Hiring Writers Is not Easy—We Experienced It First-Hand

Before we built Workello, we were a content agency called Content Distribution. We ran one of the greatest content marketing campaigns ever and grew our client from 0 to 1,000,000 per month in under two years.

To do that, we needed to scale our team of writers and editors from 1 to 45 full-time employees quickly. It didn’t take us long to realize that our hiring process was fundamentally flawed. Scaling a content team at such a rapid pace is fertile soil for chaos, particularly when you don’t have a proper system in place and when you have to do everything manually. 

We received loads of applications, which was great, but we had no system to handle them. Many applications were incomplete, and a lot of portfolios were sent as Word documents. Candidates contacted us via email or DMs. And keeping track of where each candidate is in our hiring funnel was wishful thinking. 

We spent a lot of time and over $100,000 to build a systemized process to hire qualified, more reliable, and more affordable writers. In the next 10 minutes, you will learn how to copy it, and you will learn:

1. Where you can find writers at every price point
2. Why hiring legal writers is tricky
3. How to use automation to evaluate and test more candidates

Top 15 Job Boards to Find Legal Writers for Hire

Check out top 15 job boards for hiring legal writers:

Read on to find a few more job boards where you can find legal writers for hire at any price point.

What Makes Hiring Legal Writers So Tricky

Finding qualified candidates for any position is challenging, especially when you are inundated by piles of applications, most of which will be bad. When you need to find a competent writer with experience in a particular niche, things get even more complicated. This is particularly true for legal writers—the good ones are few and far between. 

You are not the only one looking for experienced legal writers for hire, so good ones will get hired quickly. Some companies approach skilled writers even while they are still working for someone else. So, seasoned professionals can basically pick and choose who they want to work for.

Since you have to evaluate dozens of applications before you find one top-performer, if you do everything manually, besides money, you lose a lot of valuable time. 

Whichever hiring platforms you use, you will notice that they all suffer from the same inherent problems—they can’t source skilled writers as quickly as they get hired. So, while you are struggling with weeding out bad candidates, sending dozens of emails every day, and trying to keep track of all applications, you keep missing the best writers. 

We have been there, and that experience motivated us to design a system that will allow us to be the company that snatches a good writer from under someone else’s nose. 

The Primary Problem With Hiring Writers

There is no magical hiring platform where all the candidates are qualified and reliable. In fact, most of them are not. To find one good writer, you must go through a hundred applications—that’s how it is. So, we decided that to increase our chances of finding that one good writer would be to widen our search and start using several hiring platforms. Little did we know that our problems would grow exponentially. 

We received even more applications and we had no system in place to handle them all. We still kept struggling to:

• Keep track of candidates in our hiring funnel
• See and respond to every application
• Follow up with good candidates before someone else hires them
• Filter out bad candidates

Months later, we had to stop banging our heads against the wall and come up with a better solution. We looked at our problem and realized that the source of our troubles was the fact that we had invested very little in improving our hiring funnel. That had to change. 

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 abundantly clear that our system didn’t work, so we broke it down to get to the bottom of the problem. We knew that:

1. We needed to create a lot of high-quality content to increase the number of monthly website visitors
2. We needed qualified writers to create such content
3. We had to evaluate a hundred candidates to find one top-performer
4. We had to filter out numerous bad candidates first to find that one good writer
5. We didn’t have a way to filter out unqualified candidates efficiently and reliably

Every job ad brought us more applications than we could handle. We lacked a system to help us keep track of candidates’ status in our hiring funnel, weed out bad candidates fast, and spot and contact the good ones. That is exactly what Workello does. 

We learned that a hiring system that would solve all our problems at once had to:

• Display all the applications in one place, regardless of where they come from
• Allow us to keep track of where each candidate was in the hiring funnel
• Give us an option to evaluate, test, and reject, as well as invite the ones we like for an interview, for a single dashboard
• Allow for automated communication that would save time on email correspondence and eliminate the possibility of errors

The first attempt at such a system was a patchwork solution that involved Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier. Several months and countless iterations later, this set-up evolved into a fully-automated and optimized hiring system, specially designed for content teams—Workello. 

Finding Qualified Legal Writers for Hire Begins With a Great Job Description Copy

There is no way to completely avoid bad candidates, but you can reduce their number considerably with a good job description. If your job ad copy is detailed enough, it will give all the necessary information to the right candidates while discouraging unqualified ones from applying. 

Firstly, since you are hiring a very niche-specific writer, you have to emphasize that you are looking for a person with experience in creating legal content. You need to specify any other requirements you may have as well as responsibilities you expect your new employee to take on. 

You should also state whether you are looking to hire freelance legal writers or you are offering full-time employment. Applicants will be interested in career advancement and learning opportunities in your company, as well as compensation package, benefits, paid time off, etc., so don’t forget to include those as well. 

If you are not sure how to write a legal writer job description or you need to find more roles, Workello offers an extensive database of ready-made job description templates you can modify within minutes and post to any job board you want:

• Freelance Writer
• Website Content Writer
• Senior Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Senior Copywriter
• Content Writer
• Law Firm Content Writer
• Contract Writer
• Business Writer
• Assessment Writer
• Sr. Technical Writer
• Marketing Communications Writer
• SEO Writer
• E-commerce Content Writer
• Digital and Multiplatform Content Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we began looking for content writers, we didn’t have a dedicated person to handle job ad posting. Our editors had to deal with that. While it wasn’t exactly difficult, it was pretty time-consuming. 

As we needed to hire more writers, editors had to designate more of their time to job ads. This situation was unsustainable as their primary responsibilities suffered. If you are facing similar challenges, you can hire a Recruitment Specialist. But that would require you to document your hiring process and train them. 

That’s exactly what we did. We documented the entire hiring process, so you don’t have to. 

Sign up for Workello today for free to get access to our playbooks and the entire knowledge base. You will learn how to delegate job ad distribution.

One Dashboard for All Applications

Writing candidates will see your ad in different places—Facebook, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc. But wherever they apply from, they will all open the same application form. Since the form is Workello-hosted, all applications will go to your dashboard.

The format of all applications will be consistent and uniform, and they will contain all the necessary information for your editors to evaluate them. 

Here is what our application form looks like.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Once applications start streaming in, Workello allows you to move candidates through your hiring funnel with a single click. By selecting an appropriate option from the drop-down menu, you can review applications, send tests, and invite candidates for an interview or reject them. 

The drop-down menu offers you the following options:

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

Each option triggers an appropriate automated email, informing applicants about their status in your hiring funnel and the following steps. 

To make everything even easier for you, each status is color-coded. Just by glancing at your dashboard, you will see how many candidates you have in each stage!

Reject Unqualified Writers

Your editors can get access to your Workello dashboard and assess applications as they come in. If they don’t like an application, they can select “Application Rejected” from the drop-down menu. The candidate will receive a polite rejection email informing them that you won’t be hiring them at this moment. 

Point, Click, Test

You will receive a lot of heavily edited portfolios that will hardly demonstrate a candidate’s actual writing skills. In general, portfolios will tell you something about an applicant’s experience, but you will have no way of telling what the quality of their first draft would be. 

The only way to see how much time your editors will have to spend making articles publishable is to test the candidates.

Before we introduced testing, we hired writers based on their portfolios alone. It was a huge mistake as we often ended up paying for articles that needed hours of rewriting.

Workello has a built-in testing feature that will spare you such trouble. 

If your editors like a candidate’s application, they can change their status in your hiring funnel to “Test Candidate.” The candidate will receive an automated email that includes a link to the writing test and clear instructions. 

Once candidates click on the link, they will open this tab:

How to Make a Good Test

A competent writer should have:

1. Excellent command of the English language
2. Demonstrated knowledge of legal topics and processes
3. Superb research skills
4. Great understanding of proper formatting

That is what your test should reveal. However, creating a good test is not that simple. You have to constantly balance between the candidate’s willingness to finish the test and the thoroughness of the test. 

This means that you should make the test demanding enough to be able to estimate the candidate’s level of skill. At the same time, the test shouldn’t require the candidate to spend an entire day working on an article for a job they may not even get. 

A candidate’s experience with your hiring process up to this point will also play a part in their willingness to complete the writing test. If you promptly respond to emails and write a detailed job description, the candidate will notice that you are a serious, well-organized company. It would incentivize them to complete your hiring process. 

If you don’t know how to create a good test, steal ours and tweak it a little to make it suitable for your needs.  

Interviewing Candidates

When candidates complete their tests, their application status will automatically change to “Test Complete.” The article becomes available to your editors to review and decide on the next steps. There are two options:

1. Reject Candidate—The candidate will receive a polite rejection email
2. Invite for Interview—The candidate will receive an email congratulating them on making it to the final stage of your hiring process and providing them with instructions to set a video interview via Calendly.  

The Candidate Status Page

We did our best to optimize our hiring system, and we still ended up with dozens of emails every day. Candidates constantly asked about their application status, they wanted to know if we had the time to review their applications, and they were curious about what would happen next. 

Even if you only have to copy-paste the response to such emails, it still takes a lot of your valuable time. 

With that in mind, we created the Candidate Status page where applicants can check their status and inform themselves about what our hiring process looks like. 

Click here to see what a Candidate Status page looks like.  

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

When we were just starting out, we didn’t have a reliable system to help us hire qualified writers fast. We couldn’t find anything on the market that would solve all the problems at once. 

And we had many problems:

• We posted job ads on multiple platforms and had no way of grouping applications in one place
• We couldn’t keep track of applicants’ status in our hiring funnel
• We received incomplete applications and couldn’t evaluate them properly
• We wasted time contacting applicants and asking them to provide us with information we needed
• We kept wasting time weeding out unqualified candidates and losing good ones
• Our editors were overworked and torn between their primary responsibilities and ad postings

We felt trapped in a never-ending hiring circle and things seemed bleak. But countless hours of R&D and over $100,000 later, we created an optimized hiring funnel that lead to outstanding results:

1. We built a team of 45 skilled writers and editors in only 18 months
2. That team ran one of the greatest content marketing campaigns of all time
3. We reduced our content production costs by 75% by hiring non-native speakers
4. Our editors and content managers could focus on what they do best—content production

We went to hell and back to create such a system. But you don’t have to. You get a fully-automated and optimized hiring funnel we spent months and thousands of dollars developing for the price of one page of content. 

Sign up to Workello for free today! It’s pre-configured, so you can start accepting applications and automating your hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes! 

More Job Boards to Find Legal Writers for Hire

With Workello on your side, you don’t have to worry about how you will keep track of all the applicants if you post job ads on multiple platforms. They will all go to a single place—your Workello dashboard. 

• Scripted
• Guru
• Legal Writing Institute
• VirtualVocations
• PeoplePerHour