Learn From Our Mistakes—Hiring Writers Doesn’t Have To Be a Pain

Before we developed Workello, we were a content agency struggling to find qualified writers. When we produced content at a smaller scale, things were going great. But when we started scaling and needed to hire more writers, we ran into trouble. 

At first, we used only one hiring platform. We received plenty of applications, but most of them turned out bad. So we decided to cast a wider net and started posting job ads on other platforms. Little did we know that this would only multiply our problems. 

We received countless applications on multiple platforms—via email, though DMs on Facebook and LinkedIn. We had no way of tracking where candidates were in our hiring funnel. Missed some of the applications altogether, so we never even contacted some of the candidates.

To make things worse, some candidates sent their portfolios as Word documents, which made it impossible for employers to know whether the applicant is the one who actually wrote the samples. Others submitted incomplete applications, so we had to contact each candidate and ask for the missing information. We handled everything manually and wasted incredible amounts of time. 

We often identified great candidates too late—another company with a streamlined hiring funnel had already hired them. We had nothing of the sort. We tried to find a system to help us, but nothing could solve all of our issues at once.

When enough was enough, we sat down and started working on our own hiring system. Thousands of hours and over $100,000 later, we developed an optimized and automated hiring system that allows us to hire great and affordable writers faster. It allowed us to scale our content team from 1 to 45 members in less than two years. 

With that team, we executed one of the best SEO campaigns ever, growing our client from  0 to 1,000,000 website visitors per month in only 18 months. 

In the next 10 minutes, you will learn:

1. Where to find RPG writers at any price point
2. Why hiring RPG writers is difficult
3. How to copy our hiring process and use automation to your advantage

Top Job Boards for Hiring RPG Writers

Good writers are hard to come by, but experienced writers with in-depth RPG knowledge are mythical. You have to step up your search game and look in multiple places, especially since there are no job boards that are specific to game writers only. 

The table below presents the some of the most popular job boards for hiring writers, and they have hundreds of thousands of users actively looking for employment. You can use filters to find RPG writers faster.

Read on to find a few more places for hiring RPG writers.

Why Is Hiring RPG Writers So Difficult

Hiring qualified people for any role is challenging, and there are many reasons for that:

• No job board guarantees that all its users are qualified
• You have to evaluate dozens of applications to find a single good candidate
• Everybody wants to have the best employees, so the best candidates get hired fast

We know this from experience. We used many different platforms to source more candidates and improve our chances of finding great writers. It solved nothing. In fact, we had even more problems on our hands. 

The only way to get to that one great candidate is to evaluate and test a lot of candidates and get rid of bad applicants fast. 

There are additional challenges when you are hiring a person with a specific set of skills. You are looking for a writer with exceptional story-telling abilities and a knack for creating engaging dialogues. They also have to possess in-depth knowledge of the genre. 

The talent pool of qualified writers will be even smaller. What is more, such candidates can typically choose who they want to work for. They have options because they know they are scarce. 

As a result, you have to stand out and offer them something that others can’t. Still, your biggest challenge will be to identify who these writers are. To do that, you will need a hiring system that will let you:

• Log all the applications in one place
• Communicate with applicants efficiently
• Keep track of each candidate in your hiring funnel
• Keep note of candidates that stand out
• Filter out unqualified candidates fast

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 didn’t take us long to realize that our hiring system was broken and that we needed to do something about it. We needed to get to the bottom of the problem, so we broke down our processes to see what was holding us back:

1. We need to create content that will attract organic visitors to the website
2. To succeed in that, we need excellent writers
3. It’s only possible to identify great writers after evaluating hundreds of candidates
4. To get to top-performs before our competitors, we need to weed out unqualified candidates fast

We didn’t have a system that would allow us to filter out candidates that don’t meet our standards fast enough. 

We then listed what features an ideal hiring system should have. This is what we came up with:

• A unified dashboard displaying all applicants in a single place
• Ability to sort candidates according to their application status without going back and forth to multiple pages
• Features that allow us to evaluate, test, reject, invite for interview, or send offers to candidates we like—all with a single click
• Email automation that allows efficient communication without the possibility of human error

Our first attempt at such a solution was a Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier combo, and it was a significant improvement. But it needed more work, so countless iterations later, we have a fully automated and optimized hiring system—Workello.

You Can’t Attract Qualified Candidates Without a Great Job Description Copy

A good job ad goes a long way in attracting great candidates. Put yourself in candidates’ shoes—what would appeal to you more: a precise job description that tells you exactly what the job entails and what skills it requires or a vague ad giving you next-to-no information?

Such a detailed job ad will not only attract better candidates, but it will also significantly reduce the number of bad ones sending their applications. For example, consider the type of game you are making. If it’s about mythology or history, you may be looking for someone with a degree in history. 

You can go a step further and include all the benefits a candidate will get from working for you, such as bonuses, learning and career advancement opportunities, PTO, and health and retirement plans. This will make you stand out from your competition and motivate a qualified RPG writer to pick you. 

Do You Need Help Composing a Great Job Ad

When composing your job ad, you must be specific, but you don’t have to reinvent hot water. If you are not entirely sure what role you need or you wish to have a ready-made job description template to adapt to your needs, we’ve got you covered!

Workello has a comprehensive database of job description templates for all roles in your content team. You can modify the one you need in a few minutes and copy it to the job boards you use. Here are some examples:

• Writer
• Content Writer
• Copywriter
• Video Game Writer
• Senior Writer
• Technical Writer
• Freelance Writer
• SEO Writing
• Digital Content Writer
• Website Content Writer
• Quality Assurance Technical Writer
• Course Writer
• Assessment Writer
• Instructional Writer
• Marketing Communications Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we started hiring writers, our editors were in charge of composing job ads and posting them on different hiring platforms. This isn’t a difficult task but it takes a lot of time, so their primary responsibilities often suffered. 

It became apparent that we needed to hire a dedicated recruiter to handle job ad distribution. The problem was, we first had to document the entire hiring process before we could delegate this task to a new hire.

We spent dozens of hours putting together the enablement documentation, but you don’t have to!

When you sign up with Workello for free, you get access to all our playbooks. You will learn how to delegate the job ad distribution to someone else!

See All Your Applications in One Dashboard

The most significant advantage of Workello is that it will display all the applications in a single place. This is possible because you can include a link to a Workello-hosted application form in every job ad you post. 

This also ensures that all your applications are consistent, and there will be no more incomplete submissions.

You will no longer waste time contacting candidates and asking them for additional information, so keeping track of all the candidates will be a breeze. 

See what our application form looks like here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Another great feature of Workello is that it allows you to evaluate, test, and reject candidates, as well as invite them for interviews and extend offers to those you like from a single point of entry—your dashboard. 

All you have to do is select one of the following application status option from a drop-down menu:

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

Moving the candidates through your hiring funnel will demand nothing but a click on the appropriate application status. And to make everything even more convenient, every status is color-coded. It will allow you to quickly see how many applicants you have in each stage.

Reject Unqualified Writers

When applications start coming in, your editors can evaluate them and see if they meet your basic requirements. If not, your editors can select the “reject Candidate” option, which will trigger an automated rejection email, informing candidates politely that you will not be considering them for the position of an RPG writer at this point.

Point, Click, Test

Many of the portfolios you receive will not accurately represent the candidates’ writing skills. Candidates typically submit heavily edited articles that have gone through several stages of editing. 

A portfolio can give you a rough idea of the candidate’s level of experience, but it often doesn’t reflect their first draft capabilities. The only way to get such insights is to test candidates who have met your basic requirements.

When we started hiring writers, we based our decisions on their portfolios alone. That led to us paying for many unusable articles and beginning the hiring process all over again. It was a colossal waste of time and resources.

To prevent this from happening ever again, we implemented a testing feature for Workello. All you have to do is select “Test Candidate,” and they will receive an email with a link to the test and clear instructions on how to complete it. 

When they click on the link, they will open the following tab:

How To Make a Good Test

While making a test, you have to be careful to achieve a perfect balance between candidate willingness and test thoroughness. It means you have to make the test comprehensive enough to properly determine a candidate’s skill level. At the same time, you mustn’t make it too demanding because candidates won’t be willing to spend 8 hours on a test for a job they might not get.

If you want candidates to stay invested in completing your writing test, you have to do all the steps leading to the test right. Your job ad must be informative enough and your communication with applicants efficient and transparent. That way, you will come across as a professional company. 

With Workello on your side, your hiring process will be well-organized and candidates will see it. They will be impressed with your bran and feel motivated to invest their time in completing your evaluation process. 

When you devise a test, you have to be careful to make it, so it accurately demonstrates a candidate’s:

1. Language proficiency
2. Dialogue writing skills
3. Creativity
4. Storytelling ability

When hiring RPG writers, many of the applicants will only be RPG enthusiasts with little or no writing experience. If you want people to feel immersed in your game, you need great dialogues. You need a writer who will know how to develop characters through storytelling. An inexperienced writer will hardly do that. 

If you are not entirely sure how to create a test from scratch, you can take a peek at ours. Here is the test we used to scale our content team.

Interviewing Candidates

When candidates complete their writing test and submit it, it will automatically show in your dashboard—their application status will change to “Test Complete.” Your editors can then review the test and decide whether to:

1. Reject Candidate—This action will trigger a polite rejection email thanking the candidate for their time
2. Invite for Interview—This action triggers an email inviting them to schedule a video interview via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

We implemented a Candidate Status page to increase transparency and reduce the need to respond to transactional questions.

This is where candidates can see their application status and read all about your hiring process in the “What to expect next” section. Thanks to this feature, you will stop receiving emails with questions, such as:

• Have you received my application?
• Have you had the time to review my test?
• When can I expect to hear from you?
• What are the next steps?

Whenever you change a candidate’s status in your hiring funnel, it will automatically update on their end, as well. This eliminates the possibility of missing a great candidate because you were too late to reach out to them. 

See an example of a Candidate Status page here. 

The Investment Paid Off Big Time

Hiring writers before we had Workello was painful. It felt like a never-ending hiring cycle. 

We were utterly lost trying to keep track of all applicants in our hiring funnel. We often failed to follow up with great candidates on time. Sometimes, we failed to contact them at all. 

We kept struggling with incomplete applications and impressive portfolios that hardly reflected writers’ true abilities. 

Our editors spent more and more time writing and posting job ads while neglecting the tasks they were hired to do in the first place. As the list of their responsibilities grew, their performance dropped, they were overworked, and the morale was down. 

After months of hard work, countless trial and error sessions, and over $100,000, we created a fully-automated system you can get for the price of one page of content. 

It is the same hiring system that enabled us to:

1. Build a content team team of 45+ members in less than 2 years
2. Reduce the cost of content production by up to 75% by hiring non-native writers
3. Run one of the greatest SEO campaigns ever
4. Let editors and content managers go back to doing what they do best—create fantastic content

Try Workello for free today! It’s pre-configured, so you can start automating your hiring funnel and accepting applications from RPG writers in less than 3 minutes. 

A Few More Places for Hiring RPG Writers

With Workello, you don’t have to worry about how many different job boards you have to check so you don’t miss any of the candidates. You will see all applications in your Workello dashboard. 

Post your job ad on as many platforms as you like. To give you some more ideas where to look, here are some more websites for hiring RPG writers:

• Truelancer
• Toogit
• Hire a Writer subreddit
• Writers for Hire subreddit