How To Hire a Writer in the United States Without Burning a Hole in Your Budget

Before we developed our own SaaS, we were known as Content Distribution.com—a small content agency with a big dream.

In 2019, we took on an ambitious project that would eventually turn into one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time. Through unflinching determination and hard work, we managed to grow our client’s traffic from 0 to 1,500,000 organic monthly visitors!

To carry out the project successfully, we had to scale our team from 1 to 45+ capable writers in just 18 months. We didn’t have an automated, streamlined hiring process in place and hiring writers manually turned out to be a nightmare. 

Candidates were applying from different job boards. Some would send us their resumes via email while others tried to contact our team through DMs on LinkedIn and Facebook. Applications were coming in multiple different formats, so our editors had a hard time converting them and logging them properly. 

The whole situation was one big disaster, and we knew we had to do something—or else our content production would slow down to a crawl.

We were desperate for an all-encompassing solution, but there wasn’t an ATS that could solve all our issues at once. That’s why we decided to come up with our own answer.

After investing thousands of dollars and hundreds of working hours into devising the optimal hiring funnel, we finally got that answer—Workello!

Where To Hire Writers in the United States—Our Top 15 Hiring Websites

Take a look at our pick of the best 15 job boards to find top-quality writers in the United States:

Why Makes It Tough To Hire a Writer in the United States

The best writers go off the market in the blink of an eye, and you’ll be competing against thousands of companies for each and every one. That’s how it’s always been—no matter whether you’re hiring locally in the United States or internationally. 

If you’re to have any hope of finding even a single top-quality writer, you have to quickly identify the top-performing writers and send them an offer faster than anyone else.

This is an almost insurmountable task without a well-optimized, automated hiring system—we learned this the hard way. When we started hiring, we did everything manually. Every single step was a challenge, and we faced countless major issues:

• Job boards didn’t have features for sorting candidates by their status in our hiring funnel
• We didn’t have an efficient communication system that would allow us respond to candidates fast enough
• The majority of candidates didn’t meet our hiring standards

We started by using LinkedIn and Upwork, though we soon expanded to other job boards, such as Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster, and Craigslist. Spreading to other job boards didn’t solve any of our problems—it only multiplied them! 

No matter where we posted our job listings, we couldn’t manage to:

• Easily track candidates by their status in our funnel
• Log every application nor get back to each candidate in a timely manner
• Keep note of candidates whose resumes seemed good
• Efficiently filter out sub-par candidates with excellent portfolios

It wasn’t long until we realized that the problem lay with our whole hiring system—it wasn’t optimized to handle such a large influx of applications!

That’s why we decided to revamp our entire hiring process. With the same enthusiasm we had for producing content, we spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to develop a fully automated system that specializes in hiring writers!

Through much trial-and-error—and after dozens of partially successful iterations—we were finally triumphant. At last, we created 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

To create an entirely new system for hiring writers, we first had to identify all the problems of our existing one. We disassembled our entire system and carefully evaluated each separate component. This is what we concluded:

1. Driving a million organic monthly visitors, we had to maintain a consistent output of high quality content
2. Producing large volumes of high quality content is only possible with a team of top-performing writers
3. Hiring expert writers means reviewing and testing as many candidates as possible both quickly and efficiently
4. Finding a single qualified writer meant evaluating and testing dozens of candidates
5. Filtering out bad candidates efficiently was what we didn’t have an answer for

Getting applications was the easy part—what we struggled with was handling those applications once they arrived. We couldn’t sort them out nor discern between qualified and unqualified candidates as fast as we needed to. To address this, we went back to the drawing board and composed a list of features our new system had to include:

1. A unified platform that would serve as repository for all applications we received
2. An efficient system that would allow us to track our candidates by their status in the hiring funnel
3. An all-in-one dashboard from which we could conduct each stage of the hiring process, such as evaluating, testing, setting up interviews, and finally hiring the most capable writers
4. An automated testing system that would let us spot bad writers with good portfolios
5. An automatic messaging system that would reduce time on manual back-and-forth with each candidate while also removing the possibility of human error

The first iteration of our new system used the model Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It was an improvement, but our end goal wasn’t just improving the hiring process—we wanted to perfect it! Many more iterations followed before we gradually refined the system into Workello.

A Highly Specific Job Description Helps You Get the Right Type of Writer for Your Business!

There are three different “types” of writers on the market—bad ones, good ones, and excellent ones. You want only the best writing candidates, right? The problem is—so does every other content agency in the United States!

To stand a chance of hiring a top-performing writer, you need to eliminate underskilled ones in short order—a good, in depth job description is the crucial first step. 

By listing all the responsibilities, requirements, and specific demands of the position you’re offering, you will deter many unqualified candidates. Sub-par writers may not apply at all if they can see the overwhelming criteria they don’t meet.

When writing your job description, it is important to avoid any ambiguities and clichés. Be clear and precise with your list of requirements, such as preferred work experience, level of education, and industry-specific knowledge. 

Since your job description will be the only touching point you have with potential applicants before they actually apply, it is prudent to state any benefits a top-performing writer will enjoy in your company. This includes health and insurance plans, PTO, career advancement opportunities, performance-based bonuses, etc. A good writer in the United States will have more incentive to work for a professional company that treats its employees well!

If you’re not sure of the specific requirements of the role you’re hiring for, consult Workello’s database for a wide selection of pre-made job description templates. You can use them as a good starting point—select the one you’re looking for, adapt it according to the specific needs of your organization, and post your job ad!

Here are some of our most popular job description templates for writing roles:

• Writer
• Senior Writer
• Freelance Writer
• SEO Writer
• Content Writer
• Copywriter
• Senior Copywriter
• Technical Writer
• Business Writer
• Research Writer
• Course Writer
• Instructional Writer
• Fashion Writer
• Catalog Writer

A Single Dashboard for Reviewing All Applications

With Workello, you can post your job ad on as many job boards as you like, without the need to check each job board manually. It doesn’t matter if you’ve posted your job ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, or Upwork—our unified dashboard gathers them all in a single place!

Once a candidate clicks “apply” on your job listing, they will be prompted to fill out a Workello-hosted application form. This means every application will arrive in the same format, eliminating the time-consuming task of converting files submitted in an unsuited format. As soon as they submit a filled out application, it will show up in your unique Workello dashboard.

In addition, you’ll no longer have to contact candidates for any crucial details they may have accidentally left out!

You can see an example application form here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Workello automates every aspect of the hiring process, allowing you to evaluate, test, invite for interview, and reject candidates without ever leaving your dashboard. 

To move candidates through your hiring funnel, you only need to choose the appropriate status from a drop-down menu—Workello will take care of the rest! 

There are 7 available statuses:

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

Every status is also color-coded, so you see at what stage of the hiring funnel each candidate is at a moment’s notice.

Reject Unqualified Writers

When an application arrives in your dashboard, you can notify your managers and editors so they can evaluate it.

If a candidate’s portfolio displays none of the qualities you’re looking for in a writer, you can immediately remove them from the hiring process by changing their status to Application Rejected. Our automated messaging system will handle the rest and help you out greatly by:

• Politely notifying the candidate that their application has been rejected
• Saving your editors and managers time on manual communication with each rejected writer

Point, Click, Test

There’s no way to completely prevent bad writers from sending you their applications. The ones with bad portfolios aren’t a problem—you just select the “Reject Candidate” option if someone doesn’t meet your minimum hiring criteria and move on to the next candidate. 

What will give you a lot more trouble are bad writers with good portfolios. We learned the hard way that portfolios are rarely an accurate representation of someone’s writing skills. They include only the best articles that have often gone through multiple rounds of editing. A portfolio tells you nothing about the quality of the writer’s first draft. 

Thankfully, there’s an easy solution to this issue—testing each and every single writer before extending an offer.

When we first started hiring, we didn’t test writers. Instead, we would hire them based solely on the content in their portfolios. There were many brilliant resumes with long lists of various writing certificates and previous positions in different companies—but few capable writers!

It was a paradox we ended up paying for big time. The writers we hired wrote poor articles that our editors had to rewrite from scratch, which increased their workload. Our content production started taking a turn for the worse, and all because we didn’t implement a testing system beforehand!

With Workello, testing candidates is as easy as can be. You only need to pick the Test Candidate option, and they will automatically receive an email that:

1. Informs them that they have successfully reached the testing stage in your hiring funnel
2. Provides them with a link to the written test

Once a writer receives your email and opens the link, they will see a page that looks somewhat like this:

How To Make a Good Test

Any respectable writer will be used to doing a test so a company can assess their skills—in fact, the best writers will be more than willing to display their skills! 

What you have to worry about is striking the perfect balance between two crucial factors:

1. The thoroughness of a test—Your written test should be challenging and exhaustive enough to allow you to assess the full range of a writer’s abilities. Instructions should be clear and concise so a candidate can follow them without sending you emails for additional information.
2. A candidate’s willingness to complete it—Wanting to assess a candidate’s abilities thoroughly is reasonable. What’s not reasonable is sending them a novel-length task that could potentially take them 2+ days to complete. For the purposes of a test, a 600–700-word assignment is more than appropriate.

As for the actual skills you should test your writers for, these include:

1. Research abilities
2. Mastery of language
3. Correct formatting

Workello also allows you to be a bit more demanding with your test. This would normally discourage most writers, but our hiring process is so transparent and open—with optimized features that ensure all candidates are informed about every detail of their status in your funnel. Many writers will be more than glad to put in that extra bit of effort since they know they’re dealing with a highly professional content company!

Setting up a test in Workello is super-easy. You can modify our existing one or follow these instructions to set up your own writing test. 

Interviewing Candidates

When a writer turns in a completed test, Workello will immediately update their status to Test Complete. 

Your managers and editors can then access the test via your dashboard. After they have properly evaluated your candidates’ work, they can change their status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Sends an automatic message informing them that your company won’t be considering them for the job at this time
2. Invite for Interview—Sends an automated email congratulating them on passing with flying colors and inviting them to set up an interview via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

Workello features a Candidate Status page, allowing candidates to see exactly where they are in your hiring funnel in real-time. The page also features a “What to expect next” section, so your candidates are never in the dark about the status of their application.

These features eliminate the need to respond to dozens of the same transactional emails from candidates looking for updates. You also won’t have to worry about a top-talented writer slipping past you just because your editors and managers couldn’t follow-up with them on time.

Here is an example of a Candidate Status page.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

The way we put it, you’d think hiring writers in the United States is not that hard. It isn’t—when you’ve got Workello streamlining every repetitive task for you! When we started searching for writers, we didn’t have any of Workello’s automated features at our disposal. We had to perform every single task by hand—it was a time-consuming process, and we didn’t have a satisfactory answer to the myriad of issues we were facing daily. 

As dozens (if not hundreds) of applications were arriving each day, we had a difficult time responding to promising writers. Because of this, we missed many that could have been a great fit for our company.

Our editors couldn’t focus on editing, and our managers were tasked with posting ads and devising tests instead of managing our content production. It was more than troublesome—it was becoming counterproductive, and we had to come up with a solution fast!

We invested countless hours and thousands of dollars into Workello, but our investment paid off big-time!

Workello’s fully automated system allowed us to:

1. Expand our writing team from 1 to 45+ people in 18 months
2. Lower the cost of producing quality content by 75%
3. Head one of the most ambitious SEO projects of all time
4. Let our editors and managers get back to their main duties

What we spent years and $100,000+ on, you can have for the price of a single high-quality article! What’s best, you can sign up for Workello for free and test and evaluate 5 candidates on the house, before making a commitment. It takes less than 3 minutes to create an account and start hiring qualified writers in the United States!