Hiring Writers Is a Challenge—We Learned How to Overcome It the Hard Way

Anyone running a content marketing agency knows that the success of their campaigns directly correlates with the quality of the content they produce. For an SEO campaign to yield stellar results, content teams must create high volumes of valuable, top-quality content.

The problems occur when you start building your team. We know, because that is how we started.

We were an ambitious content agency with a client that had big goals. We helped that client grow from 0 to 1,000,000 organics per month in only 18 months. It was a tremendous success, but getting there was not easy. 

We didn’t have a streamlined hiring process, we had difficulty locating top-performing writers, and we did everything manually. 

When we started posting job ads, we immediately received piles of applications. That was great, but we had no idea how to deal with them. 

Candidates were applying from multiple channels, we couldn’t group them in one place, or keep track of where they were in our hiring funnel. The applications we received were in different formats, and many were incomplete. We received emails with portfolios in .docx, often terribly formatted. 

It was evident that we had to change something, so we did. We invested over $100,000 and an immeasurable amount of working hours to build a streamlined hiring funnel that allowed us to scale our content team from 1 to 45+ in under two years!

In the next 10 minutes, you will learn:

1. Where to look for press release writers for hire at any price point
2. What makes hiring skilled writers so difficult
3. How to use automation to evaluate and test more applications faster

Top 15 Job Boards for Finding Press Release Writers for Hire

The table below shows the pros and cons of different job boards you can use to hire a press release writer:

Read on to discover more places where you can look for an affordable press release writer for hire. 

Hiring Professional Writers Is a Pain Point for Everyone—Here Is Why

Hiring competent, experienced professionals is difficult in every industry. When it comes to writers, the task is even more difficult due to extremely high demand. 

Every serious business owner knows that building their online presence is crucial for success. To build a strong online presence, gain a great reputation, and establish yourself as an authority in your industry, you need top-quality and engaging content. 

You also need a writer who can maintain a professional image of your brand and keep your reputation intact. 

Since writing positions are usually remote, they will be very attractive. And since there is such high demand for writers, many people will want to try their luck. With no experience, inadequate knowledge of the English language, and mediocre writing skills at best, they will apply thinking, “How hard can it be?”

You will have to sift through hundreds of bad applications to get to one suitable candidate. Without an automated system in place, you will do everything manually:

• Logging the applications
• Keeping track of candidates in your hiring funnel
• Communicating with candidates
• Filtering out unqualified applicants

You will waste considerable amounts of time and miss many great candidates in the process because a company with a better hiring system will beat you to them. 

Our Experience Was a Nightmare—But Yours Doesn’t Have To Be

We went through a hiring cycle after a hiring cycle and always ended up facing the same problems. 

At first, we only used one hiring platform to source candidates. When that didn’t work, we figured we should start using multiple platforms to cast a bigger net. But our problems only multiplied. 

Getting applications was never the problem. In fact, we had more than we could handle. Not having a proper system in place to deal with those applications efficiently—that was the problem. 

The thing is, in the sea of applications, only a handful were from qualified candidates. Many were from apparently bad candidates, so they were easy to discard. And a considerable amount was from candidates who seemed fantastic on paper but were nowhere near as outstanding in reality—they were our stumbling block.

Our biggest campaign successes came from investing a lot of time, energy, and resources into content production. If we wanted to the same results with our hiring system, we needed to start investing in the optimization of our hiring process. 

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

Our hiring system didn’t work, and getting to the bottom of the problem became our top priority. This was our thought process:

1. A lot of high-quality content increases the number of monthly visitors to a website
2. Skilled writers are the only ones who can produce consistently great content
3. Finding one competent writer requires evaluating a hundred other candidates
4. To find that one writer, we must eliminate unqualified candidates from the game
5. To get to that one great writer before the competition, we had to filter out bad ones fast

That last point was the root of all our problems. Most of our time was wasted on candidates who turned out bad. 

When we understood what was holding us back, we brainstormed what an ideal hiring funnel should look like. This is what we wrote down:

• A unified platform that would display all applications in one place, regardless of where candidates applied
• A simple system that allows us to keep track of where candidates are in our hiring funnel
• An option to evaluate, test, and reject candidates, as well as invite them for interviews, and extend them an offer, all from a single dashboard
• A carefully devised and integrated test that chosen candidates will receive automatically
• Email automation that would allow efficient communication with candidates as they move through our hiring funnel, without the possibility of human error

We began with a combination of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier. It was a big improvement over what we previously had, but we still had to do everything manually—from updating Gogole sheets to contacting candidates. Countless iterations later, we have a unified and fully-optimized hiring system—Workello!

Your Hunt for Great Press Release Writers Begins With a Great Job Description Copy

Being super specific when writing a job description is crucial because it will attract the right candidates. It will signal that you know exactly what you need. 

You are looking for press release writers for hire, so you ideally want someone with experience in journalism or media relations. A bachelor’s degree in English, Journalism, or Communications may also be something you want to include in your job ad, as well as the knowledge of AP style. 

A detailed job description that clearly states all the requirements and job responsibilities will discourage unqualified candidates from sending in their resumes. 

Finally, to encourage great writers to pick you over your competitors, your job ad should specify what a candidate will get from working with you. Llist the benefits you offer, including the bonuses, career advancement opportunities, PTO, health and pension plans, etc.

If you need more help writing a press release writer job description or you are looking to fulfill more roles in your company, Workello has more templates to explore. Pick the one you need, modify it in a few minutes, and post it on as many job boards as you like. Here are some examples of our templates:

• Freelance Writer
• Website Content Writer
• Senior Writer
• Content Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Digital Marketing Copywriter
• B2B Copywriter
• SEO Copywriter
• Financial Writer
• Senior Medical Writer
• Political Writer
• Arts and Entertainment Writer
• Video Game Writer
• Senior Proposal Writer
• Beauty Copywriter

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

Writing job ads and posting them on multiple job platforms is not brain surgery, but it is time-consuming and tedious. Since we didn’t have a person dedicated to this job, our editors had to take a part of their working day to focus on this. 

It was not ideal because the more writers we needed to hire, the more time our editors spent looking for them instead of tending to their primary duties.

Delegating this job to a Recruitment Specialist or virtual assistant was a solution to this problem. But it required us to document our hiring process and train the new person. 

We went through this painstaking process, but you don’t have to. 

Sign up with Workello today, and you won’t have to waste a minute of your time documenting your hiring process. You will get access to our playbooks, and delegating this task will be a piece of cake. 

See All Your Applications in a Single Place

Candidates will see your ad on numerous platforms—LinkedIn, Facebook, Glassdoor, Upwork, etc. When you add a link to Workello-hosted application form to your job ads, all applications will end up in your unique Workello dashboard, regardless which platform someone applied on.

You will never have to contact candidates asking for a detail they have skipped because all applications will be consistent. 

Click here to see an example of our application form.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Moving candidates through your hiring funnel will be as easy as falling off a log when you have all the applications in a single dashboard. All you have to do is select the appropriate status from the drop-down menu. You will have 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

All the statuses are color-coded, so you will always know how many candidates you have in each stage of your hiring process. 

Reject Unqualified Press Release Writers

Your editors can start reviewing applications as soon as they appear in your dashboard. If they determine that a candidate is not the right fit, they can select the “Reject Candidate” status option. The candidate will automatically receive a rejection email informing them politely that you won’t be considering them for the position. 

Point, Click, Test

Some portfolios will seem perfect. If you are too impressed and hire a candidate based on the sample they provided, it may turn into a costly mistake. Sometimes you can’t even be sure if a candidate submitted a portfolio of press release they have written. Most of the time, those will be samples that a third party heavily edited.

Unless you test each candidate before you hire them, you will often end up paying for unusable content, and you will go back to square one.  We didn’t test our candidates at first, and that is exactly what kept happening to us. 

Workello reliably and efficiently solves the issue of impressive portfolios that don’t accurately reflect candidates’ skills. Your editors can select the “Test Candidate” option from the drop-down menu if a candidate meets the basic requirements. 

The candidate will receive an email with a link to the writing test and instructions. 

When candidates click on the link, they will see this:

How to Make a Good Test

A good test will allow you to accurately gauge a candidate’s:

• Language proficiency
• Knowledge of AP style
• Ability to communicate the message clearly and appropriately for the press releases

When creating the test, never lose sight of how much you can ask from a candidate. You don’t want them to lose interest because your test requires them to invest too much time and effort without any guarantees they will get the job. At the same time, it has to be demanding enough so a candidate can demonstrate their skills. 

If your job ad was informative and your communication with a candidate so far streamlined and transparent, the candidate will be happy to show you how good they are. If it took you ages to respond to emails and your job ad was vague, a seasoned writer will not be enthusiastic about a test they have to complete. 

To get the idea of what a test should look like, you can check out ours. The same test helped us grow our content team from 1 to 45 members in under two years. 

Interviewing Candidates

When candidates submit their finished tests, their application status will change to “Test Complete,” and it will be available for your editors to review. Based on the quality of the test article, editors can choose between the following applications status options:

1. Reject Candidate—Selecting this option removes the candidate from your hiring funnel. They’ll receive a polite rejection email thanking them for their time
2. Interview Candidate—Choosing this option triggers an email with an invitation to set up a video interview

The Candidate Status Page

A Candidate Status page is what each applicant can see on their end. This page allows candidates to see where they are in the hiring process and what they can expect next.  

Every time you change an applicant’s status in your dashboard, they will be able to see it on their end. 

This will save you valuable time you’d otherwise waste on responding to emails from candidates checking:

• If you have received their application
• If you have reviewed their test article
• What the next steps are
• When they will hear back from you

This page eliminates the possibility of losing a great candidate because you were too slow to respond.

It also demonstrates transparency and professionalism, vital for keeping good candidates motivated to stay with you until the end of the hiring process. 

Check out an example of a Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Without an optimized hiring system, we were completely lost surrounded by hundreds of applications. It was an expensive and disheartening situation to be in.

With every hiring cycle, we not only reenacted the problematic scenario but added more problems:

• We had no reliable way of keeping track of all candidates in our hiring funnel
• We kept receiving incomplete applications
• We failed to contact many of the applicants
• We wasted countless hours weeding out bad candidates
• Our editors neglected their actual job

Then we invested countless hours and conducted endless iterations until we created a reliable and fully-automated hiring system. That was the single most important investment we have ever made. And it paid off big time:

1. We scaled our content team from 1 to more than 45 members fast
2. We executed one of the most successful content marketing campaigns ever
3. By hiring non-native writers, we reduced our content production costs by up to 75%
4. Our editors could go back to doing the jobs they came to is for

We spent over $100,000 building a system you can get for the price of a single page of content. And you get to try it for free!

Workello is pre-configured, so it will take you less than 3 minutes to begin automating your hiring process and accepting applications. 

More Places to Find Press Release Writers for Hire

All applications you receive will go to the same place—your Workello dashboard. So, knock yourself out and pick as many job boards as you like. 

Here are some more places where you can find an affordable press release writer for hire:

• Toogit
• Service4money
• Press Release Writers
• Writer Access
• Compose.ly
• Constant Content
• ProCreative Writers
• Freelancer
• iWriter
• Contently
• Scripted
• Skyword
• Pitchwhiz
• Zerys
• Muck Rack
• Writers Work
• Journalism Jobs
• Mediabistro
• HireMyMom
• CloudPeeps
• PeoplePerHour
• NAJA
• SPJ 
• NABJ
• NASW
• NAHJ
• ASJA
• AAJA
• AHCJ
• SEJ
• NLGJA
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer (Facebook community)
• What’s Your Plan B? (Facebook community)
• FinCon (Facebook community)