Nobody Told Us How To Hire a Content Writer—We’ll Share Our Mistakes With You!

Before we worked on developing an automated hiring funnel, we were a one-man content agency ContentDistribution.com. In 2019, we ran one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns of all time, and we carried it out successfully.

In 18 months, our client grew from 0 to 1,000,000 organic visits per month. How? We created high-quality content consistently and uploaded it in high volumes.

This was made possible by expanding our team from 1 to 45+ Content Writers and Editors in less than 2 years. This is where our struggles began.

When we started our hiring process, there was no guide to hiring a quality Content Writer we could follow. We did everything manually and missed out on top-quality Writers because we couldn’t get to them in time.

We realized we needed to change our hiring process completely and invested countless hours and $100,000+ in creating Workello—an automated hiring funnel dedicated to recruiting Content Writers.

In the next 10 minutes, you’ll learn:

1. How to find a good Content Writer
2. Why the hiring process for Content Writers is complex and difficult
3. How to find, interview, and retain Content Writers effortlessly with automated testing

Where To Find Content Writers

We posted on various job boards, and in our experience, these are the top 15. Check out their pros and cons:

In the rest of the article, we’ll share another 35 job boards you can use to find top-notch Content Writers.

What Makes Hiring Content Writers So Painfully Difficult

The biggest problem with hiring a Content Writer is that you’re not the only one doing it. Like Developers, the best Content Writers get off the market quickly, and no job board can source new ones at the same pace.

Every website has more underqualified candidates than top-quality ones, and to get to the latter, you need to evaluate and test each candidate before they receive an offer from another content agency.

That’s easy to do with a couple of applicants, but when 100+ apply from various boards, it’ll become impossible—that’s what happened to us.

Our initial platform of choice was Upwork, but we soon realized we had to post on others as well. Regardless of the job board, we always faced the following:

• We couldn’t sort candidates by status
• We couldn’t apply settings specific for seeking Content Writers
• Portfolios didn’t match the actual ability

Once we started receiving applications from various job boards (Glassdoor, Indeed, Facebook, Craigslist, and so on), we realized that, regardless of the platform, we struggled with the same problems:

• Tracking candidates by status
• Logging and responding to all applicants
• Following up with the promising candidates
• Keeping track of the candidates we liked initially
• Reducing the number of bad candidates

We figured out that it was our hard work that made our SEO project successful, and there was no hard work going into our hiring process. That was about to change.

Investing time, money, and brainpower into an automated hiring funnel tailored for a content team’s needs resulted in 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

We went back to the drawing board and decided to break down our entire business process to see where the problem was. Here’s what we came up with:

1. Turning content into traffic and profit required top-quality content 
2. Producing top-quality content required top-quality Content Writers
3. Hiring the best Content Writers meant going through hundreds of applications
4. Spotting the best Content Writers meant identifying bad Writers quickly
5. Identifying bad Writers—we didn’t have an answer for that

With so many job boards and Writers available, we never struggled with receiving applications—we struggled with handling them.

We wanted to come up with a system that would let us go through with our hiring process without any issues. We identified the following features that had to be included:

1. A uniform platform that would collect all applications regardless of the job board
2. An optimized system that would let us sort candidates and change their status with a single click
3. A single-access point to evaluate, test, interview, and hire Content Writers
4. A writing test sent automatically to spot bad Writers with great portfolios
5. An automated email correspondence that would eliminate the possibility of human error

We started with Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was an improvement, but we wanted to create something more ambitious.

A Vague Job Description Results in Hundreds of Sub-Par Applicants

The first step toward getting the best candidate is writing a good job description.

Great Content Writers will appreciate a quality job description that lets them know they’re dealing with a serious company. Unqualified candidates will get dissuaded by an in-depth description that has a detailed list of qualifications and responsibilities. 

When writing your job description, try to be as specific as possible. Mention all the responsibilities their role will entail and the way their work will impact your company. Listing out criteria applicants need to meet will lower the number of unwanted candidates.

You should also include any benefits you offer in your job description to attract top talent and make them want to choose you over someone else.

If you don’t know how to write one or if you need a more specific role, you can turn to our comprehensive job description template database. Click on the title of a role, copy our template, adapt it slightly to fit your company, and post it online!

• Writer
• Content Writer
• Technical Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Copywriter
• Freelance Writer
• E-Commerce Content Writer
• Staff Writer
• Law Firm Content Writer
• Senior Writer
• Course Writer
• Website Content Writer
• SEO Writing
• Catalog Writer
• Business Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started expanding our team, our Content Managers and Editors were in charge of posting job ads on various websites. It’s not a difficult task, but that wasn’t their job.

We struggled to hire someone new to handle the recruitment because they weren’t familiar with our hiring process, and we had to document everything and educate them. We spent hours creating documentation and going back and forth to make it perfect. The good news is—you don’t need to waste 100+ hours!

When you sign up for Workello for free, you’ll be able to access our playbooks and delegate recruitment to someone else in an instant!

What the Workello Dashboard Can Do for You

The dashboard in our applicant tracking system acts as a single point of access for all your applications. Regardless of how many job boards you use, they will all show up in your Workello account without you having to visit all the different boards and check applications manually.

Using a Workello-hosted application form will create a single format for all applications, meaning that candidates are no longer able to submit incomplete applications and that you no longer have to reach out for further information.

Take a look at our application example.

Watch Candidates Stream In

The single-page dashboard acts as an access point to your entire hiring process. Without leaving the dashboard, you will be able to complete the entire selection process by evaluating candidates, testing them, inviting them for an interview, and extending an offer to the chosen Content Writer(s).

All you need to do is change the candidate status by selecting the appropriate option from a drop-down menu. The options include:

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

Once you have candidates in different stages, you’ll see that candidate statuses are color-coded so that you can check how many candidates are in each stage of the funnel at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Content Writers

Some candidates are underqualified to the point of there being no need to test them. If your Editors and Content Managers come across such a candidate, they can remove them from the picture by changing their status to “Application Rejected.”

This will trigger an automated email that politely notifies the candidate about the unsuccessful application. With an automated email in place, you don’t have to waste time informing them manually or replying to emails with questions about application statuses.

Point, Click, Test

If a candidate passes the initial evaluation, that doesn’t mean you should extend an offer instantly. Many bad candidates can boast seemingly perfect portfolios. That’s because they include only their best work that’s been edited at least once.

The portfolio doesn’t show you their 1st draft quality, which you can see only through testing.

Before we started testing Writers, we were gullible enough to believe in their portfolios and we had to pay a heavy price. We wasted $1,000+ on unusable content that our Editors had to write from scratch. This was on our minds when we created Workello.

When you change a candidate’s status to “Test Candidate,” Workello will send them an automated email that will:

1. Congratulate them on reaching the next stage
2. Include a link to the test

Once they open the test page, they’ll see something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

When creating a test, you should focus on the following skills of a Content Writer:

1. Language proficiency
2. Research skills
3. Article formatting

A good test needs to strike a balance between the thoroughness of testing and a candidate’s willingness to complete a test.

It’s no use creating a detailed, 2,500-word test that nobody will complete. Most people will decide against spending 8+ hours working on a task for a job they might not get.

When you use Workello, though, you can tilt the balance in your favor. 

Once they apply, candidates will receive emails about their application status and anything else that’s relevant at that point. This will show your professionalism and transparency, which candidates appreciate. Many Writers will be willing to put in a bit of extra effort for a serious company.

If you’re struggling with creating a test by yourself, you can use ours! We used this test to evaluate hundreds of candidates.

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate presses the Submit Test button, their status changes to “Test Complete” automatically. Then, your Editors and Managers can see and review the test. After the review, they can change the status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Triggers an automated email informing the candidate about the unsuccessful outcome
2. Invite for Interview—Triggers an automated email with a Calendly link they can use to schedule a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

Your candidates will also have their neck of the Workello woods. The Candidate Status page lets them find out about their application status, so they don’t have to ask about it by sending an email.

The page has the “What to expect next” section that includes information about your selection process.

With this page, you no longer have to worry about a top candidate losing interest due to a missed email, and your employees don’t have to waste time on needless email correspondence.

You can see the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Hiring Content Writers is a walk in the park when there’s a system that automates everything for you. When we started hiring, there was no such system, and we struggled with every element of it.

Hundreds of applications would flood us from various job boards, and we couldn’t keep track of them. Due to this, we missed out on a great number of top Content Writers—when we got to their applications, they were either no longer interested or already employed elsewhere.

Our Content Managers and Editors had to focus on posting job ads and creating manual tests instead of creating content. We did all this because we had no other option. You do!

With Workello, we succeeded in:

1. Scaling our business from 1 to 45+ Writers in less than 2 years
2. Reducing our cost of content by 75%
3. Producing one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time
4. Letting our Editors and Content Managers focus on what they do best

Our automated hiring funnel is a consequence of $100,000+ and years of work. You can have it all for the price of a single page of content!

Try out Workello for free! You can start accepting new candidates in less than 3 minutes.

Where To Find Content Writers—Additional Job Boards

With Workello by your side, there’s no reason to limit yourself to only a dozen or so job boards. You can increase your odds of finding that perfect Content Writer by posting your job ad wherever possible.

Take a look at the following Content Writer job boards:

• Scribewise
• Virtual Assistant Finder
• Craigslist
• Scripted
• Muck Rack
• Writers Work
• Skyword
• HireMyMom
• ContentGrow
• Journalism Jobs
• Freelancer
• 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
• Masthead Media
• Alexis Grant Media
• Editorial Freelancers Association
• FinCon Community
• Pod Reacher
• Staffing agencies
• Mediabistro
• Zerys
• National Association of Hispanic Journalists
• American Society of Journalists and Authors
• WriterAccess
• Clarity