Slingshot Content is an SEO and content outsourcing agency founded by Alex Eckhart. Alex has been managing content for quite a while now and he always felt the pain associated with hiring good content teams.
Some of the issues he had managing content for different SaaS companies and agencies were heavily tied to the quality of content the external vendors were publishing. Alex knew that he could do it better and that was the motivation behind starting Slingshot Content.
Issues with hiring
“It’s almost easier to talk about what went well because there wasn’t a whole lot of it”, says Alex.
When you’re starting out, you really don’t know where to start, so you do what everyone recommends. “You go to Fiver, you try to gather a pool of freelancers, you reach out to your network and try to create this patchwork team”, Alex says. “And man does that cause a lot of problems. How do you vet the writers? How do you assess their abilities before you hire them? And how do you do it at scale?”
Why Slingshot Content chose Workello
“One of the biggest advantages of Workello is that you can vet more candidates. If you get 100 applicants you need them all to be in one place and you need a way to vet them quickly”, says Alex.
“I got about 200 applications from Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn, assessed about 50, interviewed 15, and hired 4 really solid candidates, one of them quickly moved into an editing role!”
The process
Hiring playbook used: Hiring Generalist Writers
Slingshot Content did everything right and you can too if you follow their playbook!
Alex created a fantastic job ad where he called out all the important things his candidates will care about:
- A good description of the role
- Responsibilities for the new team member
- Transparent compensation
- Benefits of working with Slingshot Content
- Equal opportunity disclaimer
Slingshot Content’s job description is based on the standard template you can find in Workello. Alex aligned the job description with his brand and made sure that he was as detailed as possible to avoid any potential confusion from the candidate side.
The assessment task Alex created is also based on a standard Workello template aligned with his content needs. The assessment is optimized for a high-take rate, meaning that it is:
- Short
- Clear
- And tells the employer everything they need to know about their candidates’ skill levels
Sourcing candidates
Slingshot Content posted their job ad everywhere to ensure that they receive the highest number of candidates possible. The key to hiring the best writers is to evaluate more candidates, and Alex did a fantastic job. He posted his ads on:
- Facebook (specifically in interest-based communities)
Here’s an example of one of his ads on Reddit.
Following this process, Alex was able to get these amazing results:
If you, like Slingshot Content, are also looking to hire writers and editors, sign up for Workello today.
