Finding a Good Content Writer Can Be a Perplexing Task—Learn From Our Blunders!

Before developing Workello, we were a small content agency with aspirations to make it big in the industry. Seeing an opportunity to do just that, we took on a content project that required us to increase our client’s organic traffic from 0 to 1,500,000 monthly visitors.

Through tireless work and sheer determination, we managed to prevail—and the successful outcome of our project turned into one of the greatest SEO success stories of all time!

To accomplish this, we had to hastily grow our team from 1 to 45+ Content Writers in a little less than 2 years. We knew it would be no easy feat, but we weren’t expecting a hiring nightmare we found ourselves in.

With our scraped-together hiring funnel, it was impossible to keep track of all candidate applications and follow up with every candidate on time! It took us ages to screen the flood of incoming applications, set up interviews, and extend offers to the most promising candidates. By the time we identified great writers, they would’ve already accepted an offer from a different company or completely lost interest in ours.

Many other issues soon popped up, and we knew we had to fix them—but there wasn’t any ATS around that could reliably fix everything at once. That’s why we decided to take matters into our own hands and devise a brand new, fully automated hiring funnel tailored for hiring Content Writers!

In the next 10+ minutes, we’ll show you:

1. The top 15 job boards to visit when searching for Content Writers
2. Neil Patel’s guidelines for finding qualified candidates
3. How Workello can streamline your hiring process to be more efficient

What Neil Patel Has To Say on the Topic of Hiring Content Writers

Scaling a content team is a major endeavor for any company, no matter how big or small. If you’re hiring Content Writers for the first time, it’s always a good idea to have some reliable guidelines if you happen to get lost. That’s exactly what you can get from Neil Patel’s long-standing experience in the content marketing industry.

Before you embark on your hiring spree, Neil Patel advises you to first consider several crucial factors:

• Your business goals—that is, the ultimate reason you need to scale your team
• The type of content you want to publish
• How much you’re willing to pay a top-skilled candidate

Once you have determined these aspects, you can move on to the next step—finding qualified candidates.

There are countless job boards you can use, but not all of them are created equal. Some hiring platforms, like Upwork, specialize in freelancers, while some might be broad, with writers only being a small percent of job seekers on the platform. 

To find the perfect fit for your business, you should avoid posting ads on every platform you come across. This doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to cast a wide net—it just means you should carefully select the job boards that are more likely to yield you the kind of candidate you want to hire. 

Don’t fret over this—we will help you pick the best job boards for finding qualified Content Writers!

Take a Look at These 15 Job Boards To Find a Good Content Writer for Your Team

As we scaled our business, we tried out numerous job boards. Here’s a pick of our 15 favorites:

What Difficulties We Encountered While Searching for Top-Performing Content Writers

Experienced Content Writers who have mastered their craft don’t stay on any job board for long. Their services are in high demand, and they get hired in a flash. Since no job board can source top-quality candidates fast enough to meet the demand, the majority of candidates will be unqualified, no matter what hiring platform you’re using.

This means you’ll need to carefully evaluate and test dozens of candidates in a very short time period, in order to identify and extend an offer to a top-performing Content Writer faster than other companies! 

If you were hiring one or two writers, such a task would be manageable. When scaling an entire team, the pressure of all the applications continually coming in from various different sites will quickly overwhelm you.

We initially used Upwork and LinkedIn, but it soon became obvious that we had to post our job ads further afield as well. As we included other job boards, all the old issues stayed:

• We couldn’t manage to effectively sort out candidates by their status in our funnel
• Websites didn’t have settings that would allow us to target Content Writers specifically
• Candidates’ portfolios seldom gave us an accurate picture of their actual skills

Applications streamed in by the dozens each day—from Glassdoor, Indeed, Facebook, Monster, etc.—and we quickly realized that the problem didn’t lie with any of the job boards. It lay with our whole hiring system!

Some of the issues we faced were:

• Keeping track of candidates’ applications by their status in our funnel
• Responding to candidates in a punctual manner
• Keeping note of candidates whose portfolios our editors liked
• Thinning out the number of poor Content Writers who were constantly applying

We were able to successfully lead an ambitious SEO campaign because we invested time, money, and a lot of effort in it—and we invested nothing in our hiring funnel!

As soon as we realized that, we started turning the situation around. We employed all of Neil Patel’s advice but realized that the key ingredient to success was process automation.

Our hiring process became the top priority, and we toiled tirelessly—investing thousands of dollars and many months of R&D—until we perfected our product. That product is 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

Since we didn’t know what particular elements of our hiring system weren’t working, we decided to figure it out by breaking the system down into smaller segments and analyzing each one. We concluded the following:

1. To attract thousands of monthly visitors, we needed engaging, relevant, valuable content
2. Only experienced Content Writers can reliably and consistently create top-tier content
3. In order to spot a single competent Content Writer, we had to quickly sort through myriads of sub-par applications
4. To hire an excellent Content Writer, we needed to eliminate most of the bad ones from our hiring funnel
5. Identifying and filtering out bad Content Writers fast—this is what we didn’t have an answer for

As we were using multiple hiring platforms at any one time, it was never an issue to receive applications—in fact, we were receiving too many and we couldn’t handle them effectively!

For our projected new system to resolve the many issues we faced at the same time, we decided that it needed to incorporate the following features:

1. A unified dashboard that would compile all applications in one place, regardless of which job board they came from
2. The ability to sort candidates based on their application status in our hiring funnel
3. An automated testing feature that would allow us to accurately assess our candidates’ writing skills and filter out bad Content Writers fast
4. Automated email correspondence that would eliminate the chance of human error and save us dozens of hours every week

The first iteration of our new system used the combination Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It improved our hiring situation a bit, but we wouldn’t be done until we refined this crude model into—Workello!

Grab the Attention of Top Content Writers With a Comprehensive Job Description!

A well-composed job description can make all the difference in the initial stage of your hiring process. 

Whereas a vague, poorly-specified job ad will attract more unqualified candidates, a highly detailed one is far more likely to get the attention of top-skilled Content Writers..

By being specific, we mean listing out all the responsibilities and requirements of the role in your organization, such as previous work experience, education, and prerequisite writing skills. The more in-depth you go, the better your chances of snapping up a candidate who’s the perfect match for your business! 

As your first contact with candidates will be via your job ad, it is also important to include all the benefits that your company can provide to an ambitious, top-performing Content Writer. Specify your health insurance policy, promotion possibilities, as well as the number of PTO days they can get—all this will entice top-performers to work for your company instead of a competitor!

If you need an outline for your job ad, feel free to select one of our pre-made templates:

• Content Writer
• Writer
• SEO Writer
• Copywriter
• Social Media Copywriter
• Digital and Multiplatform Content Writer
• Content Specialist

View All Your Applications Simultaneously on Workello’s Single-Page Dashboard!

Our integrated dashboard helps you have a clear overview of all applications you receive by gathering them all in a single place! 

Regardless of their source, they will invariably end up in the Workello dashboard thanks to a Workello-hosted application form you can easily embed in your job ads. This will save you a ton of valuable time since you won’t have to check every job board and log each application manually.

Our Workello-hosted application form also solves the problem of incomplete applications. Each candidate will be required to complete the same application form, regardless of which website they find your job ad on. An additional benefit to this is that your HR team will no longer need to reach out to candidates for clarification or further details.

You can see an example application form here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

The Workello dashboard will be your single point of reference for each stage of your hiring funnel. You can now complete the entire process—from evaluating resumes and sending tests to scheduling interviews and extending offers—without ever leaving your Workello dashboard!

To update a candidate’s status and move them to the next stage, you only need to select the corresponding option in the drop-down menu:

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

For greater clarity, each status is color-coded—you can see at what stage your candidates are with one quick look!

Reject Unqualified Content Writers

If your recruiters spot a candidate whose abilities are inadequate for the role, you can reject their application by updating their status to Application Rejected.

Workello will automatically send them an email that politely informs them that they have not passed the initial evaluation. Because of this automation, you won’t have to deal with scores of candidates wondering about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

The biggest mistake you can make when hiring Content Writers is making your decision based solely on candidate portfolios. The reason for this is that portfolios are rarely, if ever, a true reflection of someone’s writing skills. 

Portfolios typically feature only the candidate’s best work. What you shouldn’t forget is that these articles have likely undergone at least one round of editing and QA before being published. 

What you need to assess is someone’s first draft capabilities. And that’s only possible through testing.

We didn’t have a testing step when we first started hiring! We trusted what candidates wrote in their resumes, and ended up wasting upwards of thousands of dollars on uninspired, poorly-written articles that we couldn’t publish.

This all changed with Workello. Now, you can easily discern bad writers by testing them via the Test Candidate option. This triggers an automated email that:

1. Congratulates the candidate on passing the initial review and entering the testing stage
2. Sends them a link to the written test

When they open the link, they will go to a page that looks somewhat like this one:

How To Make a Good Test

When writing a test for a Content Writer, you need to make sure that it allows you to evaluate the following three areas:

1. Command of the English language (grammar, punctuation, style, vocabulary)
2. Ability to perform thorough research on any topic
3. Formatting abilities

A good test should be challenging but fair. You shouldn’t expect someone to write a full article as a test for a job they might not even get. At the same time, you can’t gauge someone’s writing skills from a 150-word section. 

The best test is the one that strikes the perfect balance between thoroughness and the candidate’s willingness to complete it. That said, Workello lets you tip the scales a bit in favor of thoroughness. 

With all the automated features we had mentioned, the whole hiring process is so efficient and transparent that most writers will be willing to put more effort into completing your test. This means you’re allowed to devise something a bit more elaborate!

You don’t need to waste dozens of hours composing the ideal test on your own—feel free to use the same one we used to test hundreds of candidates!

Interviewing Candidates

Once a candidate has completed your test and sent it in via the Submit Test option, their status changes to Test Complete. Your editors can then evaluate how well they performed. After this assessment, they can further change the candidate’s status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Sends an automatic message that informs the candidate politely that their performance did not match your company’s hiring standards
2. Invite for Interview—Sends an automatic message informing the candidate that your editors were pleased with their performance and inviting them to set up an interview via the Calendly link

The Candidate Status Page

The Candidate Status page provides your candidates with a convenient way to check up on their application status without bothering your HR team via email. This page also includes a What to expect next section that has detailed information about each stage of your hiring process—so they can prepare in advance!Having this page means that you no longer need to stress over excellent Content Writers’ losing interest because they did not receive sufficient information about the selection process. Your recruiters also won’t be swamped by needless emails!

Here’s what a Candidate Status page typically looks like. 

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Before we created Workello, every aspect of the hiring process provided us with different problems—and we had no easy solution that would eliminate them all at once!

Our inefficient hiring system had no means to track hundreds of applications that arrived in our funnel daily. We lost many promising candidates who were left waiting for our reply—and didn’t get an answer (or got it too late).

Our editors were overworked and couldn’t perform well in two roles simultaneously. This had a negative impact on both our content production and our hiring process. They also had to do everything manually since we lacked process automation.

This is why we decided to createWorkello, which allowed us to:

1. Quickly scale our team from 1 to 45+ Content Writers
2. Lower the cost of producing quality content by 75%
3. Lead one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns ever
4. Let our editors focus on their main duty—editing content

To create Workello, we invested countless hours, all our company’s brainpower, and more than $100,000. You can now have all the benefits—without any of the trouble—for the price of one content page!Try using Workello for free! Since everything is pre-configured, you can start receiving applications in under 5 minutes!