Hiring Writers Manually is a Nightmare—Learn From our Mistakes

Before we built Workello, we were an ambitious content agency with a serious hiring problem. No matter where we looked for writers, we faced the same challenges:

• We did everything manually and were often too late to reach out to great candidates
• We had no way of keeping track of where candidates were in our hiring funnel
• Candidates contacted us via email and DMs
• Many applications were incomplete, so we had to contact candidates to supply the missing information
• Candidates often sent portfolios in .docx format
• We couldn’t be sure that portfolios submitted accurately reflect candidates’ writing skills

Our hiring process was a disorganized mess, and we had to do something about it. Since we couldn’t find anything on the market that could solve all of our issues at once, we decided to build our own system.

Countless working hours and more than $100,000 later, we have Workello—an optimized hiring funnel that allowed us to scale our content team from 1 to 45+ writers and editors in under two years!

This team of competent writers allowed us to execute one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns of all time. These talented professionals produced large volumes of high-quality content that enabled us to grow our client organic traffic 0 to 1,500,000 monthly visits in just 24 months!

In the next 10 minutes, you’ll find out:

1. How to hire writers for your news website
2. Why finding news writers for hire is so difficult
3. How automation can help you find better writers faster and cut hiring costs in half

Key Things To Look Out For When Hiring News Writers

Hiring news writers is different from hiring any other type of writer. You need to ensure these candidates have a particular set of skills to be able to create articles adequate for a news website.

This means they must have an excellent command of the English language, particularly:

• Grammar—Not many things can deter readers as poor writing; you want your articles to exude trustworthiness, and that’s impossible with grammatically inaccurate writing
• Punctuation—Just like grammatical inaccuracies, poor punctuation leaves a bad impression on the reader and harms your website’s reputation
• Writing style—News writers must have a specific tone when writing; style is how writers communicate with their audience. When it comes to news articles, writing must be informative but not boring

On top of general literacy and command of language, news writers have to be familiar with all the different forms of news writing. This means you should be targeting graduates who majored in Journalism and Communications, or hire writers with previous experience in writing for a news website. 

A blog writer with extensive experience will be more difficult to handle than a rookie writer. The style of writing is so vastly different between promotional, bloggy content and news articles that you’ll spend ages editing their content and getting them to adapt a news-appropriate writing style.

On top of that, a news writer must also understand SEO, use keywords in their articles, and incorporate links well. You should emphasize all of these requirements in your job ad, to make sure you attract candidates with the right skills for the job.

Another thing to keep in mind is that news writers must have excellent research skills and must know how to fact-check every single piece of information that they share in their articles. This isn’t something you can assess from their portfolio and application alone, but you can and should assess their approach to news writing by asking the right questions during the interview.

Where To Find News Writers for Hire

When we started hiring professional writers, we used many different job boards. We found the following to be the top 15:

Read on to find more places where you can find news writers for hire.

What Makes It So Hard To Hire News Writers

There are several reasons why hiring skilled news writers is so painfully difficult:

1. You are not the only one looking for them
2. Most of the candidates on job boards are unqualified
3. You must evaluate and test dozens of candidates to find one good news writer
4. The best writers get hired quickly, and job boards can’t source them fast enough

You have to identify that one great candidate before your competitors extend them an offer. Without an automated system in place, you stand little chance. Here is why:

• You likely have no way of sorting candidates according to their application status
• No job board has features specifically designed for content writers
• Portfolios often don’t match candidates’ actual writing capabilities, so you need to test them
• You have to log, respond to, and follow up with candidates manually
• You don’t have a way to reduce the number of unqualified applicants

We have been through this, and we realized that the only way to fix our hiring process was to develop a system that would resolve all of our troubles. 

That’s why we invested our resources into developing an automated hiring funnel tailored specifically for content teams. After months of work and countless iterations, we finally created Workello!

Pre-Hire Assessments Allow You To Hire the Best Writer in Your Niche

You’ll never get an applicant that admits they have no idea how to write content for your niche. While their portfolios may include some industry-related articles, you’ll never know how good they are at it until you see their first draft. Don’t wait to hire them for that to happen—improve your hiring process with pre-employment assessments.

Coming up with a writing test is the easy part. What do you do when hundreds of writing samples start flooding your inbox? You need skill assessment software to keep the process organized and to avoid missing out on a top candidate due to an email you forgot to respond to.

Workello will entirely automate your hiring process and take care of assessment management. You only need to:

1. Create a free account and set up a pre-configured hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Add a Workello link to your job listings (works with all job boards)
3. Wait for applications to start coming your way
4. Send tests to spot bad writers with impressive portfolios fast
5. Reject, interview, and hire the best candidates with a single click

Streamline Your Testing Process and Hire the Top 1% of Writers With Workello

With Workello—high-volume recruiting software—you can automate your entire hiring process and cut costs by 50%. Use our platform to test content writers for whatever writing needs you have, be it technical, SEO, or any other type of writing. You can also assess copywriters and SEO copywriters.

Sign up for free and assess, test, reject, interview, and hire writers from your Workello dashboard effortlessly.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

It was obvious our hiring process was flawed, but we had to understand exactly why it wasn’t working before we could revamp it. 

So we broke down our entire business processes and came up with this:

1. The only way to turn content into traffic is by creating a lot of consistently great content 
2. Only top-quality writers can produce such great content
3. Hiring the best news writers requires evaluating hundreds of applications
4. Identifying the best news writers required eliminating bad candidates fast
5. Identifying bad writers quickly—we had no idea how to do that

There are numerous job boards and thousands of writers, so sourcing applications was never our problem. Handling all those applicants efficiently was our main stumbling block. 

We needed a system that would allow us to handle hundreds of applications faster and get to the best candidates before others. Such a system had to include:

• A unified dashboard that displays all applications regardless of the job board they come from
• An optimized system that allows us to sort candidates according to their status in our hiring funnel
• A single place from which we can evaluate, test, reject, interview, and hire writers
• An option to send writing tests automatically to selected writers
• Email automation that saves time and prevents human error

We started with Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier, and it was a massive improvement. Still, we had something much more ambitious in mind, and this first set-up showed us what we needed to focus our efforts on the most. 

A Specific Job Description Copy Is Half the Battle

The first step of any hiring process is writing a job description. That is also the first step toward attracting qualified candidates. 

A good job description is highly specific; it includes an in-depth description of job responsibilities and a detailed list of requirements. 

The objective of a job description is two-fold:

1. Attract the best candidates—applicants will see they are applying for a position in a serious company
2. Deter bad candidates from applying—when they see the list of requirements and duties, unqualified will get the message that there is no point in applying

Besides duties and necessary qualifications and experience, your job ad should also mention the benefits the chosen candidate will get from working for your company. Think of your job ad as an opportunity to promote your business and “sell” your news agency to the best candidates. 

Knowing what they can expect from you will motivate them to stay with you until the end of your hiring process and pick you over your competitors. 

If you don’t know how to write a killer job description from scratch, you can leverage one of our pre-made job description templates for various writing roles:

• Writer
• Senior Writer
• Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Business Writer
• Political Writer
• Financial Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Travel Writer
• Fashion Writer
• Lifestyle Writer

The Power of Unified Workello Dashboard

Your Workello dashboard will be a single point of access for all your applications, as well as a central hub from which you can conduct every stage of the hiring process. 

You can use a dozen job boards, and all the applications will show up in your unique Workello dashboard. 

This is made possible thanks to the Workello-hosted application form that you can embed in your job ad. Once a candidate submits their application, it will immediately show up in your dashboard, regardless of which job board the candidate applied from. 

Workello eliminates the need to log each application manually and saves you valuable time.

As a cherry on top, all the applications will be in the same format. You will have all the necessary information because candidates won’t be able to submit the form before they have filled all the fields. 

Gone are the days when you had to reach out to applicants and ask them to supply the information they have skipped. Check out our application example.

Watch Candidates Stream In

As applications start steaming in, you will be able to evaluate, reject, test, interview, and hire candidates—without ever having to leave your Workello dashboard. 

All you have to do is change a candidate’s application status by selecting one of the options 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

When you select an appropriate status, you will notice that the color of the entry has changed. That’s because each status is color-coded, allowing you to instantly assess how many candidates you have in each stage of your hiring process.

Reject Unqualified Content Writers

Some of the applications you receive will clearly be from unqualified candidates. If your editors come across such candidates, they can quickly remove them from your hiring funnel by changing their status to “Application Rejected.”

Candidates will immediately receive an automated rejection email, and you won’t have to waste time informing each candidate individually that they won’t be moving on to the next step of your hiring process. 

Point, Click, Test

Candidates who don’t meet your minimum hiring criteria are easy to deal with. You can remove them from your hiring funnel in an instant by selecting the “Reject Candidate” option. 

What will give you far more trouble are bad candidates with good portfolios. The main issue is the fact that portfolios never tell the whole story. They feature the writers’ best work, which are typically just a handful of articles that have gone through a rigorous editing process and have been polished to perfection.

In other words, portfolios don’t give you any idea about the candidate’s first draft capabilities. The only way to accurately assess a candidate’s writing skills is to test them.

We didn’t test writers in the beginning, and it was a costly mistake. We wasted a lot of resources on unusable content, and we had to begin a hiring cycle again. 

For that reason, we implemented a testing feature in Workello. When you change an applicant’s status to “Test Candidate,” they will receive an automated email that:

1. Congratulates the candidate on making it to the nest stage of your hiring process
2. Provides them with a link to the writing test and the necessary instructions

Once they click on the link, they will open a test page that will look something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

When developing a writing test, you need to check the following skills:

1. Language proficiency 
2. Research skills
3. Formatting skills
4. Style and tone of the writing

You also have to strike a perfect balance between test thoroughness and candidate willingness. You have to make your test detailed enough so you can accurately gauge candidates’ abilities. At the same time, you mustn’t make it too demanding because nobody’s willing to spend a full day writing a test article for a job they might not get.

When you’re creating a test, you should factor in the time necessary to find and fact-check all the information, on top of writing the news article itself. A simple 150-word article might not be enough to gauge someone’s writing skills, but a 1,000-word one might be too demanding. 

Thankfully, Workello lets you tip the scales in favor of test thoroughness. Your detailed job description prompted candidates to apply. Up to this moment, candidates received emails every time their application status changed. 

So far, you have demonstrated transparency and professionalism, and candidates will be more willing to complete your test.

If you need help creating a test, check out ours. Click here and get the same test we used to evaluate hundreds of candidates. 

Interviewing Candidates

Once candidates click on the Submit Test button, their application status will automatically change to “Test Complete.” This gives access to the test to your editors and content managers. 

When they review the test, they can decide whether to:

1. Reject Candidate—Triggers an automated rejection email thanking the candidate for their time
2. Invite for Interview—Triggers an automated email with a Calendly link that candidates can use to schedule a video meeting

The Candidate Status Page

The Candidate Status page allows candidates to track their application status instead of sending you emails with transactional questions. 

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

This page ensures that the best candidates don’t give up on you because it took you too long to respond to their emails.

You can see an example of a Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

With an automated hiring system that does all of the heavy lifting for you, hiring news writers is a piece of cake. When we started hiring writers, things weren’t that bright. We struggled every step of the way. 

Getting people to apply was the only part we had no issues with whatsoever. Every time applications started streaming in, we faced the same problems:

• We had no way of grouping applications from different job boards in the same place
• We couldn’t respond to all candidates
• We couldn’t keep track of where candidates were in our hiring funnel
• We spent a lot of time weeding out bad candidates and doing everything manually
• We were often too late to reach out to great candidates
• Our editors and content managers didn’t create content—they wasted their precious time posting job ads and creating tests

We developed Workello because that was the only solution to our problems. Thanks to the automated hiring funnel, we managed to:

1. Scale our team from 1 to 45+ writers in less than 2 years
2. Reduce our content production costs by 75%, thanks to hiring non-native writers
3. Run one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever
4. Let our editors and content managers go back to their actual jobs

We spent $100,000+ and countless hours developing Workello. You can gain access to it at the price of a single article!

Try out Workello today for free. Everything’s pre-configured so you can set up your automated hiring funnel in 3 minutes and start accepting candidates today!

Where Else Can You Find News Writers for Hire

Workello allows you to use as many job boards as you won’t without worrying about how you will keep track of all the applications. You can cast a wider net and increase your chances of finding a perfect candidate by posting your job ad on more job boards. 

Below, you’ll find all the different places where you can find excellent news writers for hire.

Associations:

• EFA
• SPJ 
• NABJ
• NASW
• NAHJ
• ASJA
• AAJA
• AHCJ
• SEJ
• NLGJA
• NAJA

Job boards:

• Journalism Jobs
• Mediabistro
• HireMyMom
• CloudPeeps
• Guru
• PeoplePerHour
• Freelancer

Content creation platforms:

• Contently
• Scripted
• Skyword
• Pitchwhiz
• Zerys
• Muck Rack
• Writers Work
• WriterAccess

Facebook communities:

• The Write Life
• FinCon
• What’s Your Plan B? 
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer