We Didn’t Know Hiring Writers Was So Difficult—Don’t Repeat Our Mistakes 

Before we created Workello, we were a content agency ContentDistribution.com. In 2019, we took on a client who shared our ambition and created one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time.

In just 18 months, we grew our client from 0 to 1,000,000 organic monthly visitors. We achieved this by publishing 600+ pages of high-quality content every month.

Such volume demanded scaling our business rapidly. In the same time period, we expanded from 1 to 45+ writers and editors. 

In the beginning, we thought hiring writers was as easy as posting a job ad and going through a handful of applications to select the best candidate.This can’t be further from the truth. 

When we posted ads, hundreds of applications would come our way. We couldn’t keep track of them, candidates would submit incomplete applications, and many candidates’ portfolios were in a .docx format.

We soon realized our approach to hiring writers was all wrong. We lacked an automated system that would optimize the whole ordeal and let us spot the best candidates swiftly.

Since there was no ATS dedicated to hiring writers, we decided to create one. With Workello, you can automate your hiring funnel to save precious time, cut down on hiring costs, and beat the competition to the best candidates.

In the next 10+ minutes, we’ll show you:

1. What the best websites for hiring content writers are
2. What makes hiring writers almost impossible without an automated hiring funnel
3. How automated testing helps you hire the best writers with ease

Top Places To Find Freelance Writers

We used dozens of job boards to find writers. Check out our pick for the best 15 websites for hiring writers:

Continue reading the article to find additional 15 websites you can use to find a freelance writer.

Posting Job Ads on Websites for Hiring Writers Is the Easy Part—Hiring Top Writers Is Difficult

You’ll never struggle with finding writer candidates. There are hundreds of job boards with thousands of writers out there. The trouble is, the majority of those job seekers are inexperienced, bad writers, or mediocre at best.

When you’re looking to hire a writer, you have to deal with the fact that you’re not the only one. Dozens of companies are seeking writers as well, and the best candidates receive offers in a flash.

This means that, over time, all job boards are mostly populated by unqualified candidates. Most applications come from writers that don’t meet the criteria and are not the right fit for the position you’re offering.

These are the conditions you have to make peace with—there’s no workaround for this. The only way to find a top-notch writer is to evaluate and test hundreds of candidates, and you have to do it faster than your competition.

When we started expanding our writing team, we looked for writers on Upwork but soon decided to post job ads on other platforms as well. 

The problems we faced with every website were the same:

• No platform was designed for testing and hiring writers
• We had no means of sorting candidates by their status in the hiring funnel
• Portfolios writers submitted weren’t valuable as they didn’t show us the quality of their 1st draft

We would get flooded with hundreds of applications coming from Craigslist, LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor, Fiverr, and so on. Whenever we posted an ad on a different website, the issues would only multiply. We couldn’t:

• Follow up with candidates fast enough
• Keep track of applications
• Sort candidates by their status in the hiring funnel
• Note applicants that caught our eye initially
• Reduce the number of bad candidates

The secret behind executing one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time was our commitment to developing high-quality content. We realized we didn’t approach our hiring process with the same commitment and decided to work on improving the way we hired writers.

Instead of settling for the system we already had, we decided to create a new one that would allow us to automate our hiring funnel.

Pre-Employment Testing Is Difficult—You Can Make It Easy

With every job listing, you get a bundle of applications from unqualified candidates—with writing positions, the number of such candidates grows exponentially.

It’s difficult to understand how good someone is at writing from their portfolio alone—nobody shares their worst examples and unedited work. You need to introduce pre-hire testing to gauge your candidates’ skill set. If they can’t write a stellar test, how can they create high-quality content?

If you go down this route, you’ll need assistance. Keeping track of hundreds of candidates, sending and collecting tests, taking care of correspondence—it quickly turns into a disaster if you do it manually. Reliable skill assessment software will keep you organized and allow you to focus on other tasks. 

Workello is a high-volume recruiting solution that will help you automate assessments and the hiring process in general. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for free and set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Post job ads on your favorite job platforms and add a Workello link
3. Review applications from your dashboard
4. Send tests to filter high-quality writers from bad ones quickly
5. Reject, interview, and hire the best applicants

Hire the Top 1% Fast With Workello’s Pre-Hire Assessments

With Workello, you can assess, test, reject, interview, and hire candidates with a single click—all actions are available on your single-page dashboard. Move candidates through the funnel by changing their application status, and Workello will do the rest.

You can use our platform to send out copywriting, content writing, and technical writing tests automatically. If you’re looking for someone in the SEO department, make sure to test your SEO writers and SEO copywriters. Workello also supports content marketer testing.

Use our free trial and cut your hiring costs in half with an automated hiring funnel.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Before we could remodel our hiring process, we needed to figure out what the process consisted of. We broke it down into five elements:

1. Getting people to visit your website requires publishing top-quality content
2. Producing top-quality content is only possible with a team of top-quality writers
3. Finding top-quality writers online requires going through hundreds of applications
4. Each applicant needs to be evaluated rapidly so that we could weed out bad candidates and follow up with the good ones
5. Sorting out bad candidates—that was holding us back

More and more businesses are understanding the importance of high-quality content. As a result, content writing has become a profitable career choice, given the huge demand for writers and the fact that the job can be done remotely.

The problem is, people mistakenly believe that writing quality content is easy. In reality, the content writing market is oversaturated with beginners who are still learning the craft and don’t have the skills and experience necessary to create relevant, valuable, engaging content.

No matter what you do, the majority of applications you receive will be from these unqualified candidates. What you can and should do is implement a system to filter them out quickly and efficiently.

We were looking for an ATS that would solve every issue we encountered when hiring writers, but there was no ATS that would optimize everything to perfection. This is why we decided to create a system of our own.

Seeing what was lacking from other systems, we established that our ideal hiring funnel required:

1. A unified platform that would collect applications from every job board we posted an ad on
2. An automated system that allowed us to sort candidates by their status in the hiring funnel with a single click
3. A dashboard that had the built-in functionalities that would enable us to evaluate, test, interview, and hire writers without ever leaving the page
4. An automatically-sent test that would let us spot a bad writer with an impressive portfolio
5. Automated email correspondence that removed the chance of human error and saved time

Our first attempt to create an automated hiring funnel was Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. This was a step in the right direction, but it was far from ideal. Over a year of going back and forth, tweaking every segment of the funnel, we finally came up with Workello.

Use Your Job Description To Attract the Best Candidates

Whenever you post a job ad, you will always receive tons of applications from unqualified candidates. While you can’t prevent them from applying, you can reduce their number significantly.

A good job description goes into detail about the position the company is offering. You need to be specific about the responsibilities writers working for you will have, as well as state every requirement you want candidates to meet.

The more specific you get with it, the more unachievable it will seem to underqualified candidates, and many of them will opt out from applying.

The job description is not only there to dissuade bad candidates—you should also use it to sell your company to top-performing writers seeking a job. Since dozens of companies are looking for a writer, you need to show the best candidates why they should choose your organization over someone else’s.

To do that, you should mention all benefits that come with the job, such as health plans, salary increases, career advancement opportunities, etc.

If you can’t think of a great job description or you’re looking for a specific type of writer, you can use our comprehensive database of pre-vetted job description templates.

All you need to do is click on the job title, copy and adapt the template to fit your company’s needs, and post it online!

• Freelance Writer
• Copywriter
• Technical Writer
• Staff Writer
• Content Writer
• Writer
• Instructional Writer
• SEO Writing
• Research Writer
• Fashion Writer
• Business Writer
• Senior Copywriter
• Course Writer
• Catalog Writer
• Senior Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

In the beginning, when we started hiring writers we didn’t have a dedicated person to distribute job ads. This task fell to our content managers and editors. While it wasn’t a mind-boggler, it was time-consuming, and they couldn’t focus on their primary responsibility—handling content production.

We had to delegate that task to someone else, but we couldn’t hire a recruitment manager with ease. Our hiring process wasn’t documented, and we couldn’t educate a new employee on how we handled job ad distribution.

We had to go through the painful task of writing down every step of the hiring process, but you don’t!

When you register for Workello for free, you will be able to access our playbooks and delegate the job to someone else effortlessly!

Workello Dashboard Collects ALL Applications in One Place

When a candidate submits their application, you’ll usually find it on the website they applied on. This means you have to regularly check every job board you posted on for new applications, then figure out how to sort and keep track of them.

With Workello, this is no longer an issue. When you post a job ad, you can include a link to a Workello-hosted application form. This way, every application will end up in the same place—your Workello dashboard!

Using the same form means every application will be in the same format. Candidates won’t be able to submit applications without all the required information, and you won’t have to reach out to them to ask for what they omitted.

Take a look at an application example here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Your Workello dashboard works as a one-stop-shop for your entire hiring process. You will be able to use the same page to evaluate, test, and interview candidates, as well as extend an offer to the chosen ones.

You can move candidates through your funnel with a simple change of their status from the drop-down menu. Candidates can have one of the following statuses:

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

Statuses are color-coded, which allows you to see how many candidates you have in each stage of the hiring funnel in seconds.

Reject Unqualified Writers

With applications coming your way, your editors and content managers can take a look at each one and review them. If they find a candidate that doesn’t meet the minimum requirements, they can change their status to “Application Rejected” and remove them from the funnel.

This action will trigger an automated email that informs the candidate that you won’t consider them for the job. The automation saves you time since you don’t have to notify each candidate manually or respond to hundreds of emails from candidates asking about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

An application may look great on paper, but that doesn’t guarantee that the candidate is a perfect fit for your organization. Writer portfolios consist of a candidate’s best work that has been edited, QA’d, and polished to perfection.

You can’t know about the quality of the candidate’s 1st draft by their portfolio. The only way you can find out how good a writer is is by testing them.

Initially, we didn’t test candidates and hired writers based on their portfolios. This proved to be a mistake that cost us thousands of dollars.

We paid writers that handed in unusable content. Our editors had their workload tripled because they had to rewrite articles or edit them heavily. This didn’t end until we introduced automated testing to our hiring process.

When a candidate submits an application that meets the criteria, your managers can change their candidate status to “Test Candidate,” which triggers an automated email that:

1. Congratulates them on reaching the next stage
2. Includes a link to the writing test

When they click on the link, they’ll see a page similar to this:

How To Make a Good Test

A writing test should assess candidates’ abilities regarding:

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

Remember that the test is a piece of writing candidates have to complete without any compensation. Most candidates won’t bother with a 2,500-word test that takes them 8+ hours to complete.

It’s important to strike a balance between the complexity of the test and a candidate’s willingness to complete it.

Thanks to Workello, you will be able to be more thorough than usual.

When a candidate applies to your job ad, they will receive emails informing them about their application status and the selection process they need to go through.

This transparency will make your company more professional, and candidates will be willing to go the extra mile and complete a more complex test for a serious organization.

If you don’t know how to create a test for your hiring process, you can use ours! This is the same test we used to hire 45+ writers.

Interview Candidates

Once the candidate completes the required task, they will submit the test, and their candidate status will automatically change to “Test Complete.”

Your editors and content managers will be able to access the submitted test and review it.

When they assess the candidate’s skills, they can change the candidates status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Triggers an email telling them they failed the testing
2. Invite for Interview—Sends an automated email with a Calendly link to schedule a Zoom meeting 

The Candidate Status Page

We’ve developed a page that’s for candidates’ use. When a candidate opens the Candidate Status page, they will find information about the application status.

The page also contains a “What to expect next” section that provides an insight into your selection process and informs candidates on where they are in your hiring funnel and what the next steps are.

Thanks to this page, you will minimize transactional questions, and you won’t have to worry about a top-notch writer giving up because you failed to respond to an email.

You can see here what the Candidate Status page looks like.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

When you have an automated hiring funnel at your side that optimizes the whole hiring process, hiring writers is a walk in the park. When our content agency was expanding, we had no such funnel to rely on.

We struggled to keep track of applications, and it would take us weeks to get through all of them. In that time, candidates would find a different job or lose interest in our company. We missed out on many great writers because of it.

Our editors and content managers had to take time and focus off their work to post job ads across the Internet. Our whole business model suffered because of an inefficient hiring process.

We decided to change that. We created a new, fully-automated hiring funnel that allowed us to:

1. Grow our agency from 1 to 45+ writers and editors in under 2 years
2. Lower the cost of content by 75%
3. Develop one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time
4. Let our editors and managers focus on their jobs

What took us countless hours and $100,000+ to build can be yours for the price of a single page of content!

try out Workello for free! It’s pre-configured so that you can start accepting new candidates in less than 3 minutes.

Additional Websites for Hiring Writers 

With an automated hiring funnel you can rely on, you can post job ads on as many job boards as you want, without having to worry about losing track of applications.

Check out these websites to find writers looking for a job:

• Freelancer
• Masthead Media
• Craigslist
• Scribewise
• ContentGrow
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer group
• Certified Writers
• PeoplePerHour
• WriterAccess
• Storyhackers
• HireMyMom
• Pod Reacher
• Mediabistro
• Pitchwhiz
• Muck Rack