple.

This investment paid off big-time because we:

• Reduced our cost of content by 75%
• Grew our agency from 1 to 45 writers in less than two years
• Made it possible for our editors and content managers to concentrate on creating outstanding content rather than on locating and hiring exceptional writers

A product that cost us more than $100,000 is now available to you for the price of a single page of content—plus you get a free trial period!

Try Workello completely for free. It’s pre-configured so you can start accepting candidates, and automating your hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes. 

How To Find Good Blog Writers—Additional Job Boards

Workello makes posting ads on all the best websites for Blog Writers a piece of cake. Check out a few more job boards for hiring top-notch Blog Writers:

• PeoplePerHour
• Craigslist
• Muck Rack
• Pure Content
• ContentGrow
• Pod Reacher
• Freelancer
• Scribewise