What We Learnt About Hiring Technical Skin Care Writers

Before developing Workello, we were an ambitious content agency. We took on a project for a VC-backed client and executed what turned out to be one of the best SEO campaigns ever! In just 18 months, our team was able to grow the client’s monthly organic traffic from 0 to 1,500,000 visitors, but the process wasn’t straightforward or easy. 

Within that time, we had to begin a hiring process to scale our team from 1 to 45+ writers and editors. 

Our hiring process wasn’t well-suited for a huge influx of applications, and we ran into problems on every corner:

• The recruitment process was manual and it was next to impossible to log each application and keep track of every candidate in our hiring funnel
• Candidates often sent in incomplete applications so we had to request the necessary info via email
• Applicants sent portfolios in Word, which we had no way of verifying
• Candidates contacted us via email and DMs

Overall, the entire recruitment process was slow, painful, and chaotic. Since there was no solution on the market that could help us solve all our problems at once, we decided to create our own. 

We spent more than $100,000 and hundreds of hours systemizing the recruitment process and optimizing it to hire better, more affordable writers—Workello. 

In the next 10 minutes, you’ll learn:

1. How to find a technical writer for skincare for every price point
2. Why hiring a good technical writer for skincare is so difficult
3. How automation can help you evaluate, test, and interview more applicants

15 Websites To Find A Qualified Technical Writer For Skin Care

When we first started recruiting technical writers, we posted the jobs across numerous job boards. Here are the top 15 websites for finding professional top writers:

Why Businesses Struggle With Hiring a Top Technical Writer for Skin Care

When looking for writers, one of the main problems companies face is finding top quality technical writers. This is because like programmers and developers, the best writers are picked out of the market quickly and job boards like Upwork and TextBroker cannot source new, qualified writers fast enough.

As a result, every job website will have more underqualified candidates than high-quality ones. This means you will have to evaluate and test hundreds of candidates to find top writers before other content agencies snatch them up. While this is possible for a few candidates, it’s nearly impossible when you receive 100+ applications. 

When we began expanding our writing team, our job website of choice was Upwork, but we realized we had to post on other job websites (Glassdoor, Problogger, SimplyHired, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn, etc.) to attract a larger pool of top candidates. Soon, we realized the problem with using job boards to source technical writers:

• We couldn’t sort candidates according to their application status in our hiring funnel
• We couldn’t respond to all candidates in time (or at all)
• Candidates submitted heavily edited samples that didn’t reflect their actual writing capabilities
• Most platforms aren’t designed for exclusively hiring writers and lacked the settings to test and evaluate writers
• We couldn’t reduce the number of unqualified candidates

After months of unsuccessfully trying to make it work, we realized we needed to change our approach to hiring writers. We invested months and over $100,000 into creating an automated hiring funnel that would resolve all of our hiring problems—Workello!

Check Your Technical Content Professionals’ Qualifications With Pre-Hire Testing

All candidates that apply for a technical role will say they’re qualified. You can never know whether they’re as skilled as their portfolio claims they are if you don’t incorporate pre-employment testing in your selection process.

As the most effective assessment method, testing is crucial if you don’t want to end up with an unqualified employee.

Once you start conducting pre-hire assessments, you need a skill assessment software that automates every step of the process. Sending tests out, collecting them, and keeping track of where each candidate is in your funnel could quickly turn into a nightmare without a unified platform that eliminates most of the manual work.

Workello, our pre-employment assessment software, does just that—once you sign up for a free account, you can:

1. Set up your pre-configured hiring funnel in 90 seconds
2. Add a unique Workello job ad link to all your job ads, regardless of where you post them
3. Watch candidates from all job boards you posted on stream into a single dashboard
4. Send out automated tests to weed out unqualified applicants
5. Reject tests, invite to an interview, and send an offer by changing the candidate status with one click

The Easiest Pre-Employment Testing Functionality for Any Role on Your Team

You can test technical writers or any other technical content professional in a few clicks, but Workello sets no limits to the role—you can also assess the skills of a content writer, for example. In case your team lacks a more SEO-oriented role, you can test an SEO writer and hire the top 1% with our high-volume recruiting software without wasting time sifting through hundreds of portfolios.

Sign up for a free trial of Workello today, and start assessing your candidates’ skills in less than 3 minutes.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Before we could start improving our hiring process, we needed to determine precisely where our main pain points were. 

We decided to break down our entire work process into the smallest elements and find out what the root cause of the problem was—here’s what we found:

• Reliably generating millions of organic visitors required us to create large volumes of high quality content
• Only the top 1% of writers can produce such content consistently
• Hiring top-quality technical and content writers required going through hundreds of applications
• We needed to quickly filter out unqualified candidates to find the best writers fast
• We sorely lacked a way to filter out bad candidates efficiently

With plenty of writers and job boards available, we never struggled with receiving applications—we struggled with managing them. 

We needed a system that allowed us to quickly organize, sort, and communicate with candidates without any issues. To achieve this, we identified the key features that needed to be included in the system:

1. A single dashboard that displays all applications in one place, regardless of which job board the candidates applied on
2. An optimized system that would allow us to move candidates through our hiring funnel with a single click
3. A centralized dashboard to test, reject, interview, and onboard candidates 
4. An automated writing test to accurately gauge the candidates’ actual writing abilities and filter our bad candidates with good portfolios
5. Automated email correspondence to save time and eliminate the possibility of human error

With the main features identified, we began building our hiring tool. Our initial system started off as a merging of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier and over time, we evolved it into the automated system we have now.

Your Skincare Technical Writer Job Description Is the First Step to Hiring Great Candidates

If you want to attract top candidates to your job posting, you need to be as specific as possible in the job description. You should include key details about the job such as the daily responsibilities in the role, required skills set, tool proficiencies, and prior work experience. 

It’s also crucial to emphasize industry specific knowledge and make it abundantly clear that you’ll only be considering candidates with either a pharmaceutical background or previous experience writing about skincare products.

Apart from that, you should also sell your company and show candidates why they should choose you over your competitors. You can do this by explaining what your business is about, the benefits you offer writers, and career advancement opportunities once they join your company.

If you aren’t sure about the role you’re looking for or don’t have a job description yet, you don’t have to start from scratch when hiring a technical writer for skincare. 

We’ve compiled a list of ready-made job description templates for similar writing roles that you can copy-paste and slightly adapt according to the needs of your organization:

• Technical Writer

• Junior Technical Writer

• Senior Technical Writer

• Technical Writer and Editor

• Technical Writer in Healthcare

• Quality Assurance Technical Writer

• Technical Writing Manager

• Technical Writer for Cyber Security

A Single Dashboard for the Entire Hiring Process

The Workello dashboard acts as a central point of access for all your hiring activities. 

Once you’ve posted your job across various boards such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Glassdoor, and others, you will receive applications directly to your Workello account without having to visit the job boards. 

This is possible thanks to the Workello-hosted application form, which also ensures all applications are complete and in the same format. 

Check out an example application form here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Your dashboard is the single point for conducting every step of your hiring process. Without leaving the page, you will be able to interview, test, reject and hire candidates. To do this, you will have to change a candidate’s application status from the following list of options:

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

The application status guides you on the hiring step each candidate is in and the next step for the candidates. 

Reject Unqualified Candidates

When an application pops up on the Workello dashboard, your editors and content managers can evaluate and see if the applicant meets the requirements. If a candidate doesn’t meet the requirements or fails their writing test, the managers can swiftly reject the application by switching the status to ‘Application Rejected’. 

Changing the status immediately and automatically triggers the platform to send a polite rejection email to the candidate. With an automated email system in place, you will not be spammed with emails from unqualified candidates asking for status updates. You’ll also save an incredible amount of time and effort since everything is automated.

Point, Click, Test

Portfolios are rarely good indicators of the candidates’ actual writing skills. Plenty of bad candidates have excellent portfolios because they include samples that have been edited and refined before getting published. It’s also impossible to tell how much the content has been edited. 

Generally, portfolios don’t show you the first-draft quality—you can only find out a writer’s quality by testing them.

When we first started looking for technical writers, we didn’t have an assessment phase. We relied only on candidates’ portfolios and paid a heavy price for it. We paid out thousands of dollars for content that was unusable and editors required to rewrite.

As we created Workello, we had to include an assessment feature that works by simply changing the candidate status to ‘Test Candidate’. Changing the status triggers the system to email candidates with two key details:

1. A congratulatory message on moving to the next stage of the hiring process 
2. A link invitation to a short written test hosted on Workello

When candidates click on the writing test link, here’s what they’ll see:

How To Make a Good Test

There are three main areas to test your writing candidates on:

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

An ideal test has to strike a balance between the complexity of the test and the candidate’s willingness to complete it. You should avoid creating a test that is too complex or too long—no technical writer will be willing to do a 2,500-word article that takes eight hours to complete, and rightfully so.

With Workello, you can easily find the right balance when creating tests. Through the entire hiring process, your candidates will receive fast responses and updates every step of the way. This presents your business as a professional and transparent company, making candidates more willing to invest time and effort into the test.

If you’re struggling to create a test, you can check out the one we used to evaluate hundreds of writers, and slightly modify it according to the needs of your business. 

You will find the example writing test here, along with the instructions on how to set up your own test in Workello in 5 minutes.

Interviewing Candidates

Once the candidate has submitted their test, the status will automatically change to ‘Test Complete’. Content managers and editors on the other end can then review the submitted tests. After evaluation, they can change the application status to:

1. Invite for Interview—The system will automatically send an interview invitation email to candidates that have passed the test 
2. Reject Candidate—The system will automatically send a polite rejection email thanking them for their time

The Candidate Status Page

Apart from streamlining every stage of your hiring process, Workello also features a Candidate Status page which contains information about application status. It also includes a “What to expect next” section, so your candidates will always know how far they’ve come in your selection process. 

Here’s how the Candidate Status page makes the hiring process even more efficient:

• Candidates will find all the necessary feedback and information on time, without having to request it via email
• You won’t have to waste time responding to individual candidates
• You won’t miss out on great writers because you failed to follow up with them on time
• The page increases the transparency and professionalism, keeping top-quality candidates invested in completing your selection process

You can check out the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Hiring a technical writer for skincare is easy when you have a tool that automates the entire process. 

But before we employed our automated hiring funnel, we struggled with every element of hiring technical writers:

• Editors and content managers spent too much time posting job ads and reviewing applications due to the demanding workload of manual recruitment 
• Candidates applied from different platforms which made it difficult to track applicants
• We replied late or never responded to a significant percentage of our candidates
• There was no defined way of sending applications. Candidates often sent us applications without all the info we needed 
• We couldn’t sort or track candidates by status

After we developed and started using Workello, we have been able to:

1. Reduce our cost of quality content by 75% by hiring non-native speakers
2. Create one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time
3. Scale our writing team from 1 to 45 writers in less than two years
4. Let our editors and content managers focus on their actual jobs

Our automated hiring funnel is a product of more than $100,000 and years of refinement. It is now available to content teams for the price of a single page of content!

Try Workello for free and set up your fully automated hiring funnel in 3 minutes!