We Know How Difficult It Is To Hire Writers—You Can Learn From Us! 

Before we developed Workello, we were a content agency called ContentDistribution.com. In 2019, we took on a project that became one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time. We managed to grow our client from 0 to 1,500,000 organic monthly visitors in less than 24 months.

Reaching that goal meant we had to produce a high volume of top-quality content consistently, and in early 2019, we were a one-man team.

During the 18-month period, we hired 45+ Writers and Editors. Deficiencies in our hiring process cropped up immediately. We wasted time on tasks we had to do manually until we realized we should automate them—this caused us to miss out on the best candidates.

We invested $100,000+ and countless working hours into developing Workello. In the next few minutes, we’ll show you:

1. How to find a Technical Writer for hire
2. Why hiring Technical Writers can be a nightmare
3. How to use automated testing to filter out bad candidates faster

The Best 15 Job Boards for Finding a Technical Writer for Hire

You’ll find the best Technical Writer candidates on one of these job boards. Here’s what they offer:

We’ve prepared 15 additional sources to find a Technical Writer in this article!

All Companies Struggle With Finding a Technical Writer for Hire

It seems that virtually every company today employs a Technical Writer, regardless of the industry. When you start looking to hire one, the best ones get snapped up instantly. All hiring platforms suffer from not being able to source new Technical Writers fast enough.

This means that your job is to go over as many applications as possible to get to that perfect candidate before someone else does.

To find the best fit, you’ll need to evaluate and test hundreds of candidates, and you’ll need to do it quickly.

When we started expanding our team, we used only Upwork but soon spread out to other job boards.

Whenever we added another job board, the issues persisted and only multiplied. We had applications flying in from all over—Facebook, Indeed, email, Craigslist, LinkedIn, etc.

We’d change job boards to see whether it would be different elsewhere, but nothing got rid of the problems we initially had with Upwork. Whatever change we introduced, we could never:

• Keep track of all applications
• Track candidates by their status
• Respond to the best candidates on time (or ever)
• Log candidates whose applications we liked at first
• Decrease the number of poor candidates

We realized we needed to change our approach to hiring Writers. We needed an ATS that would address all these issues single-handedly, and something like that wasn’t around.

Our commitment to content is what made us a successful agency, but that commitment wasn’t there when we hired people. We changed that and invested tons of time and money into creating an automated hiring funnel that would resolve all of our hiring problems.

Workello is the result of that investment.

Why You Should Test Technical Content Professionals Before Hiring Them

Hiring skilled members for your content team has never been an easy task, but the challenge is even bigger if you’re looking for an experienced technical writer or editor. It’s easy for candidates to amp up their resumes and portfolios with niche-specific samples that have been heavily edited by third-party collaborators, and you’ll be none the wiser about the quality of their work until you hire them. The only way to gauge their actual skills is to add pre-employment assessments to your hiring process.

Testing candidates is impossible without skill assessment software to keep everything organized and under control. Without it, you’ll have to communicate with candidates, send tests, collect and grade them, and keep track of what stage of the hiring process each candidate is in.

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that takes care of the entire process for you. After you sign up for free, you’ll find the perfect candidate by taking the following steps:

1. Launch your pre-configured hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Add a Workello link to your job postings on all job boards you use
3. Wait for applications to come your way
4. Send tests to applicants to test their technical writing skills
5. Reject, interview, and hire candidates from your single-page dashboard

Test Candidates for Technical Roles Effortlessly With Workello

You can use Workello to test technical writers in any industry. The platform is not for technical writing only—you can use it to test content writers and SEO writers as well. With Workello, you can manage candidates through the entire selection process without ever leaving your dashboard. Use Workello’s free trial to sign up and see for yourself how fast you will identify the top 1% of technical writer candidates.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Before we could create something to improve our hiring system, we had to figure out what was holding our current system back. We took the entire process apart and split it into five steps:

1. Technical documents that give value to our clients need to be of the highest quality
2. High-quality documents can come only from high-quality Technical Writers
3. The Technical Writer hiring process consists of going through hundreds of applications
4. The hiring of high-quality Technical Writers requires spotting and dropping bad ones fast
5. Bad Writers were difficult to spot—that was holding us back

Receiving applications was never an issue—you post a job ad, and people apply. The problem was handling them once they arrived, especially if they came in the hundreds each day.

We wanted to create an automated system that would remove all obstacles that come with hiring Technical Writers and help create a more efficient hiring process. Such a system had to:

1. Gather all applications in one place, regardless of the job board where candidates apply
2. Let us sort candidates by application status and move them through the funnel in an instant
3. Have a single dashboard to evaluate, test, interview, and hire new Technical Writers
4. Send writing tests automatically so that we could spot a bad Writer with an impressive portfolio
5. Automate communication so we wouldn’t worry about human error and waste valuable time on email correspondence

Our initial solution was Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier, which did its job but didn’t fulfill everything we needed it to. We spent the next several months tweaking each element until we had a product we were completely satisfied with—Workello.

Your Technical Writer Job Description Is Your First Step to Great Candidates

A good technical document is informative and has no room for fluff and vagueness. A job description is no technical document, but the same principles apply.

No job listing is perfect—you will always have unqualified candidates. Still, a well-written job description can help you lower their number significantly. To do that, you have to be as specific as possible about the role.

You must lay out all the responsibilities that come with the job and be precise about the requirements candidates must meet to be considered for the role. For instance, if you require experience in your industry, state so explicitly. This will deter many underqualified Writers.

You should also use your job description to promote yourself as an employer. The best Technical Writers have many offers, and you need to show them why they should choose yours.

List all the benefits that come with the role, such as career advancement opportunities, salary increases, health plans, and so on.

If you don’t know how to write a job description or what specific role you need to hire, you can use our database of pre-vetted templates. Click on the job title you need, copy our template, adapt it slightly to suit your company, and your job description is ready to go online!

• Technical Writer
• Copywriter
• Content Writer
• Writer
• Technical Writer II
• Technical Writer III
• Junior Technical Writer
• Senior Technical Writer
• Technical Writer and Editor
• Technical Writer Intern
• Technical Writer in Healthcare
• Technical Writer for Cyber Security
• Technical Writing Consultant
• Quality Assurance Technical Writer
• Technical Writing Manager

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we first started hiring, we didn’t have a Recruiting Coordinator to handle posting ads on various job boards. Instead, our Editors and Content Managers had to put their actual work aside and create listings. It wasn’t difficult to do, but our content production suffered because of it.

It was hard to get someone new in as it involved documenting our entire hiring process and educating the new employee on how we went about it. Still, we realized there was no way around it, and we went through the whole ordeal—but you don’t have to! 

When you register for Workello for free, you’ll be able to use our documentation and hire someone else to deal with job ad distribution effortlessly!

We Fell in Love With Our Dashboard—You Will Too! 

Once applications start flying in from various sources and you have to visit all the different job boards to find them, it gets hectic. Our dashboard gets rid of that problem as it gathers all applications in one place.

Thanks to the Workello-hosted application form, every application will show up in your dashboard, and candidates will submit applications in the same format.

This way, you won’t have to log applications by yourself and follow up with candidates who leave out any necessary information.

Take a look at an application example.

Watch Candidates Stream In

The dashboard is where you will conduct the whole hiring process. It provides you with options to evaluate, test, review, invite for interviews, and extend offers to the best Technical Writers.

Moving candidates through the hiring funnel has never been easier—all you need to do is choose a different option from the drop-down menu. Your choices are as follows:

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

With each status being color-coded, you’ll be able to know how many candidates are in each stage of the funnel at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Technical Writers

When an application pops up in your dashboard, your Content Managers and Editors can take a look and evaluate it. If a candidate doesn’t meet your minimum requirements, they can disregard it by changing the status to “Application Rejected.”

This will trigger an automated email politely informing the candidate you will not consider them for the position.

With this functionality, your Managers no longer have to waste time sending emails manually, and unqualified candidates won’t have to send messages asking about their applications.

Point, Click, Test

If an application passes the initial inspection, that doesn’t mean that the candidate is the perfect fit for your organization. Portfolios are rarely an accurate representation of someone’s quality of work.

Technical Writers make portfolios out of their best work, i.e., the final product. It probably went through several revisions and at least one round of editing before getting published. The only way to find out what a Technical Writer’s 1st draft looks like is to test them.

In the beginning, we didn’t have a testing phase in our selection process and hired exclusively based on Writers’ portfolios and resumes. This backfired quickly.

Writers would turn in unusable content, and Editors had to devote twice as much time editing or completely rewriting their work. We spent thousands of dollars on poor Writers who got the job based on their portfolios. We figured the only way to avoid this was to test candidates.

With Workello, you can automate the whole testing process. If your Managers are happy with an application, they can change the candidate’s status to “Test Candidate.”

This will trigger an automated email that congratulates the candidate on reaching the next stage and includes a link to the test.

When the candidate opens, they will see something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

A good test is a balance between the candidate’s willingness to complete it and the test’s thoroughness.

In the eyes of Writers, testing is doing the job for free while facing the risk of the company not employing them in the end. You can’t make a 2,500-word test that would take them 8+ hours to complete—most Technical Writers won’t do it, and rightfully so.

Still, the test is there for you to learn about their skills, so it needs to be complex enough. You should use the test to assess the following skills:

1. Command of language
2. Research skills
3. Article formatting

Luckily, Workello can help you be more demanding with your test.

During the entire process, your candidates will receive fast responses and information every step of the way. This will show them that you’re a professional and transparent company, which will make them willing to invest more time to get the job.

If you’re not sure what the test should look like, you can take a look at the one we used to hire Content Writers.

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate submits the test, their status will change automatically to “Test Complete.” From that point on, your Editors and Managers can access the test and review it.

When they complete the assessment, your Editors can change the candidate status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Sends an automated email informing the candidate about unsuccessful testing
2. Interview Candidate—Sends an automated email with a link candidates can use to schedule a Zoom meeting via Calendly

The Candidate Status Page

Workello has a page dedicated to candidates as well. They can access the Candidate Status page that contains information about their application status so that they don’t have to reach out to your HR department.

The page also has general information about the entire selection process in the “What to expect next” section.

This page makes the whole hiring process much more efficient:

• Candidates will find all the necessary information there without having to request it via email
• Your Managers won’t have to spend time responding to individual candidates
• You won’t have to worry about missing out on the perfect Technical Writer because they didn’t receive a reply

You can check out the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Finding a Technical Writer for hire is easy—choosing the right one from a sea of unqualified candidates is the difficult part. When you have an automated hiring funnel, the whole process sounds like a walk in the park, but we didn’t have that when we started out.

Before Workello, we struggled with everything. We couldn’t track applications, we had to visit various job boards to log candidates, and we missed out on the best ones because of that. By the time we got to their application, they had either already accepted another offer or lost interest in our position.

Our Editors and Managers had to focus on posting job listings and creating manual tests. They didn’t do their actual job—producing content. We had to do it like this because we didn’t have a better alternative, but you do!

Creating Workello required spending $100,000+ and investing brainpower and time into tweaking every detail to make the perfect hiring funnel.

With Workello, we managed to:

1. Scale our team from 1 to 45+ employees in 18 months
2. Lower our cost of content by 75%
3. Execute one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns ever
4. Allow our Editors and Content Managers to focus on content instead of hiring new Writers

You can now use the same hiring funnel for the price of a single page of content!

Try out Workello for free! We configured it so it takes you less than 3 minutes to start accepting new candidates once you sign up.

Where To Hire Technical Writers—Additional Job Boards

Now that there’s an automated hiring funnel to make your life easier, you can post job ads on as many boards as you like. You can use the following boards to expand your network and find new Technical Writers:

• Scribewise
• ContentGrow
• Mediabistro
• Skyword
• Zerys
• Masthead Media
• Pod Reacher
• Pitchwhiz
• HireMyMom
• Pure Content
• Copify
• Craigslist
• Freelancer
• Muck Rack