RNKD is a technical SEO agency founded by Alan Martin and Jonathan Smith, and they help their clients make smart investments in SEO. They focus on legal, dental, and home services and have a wide array of satisfied clients under their belts.

Of course, as an SEO agency, they need to be able to fulfill their clients’ content needs, not just technical, and they need to work with good writers who can write engaging articles that get a lot of clicks.

Hiring writers = trouble?

“We struggled with producing good content for quite a while,” says Alan Martin. “We tried every content mill you can think of, from bargain-basement ones to those that charge premium prices. We found that we couldn’t get any consistency in the quality of the content we got back.”

RNKD is not alone in their struggle. Many new and well-established companies fall into the trap of content agencies and content mills, as these companies market themselves as a “done for you” service. However, they fail to mention that the clients rarely get a dedicated team of writers who consistently work on their content. Usually, if you hire a content mill, you’re playing Russian roulette with the writing team — one day, you may get someone amazing, and the very next day, a complete beginner could be working on your content.

You really can’t enforce your writing guidelines, as it is unfair to expect someone who just got introduced to your company to absorb all of your guidelines in one day and deliver their first drafts on that same day. That’s why we always recommend hiring a freelance writer or even a writer in-house that you can work with for a long time and so that they can truly implement all the guidelines you have in their content.

RNKD’s hiring process

Hiring playbooks used:

  1. Delegating hiring to a virtual assistant
  2. Hiring generalist writers

Alan Martin from RNKD created a simple job ad that communicated exactly what he needed from his candidates. He used Workello’s template and modified it to align it with his brand, explaining that the writers will work with content briefs and that they will need to know how to do good research to be successful in their roles.

The assessment task Alan created was also based on Workello’s pre-optimized template that ensures several things:

  1. That the highest percentage of invited candidates actually take the test
  2. That you will be able to assess their writing and research skills easily and accurately
  3. That the assessment task is less time-consuming for the candidate compared to other writing assessments

The RNKD team hired a virtual assistant who spread their job ad everywhere! They utilized interest-based communities on Facebook and several local job boards in lower-cost countries.

The results RNKD got were amazing. Out of about 80 candidates they received, they tested around 20, and hired 4 fantastic and affordable writers that joined their team!

Why RNKD chose Workello

“In just a couple of weeks of really using Workello, we got 86 candidates, tested 23 (I’m very picky),” says Alan, “We interviewed 6 (again, I’m very picky, and I have very low churn on my writers), and hired 4 really amazing, high-quality, affordable writers, with two more starting soon.”

Alan’s goal was to hire 3-5 writers in his first sprint, and he pretty much achieved that in under 2 weeks! “Workello has changed the game for us. It allowed us to evaluate candidates at a scale that would be impossible to manage without it.”

If you’re an SEO agency like RNKD and you need to work with high-quality writers, try Workello today!