Hiring Writers Is Difficult—Learn From Our Mistakes

Before launching Workello, we were a successful content agency called ContentDistribution.com. In 2019, we ran one of the most successful SEO campaigns on the internet ever, growing our client’s organic monthly visitors from 0 to 1,000,000+ in just 18 months!

We accomplished this by publishing hundreds of pages of high-quality content each month. To be able to produce high volumes of great content, we needed to scale our team quickly. In less than two years, we went from 1 to 45+ writers and editors—which was anything but easy. We had a hard time keeping track of all the applicants because they were sending in incomplete applications, portfolios in Word, and contacted us via email. Our hiring process was… chaotic, to say the least.

We quickly realized that our hiring strategy was ineffective and that we lacked an automated system that would streamline the process and allow us to identify and connect with the best candidates quickly. Since a system dedicated exclusively to hiring content writers didn’t exist at the time, we decided to create our own. We invested over $100,000 and thousands of hours to create what is now known as Workello.

Using Workello, you can automate your hiring process to cut hiring costs, save time, and snatch the best candidates before your competitors. In the next 10+ minutes you’re going to learn:

1. How to find better and more affordable writers for your online magazine
2. Why is it difficult to hire writers without an automated hiring system 

Top 15 Job Boards To Hire Writers for Your Online Magazine

Take a look at our list of the top 15 job boards for hiring writers for your online magazine:

Read through the article to discover additional job boards for hiring top-notch writers.

Why Is It so Difficult To Find Good Writers for Online Magazines

Hiring a writer is easy—but hiring a good and affordable writer is incredibly difficult. Good, pre-vetted writers are worth their weight in Google stock and are hired faster than any platform can source them. Every brand that wants to build an online presence and drive organic traffic is looking for qualified writers. This means that great writers get tons of offers and can always have several options to choose from. Even when they’re in-between switching companies, they don’t stay unemployed for long. As a result, all job boards are “dominated” by unqualified candidates, and your hiring process must be extremely efficient to reliably identify great writers in a sea of mediocre ones. 

Only by evaluating and testing hundreds of candidates can you locate a top-notch writer, and you must do so faster than your competitors. We used only Upwork when we first started growing our team but soon expanded onto other job boards, such as Facebook, Craigslist, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor. This is where things started going downhill since our problems only multiplied. 

We faced the following problems:

• We used platforms that aren’t designed for testing and hiring writers
• It was hard to keep track of where candidates were in our hiring funnel
• Candidates submitted heavily edited portfolios that didn’t accurately reflect their true writing skills
• We were responding to good candidates too late
• Most of our candidates continued to be unqualified

Our dedication to creating high-quality content was the key to executing one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time. We realized that we weren’t being as dedicated to improving our hiring process as we should have been, so we set out to change that. We spent thousands of hours building an optimized and automated system for sourcing, evaluating, testing, and hiring good writers—and we succeeded! Our final product was Workello.

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

Our existing system was outdated and inefficient and we knew we needed to fix it. To do this, we had to go back to the drawing board and break down the problem into small elements. 

These were the main conclusions we came to:

1. Websites that publish a lot of high-quality content generate millions of organic visits per month
2. Publishing large volumes of high-quality content requires a lot of talented writers
3. Finding a dozen talented writers requires evaluating hundreds of candidates and quickly weeding out bad ones

How to weed out bad candidates is where we got stuck, so we started wondering what our ideal hiring system for finding qualified candidates and filtering the bad ones would look like. 

Here’s what we wrote down:

• A dashboard to view candidates from all hiring channels
• A place where we can test, reject, and hire candidates without having to leave the dashboard
• Ability to sort our candidates by application status, so we know exactly what to do next
• An automated writing test to filter out bad candidates with good portfolios

What started as a fusion of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier has turned into a streamlined, automated system for hiring good and affordable writers. 

Why Is Writing a Detailed Job Description Super Important?

You will receive a large number of applications from unqualified applicants no matter where you post your job ad. While you can’t stop them from applying, with a well-crafted job ad, you can drastically reduce the number of bad applications you receive.

A good job description goes into great depth regarding the open position—you should be precise about the responsibilities your writers will have, talk about the word count they have to deliver daily, mention the industries and topics they’ll be writing about, highlight any industry-specific knowledge they need to succeed in the role, and list all the requirements applicants must meet to be considered for the job. The more specific you make your job ad, the less likely it is you’ll be swamped by applications from writers who don’t have the necessary writing skills or experience.

You should use the job description not only to weed out bad candidates but also to “sell” yourself to top-notch writers looking for a job. Competition is stiff so you must find a way to convince the best applicants why they should select your company over all others. It is important to highlight all of the job’s perks, such as competitive salary, PTO, bonuses, career advancement opportunities, etc. 

If you can’t come up with a good job description or if you’re looking for a specific type of writer, you can use our ready-made job description templates. Click on the job title in the table below, copy the template, tweak it to your needs, and post it on any job board you like.

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

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

Our growing team lacked a dedicated recruiter when we first started hiring writers, so we had to rely on our content managers and editors instead. On top of managing content, they had to post job ads on a variety of job boards and evaluate dozens of applications every week. Even though it wasn’t a difficult task, it took a significant amount of time each day. As a result, their actual job suffered.

Delegating all employment-related tasks to a Recruitment Coordinator was our goal, but first, we had to document the entire process to be able to train them. This is exactly what we did, so you don’t have to!

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

A Single Place Where You Can See All Candidate Applications

Candidates will find your job ad on all the different job boards you posted it on. If you don’t have an efficient system in place, you’ll have to visit a variety of job boards each day to check for new applications and figure out how to organize and keep track of them. 

Workello can make your life so much easier because it allows you to receive all applications in the same place—your Workello dashboard. All you need to do is include a link to a Workello-hosted application form in your job ad.

Using the same form regardless of which job board candidates apply on means all applications will all be in the same format. Candidates won’t be able to submit incomplete applications and you won’t have to waste time contacting them to request the missing information.

Check out an example application here

Watch Candidates Stream In

From your Workello dashboard, you can change candidates’ status with a single click. You can evaluate, test, invite for interviews, and extend offers to candidates you like, all from a single place. 

Candidates can have the following statuses as they progress through your hiring funnel:

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

We color-coded each status to enable you to see how many candidates you have in each stage of the funnel, at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Candidates

You can grant access to your Workello account to your editors and content managers so that they can review applications as they come in. They will be able to change a candidate’s status to Application Rejected and remove them from the funnel if they don’t meet the basic requirements. 

Workello will automatically send an email to the rejected candidate, politely informing them they won’t be progressing to the next stage of the hiring process.

This automated process will save a lot of time you would otherwise spend answering hundreds of emails from candidates inquiring about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

Although their application may appear great, it doesn’t necessarily mean an applicant is a good fit for your company. Writer portfolios showcase a candidate’s greatest work which is often heavily edited before publishing. You should never hire a candidate based only on their portfolio—the only way to determine how good a writer is is to put them to the test.

Before we introduced testing as an integral part of our hiring process, we had dozens of bad writers on our payroll. Our editors wasted a lot of time editing and often completely rewriting articles to make them good enough for publishing.

Thanks to Workello’s automated testing features, you’ll never find yourself in this situation. When a candidate’s resume and portfolio seem satisfying, your managers can change their status to Test Candidate. This will trigger an automated email that:

1. Congratulates them on progressing to the next stage of the hiring process
2. Includes a link to a writing test
3. Provides step-by-step instructions for completing the test

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

How To Make a Good Test

A good test should be thorough enough to allow you to assess your candidates’ skills while still not being too exhaustive to make them give up on wanting to apply for the job. To find a qualified writer for your online magazine, you have to test their language proficiency, research, and formatting skills. 

Workello enables you to establish the ideal balance between thoroughness and a candidate’s willingness to complete the test. Still, you should keep in mind that the majority of applicants won’t be willing to bother with a 2,500-word test that will take them 8+ hours to finish.

If you’re not sure how to make a good test, you can use ours. It’ll be a great place to start, and you can easily tailor it to your needs.

If, on the other hand, the candidate fails the test, all you need to do is update their status to Reject Candidate. This will trigger a polite rejection email that thanks them for their time.

The Candidate Status Page

While we tried our hardest to make our processes more efficient, we still spent a lot of time answering the same questions four questions from the candidates:

1. Have you received my application?
2. Have you checked my test?
3. When will I hear back from you?
4. What are the next steps I should take?

We were often late to reply or missed the question altogether which resulted in missing out on great candidates. This motivated us to develop the Candidate Status page which allows them to track their progress through our hiring funnel. This page also includes a section called What to Expect Next, which gives candidates insight into your selection process.

The Candidate Status page not only reduces transactional questions but also promotes transparency, keeping good applicants invested in completing the process. Here is what the page looks like.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

We didn’t have a reliable system in place when we first started out and needed to hire dozens of writers. A system that could solve all of our problems at once didn’t exist on the market at the time. 

We had trouble keeping track of applications, so a ton of great writers slipped through our fingers. Our editors and content managers had to take time away from their work to post job ads all over the internet so our content production slowed down.

We realized we couldn’t go on like this for long, so we decided to create our own automated hiring funnel that enabled us to achieve the following:

1. Scale our team from 1 to 45+ writers and editors in 18 months
2. Cut the cost of content by 75%
3. Execute one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time

We invested over $100,000 and thousands of hours to make it happen, but you don’t have to do everything the hard way. For the price of a single page of content, you will get access to a fully automated and optimized hiring funnel that will help you hire good and affordable writers fast!

Try Workello completely for free. It’s pre-configured so you can start accepting candidates in less than 3 minutes. 

How To Find Writers For Your Online Magazine—Additional Job Boards

With Workello, you may post your job ads on as many job boards as you want, without worrying about losing track of applicants. Check out a few more job boards to find good writers for your online magazine:

• Craigslist
• Pure Content
• ContentGrow
• Scribewise
• Freelancer