We Scaled From 1 to 45 Writers and Editors in 18 Months—Here’s What We Learned

We know how difficult scaling can be—to accomplish our business goals, we had to grow our team from 1 to 45 editors and writers in only 18 months. It was a tedious, cyclical process of screening hundreds to find a single qualified writer. 

It felt like were in a never-ending hiring cycle for several reasons:

• Candidates were sending us incomplete applications
• Applications were coming in from everywhere and it was next-to-impossible to log them all manually
• Writers often sent us portfolios as Word documents and we had no way of verifying the authenticity of the content
• We couldn’t keep track of candidates’ application statuses, so tracking where everyone was in our hiring funnel was impossible
• We couldn’t follow up with candidates on time, and we missed out on great writers as a result

Our hiring process was a disorganized mess, so we know exactly how difficult hiring writers can be when you’re doing everything manually. We also know how incredibly easy it is to find content writers, copywriters, and editors once you set up an optimized, fully automated hiring funnel with Workello! 

Although we’ve invested countless hours and over $100,000 into developing Workello, it was more than worth it. It enabled us to scale our team at an incredible pace, which resulted in one of the best SEO campaigns of all time. In just 24 months, we managed to grow our client’s traffic from 0 to 1,500,000 organic visitors per month!

Now, we want to help others replicate our success. In the next 15 minutes, we’ll show you:

• Where to recruit top-performing Headline Subject Copywriters at any price point
• Why finding talented Headline Subject Copywriters is so difficult—and how to sidestep the issues
• How to automate the hiring process to assess a large number of candidates

Our Choice of Top 20 Job Boards To Find Top-Tier Headline Subject Copywriters

Why Finding Reliable, Experienced Headline Subject Copywriters Is Difficult

For every talented and experienced Headline Subject Copywriter, there is a slew of unskilled ones. Regardless of which hiring platform you turn to, you’ll encounter the same problem time and again—good copywriters get hired too quickly, so the majority of candidates remaining are unqualified.

The only reliable way to find an excellent professional with the right skillset is to screen hundreds of applicants. Doing so manually can and will stall your day-to-day operations, as you’ll be forced to turn your experienced employees into a recruitment team and waste their potential on menial duties.

We speak from experience—similarly to other companies, we posted our job ads on various hiring websites, thinking the next one would be equipped with some magic formula that generates quality writers. Instead, we kept encountering the same issues.

It was then that we realized the solution lies in how we approach finding talented experts, not where. 

We decided to optimize the recruiting process bottom-up. Instead of sifting through dozens of bad portfolios and applications, our team designed a hiring funnel that automatically tests candidates, filters out unsuitable ones, and zeroes in on the top performers in a fraction of the time.

Thanks to Workello, we were able to:

• See all applications in one place and easily track candidates by their application status in our funnel
• Automate candidate correspond and follow-up with every prospective candidate instantly
• Leverage testing to identify bad candidates with good portfolios quickly and efficiently
• Identify top-performing candidates and extend an offer before other companies hiring for the same role
• Build a team of 45+ superb writers and editors

Use Pre-Hire Tests To Overcome the Struggle of Hiring a Skilled Copywriter

Hiring copywriters often turns out a mess. You get hundreds of applications, most of which are from underqualified candidates. You go through their resumes and portfolios, without ever knowing how true their portfolios are to their actual first-draft quality—you are well aware that the submitted samples have likely been heavily edited. Without testing your applicants, you risk hiring someone unqualified based on their solid interview skills—not their copywriting prowess.

To bypass this issue and hire only the top 1% of talent, you need to introduce pre-hire assessments.

When you do so, another issue will occur. How do you manage testing hundreds of candidates at once without losing your bearings? The only way to do it is to get reliable skill assessment software. Workello will automate the assessment process and facilitate your communication with candidates. All you need to do is:

1. Sign up for free and use the pre-configured settings to set up the hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Post job ads on job platforms using the Workello link
3. Assess applications within your dashboard
4. Send tests to candidates to evaluate their skills
5. Reject or invite for interview and hire candidates without ever leaving your dashboard

Test Hundreds of Candidates Hassle-Free With Workello

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that automates your hiring funnel and speeds up the entire process, allowing you to save time and money. Most importantly, you won’t miss out on top candidates.

You can use Workello to test copywriters and SEO copywriters for any industry and niche. If you need a boost in your content team, use Workello to test content writers with ease. It’s an all-in-one platform that will meet all your needs. You only need to create a free account and hire top-quality copywriters in no time.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

To move forward, we had to go all the way back to the drawing board and figure out where things went wrong with our current system. We mapped out every phase of our hiring process to identify the root cause of the issue. The conclusion we reached was that the only way to find quality professionals was to conduct large-scale recruitment automatically.

An automated hiring funnel didn’t exist back then, so the only solution was to build one ourselves. We asked ourselves what an ideal system would look like, one that could quickly identify bad candidates and single out good ones.

The answer suddenly became clear, so we wrote it down. We need a system that features:

• Unified dashboard—a single place where we could see all applications, regardless of which job board candidates applied on
• Candidate statues—different categories for applicants depending on the stage they’re in, such as application received, invited for test, test completed, invited for interview, offer sent, application rejected
• Built-in testing—the ability to integrate tests into the Workello and send them automatically, so we could accurately evaluate each candidate
• Email automation—accurate and timely communication that eliminates human error and ensures every candidate knows exactly where they are in our hiring funnel and what to expect next

The first prototype of this hiring funnel was based on the features of Zapier, Google Sheets, and Google Forms. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a step in the right direction.

Write Your Job Description Copy

The first step to finding a competent Headline Subject Copywriter is to create a detailed, super-specific job description of the role in your organization.

Think about the tasks an ideal copywriter would perform in your company and what skills they would need to possess, then list everything in the job description. Take care to be highly precise—define the specific requirements, competencies, and qualifications needed for the role. Paint the candidates a vivid picture of what their typical workday would look like, what duties they would be expected to assume, and what knowledge they would need to be considered for the position.

Equally important is to communicate to applicants why they should work for you. Explain what benefits they’ll get, what advancement opportunities they can expect, and what your company culture looks like.

There’s no need to bang your head against the wall trying to come up with a super unique job ad—writing a clear and detailed description is enough. If you’re having difficulties defining the responsibilities and competencies unique to a specific position, we’ve got you covered. 

Our team has written dozens of job descriptions for copywriting positions that you can use and customize to suit the needs of your organization:

• Copywriter
• Junior Copywriter
• Senior Copywriter
• SEO Copywriter
• Conversion Copywriter
• B2B Copywriter
• Direct Marketing Copywriter
• Social Media Copywriter
• Fashion Copywriter
• Medical Copywriter
• Beauty Copywriter
• Automotive Copywriter

Watch the Applications Pour In

Copywriters will find your job ad on Indeed, LinkedIn, Craigslist, and other websites you choose to post the job description on. When they click on it, they’ll be automatically redirected to an application form hosted on Workello.

Regardless of where the candidates find you, you’ll be able to view their applications within a single, unified dashboard. Each candidate will have to fill out a standardized format with all the necessary information needed for you to decide whether to move them through to the next stage.

You can check out an example application here.

Watch the Candidates Stream In

Since you have all the candidate information in one place, it will be easy for you to review and keep track of applicants. Their statuses are color-coded, allowing you to effortlessly see and change their status. With a single click of the mouse, choose one of the preset funnel phases:

1. Application received
2. Application rejected
3. Test candidate
4. Interview candidate
5. Send offer

Weed Out Unqualified Applicants

You can share access to the Workello dashboard with your editors and managers and have them log in to the system a few times a week to reject underqualified applicants. 

After reviewing the application, if they determine a candidate doesn’t meet your minimum hiring criteria, they can change their status to ’Application Rejected’. 

The status change triggers an automatic email response that tactfully lets applicants know they’ve been declined while saving you the trouble of manually answering dozens of emails.

Point, Click, Test

It is impossible to avoid bad candidates—you’ll receive plenty of substandard applications that you’ll be able to filter out instantaneously. What will give you a lot more trouble are sub-par candidates with great portfolios. 

We learned the hard way that portfolios are rarely, if ever, an accurate representation of someone’s writing skills. Portfolios only feature their best content and copy, which has gone through at least one round of editing and has been polished to perfection. 

The only way to accurately assess someone’s first draft capability is to test them.

The biggest issue is that many recruiters hire bad writers based solely on the strength of the applications they submitted. This leads to greater issues down the road—the copywriter’s bad work reveals itself very early on when it turns out that all their assignments require tons of editing. This puts an unnecessary strain on your editors, leads to extensive rewrites, prolonged revisions, or completely unusable content.

In short—thiring based on portfolios alone is a recipe for disaster. Any skilled copywriter will be more than willing to do a simple test to demonstrate their skills, so there’s absolutely no reason not to include testing as a mandatory component of your hiring process.

Workello makes testing writers super-easy. All you have to do is change their application status to “Test Candidate,” and they’ll receive an email with a link to the test:

After they click the link, they’ll see a new page with detailed test instructions. Here’s what our test looks like:

How To Create a Good Test

An effective writing test has two purposes—to assess the applicant’s skills and their commitment to quality. 

The test has to be thorough and challenging enough to determine their writing prowess, but shouldn’t be too demanding. You can’t reasonably expect someone to spend 8 hours writing a test for a job they might not get. 

Nonetheless, you need to find applicants who are willing to work on quality content. You need to make sure they won’t quit at the first obstacle. That’s where your professionalism comes in.

A candidate will be far less likely to give up on the test if you convince them it’s time well invested. You’ve already accomplished this by following the guidelines we laid out—the job description communicated why your organization is a great place to work for. 

After applying, the candidate was moved through the funnel quickly and smoothly. You’ve demonstrated that you’re committed to potential employees, meaning potential employees are now more likely to meet your pre-recruitment criteria.

Learn how to set up a test in 3 minutes or use the same one we used to test hundreds of writers.

Interviewing Candidates

When the applicants submit the test, their status will automatically change to ’Test Complete’. Your editors and managers can now review the candidate’s writing capability to decide whether they’re the right fit for your company.

If a candidate meets your quality standards, your managers can easily update their status to ’Invite for Interview’. This will trigger an automatic email that instructs the applicant on how to book a Calendly interview when it’s convenient for them.

If the candidate lacks the talent you’re looking for in an ideal employee, change their status to ’Reject Candidate’. They will receive an automatic email that thanks them for their time and politely declines them.

The Candidate Status Page

Many candidates are either unfamiliar with the concept of automated hiring processes or too impatient to wait for you to update them on their current status. As much as you try to optimize and automate the entire process, you’ll still inevitably receive tons of emails from applicants with questions such as:

• Have you received my application?
• Have you reviewed my application?
• Have you scored my mock test?
• When will I hear back from you?

To save both you and the candidates time, we’ve devised a way for the applicants to keep track of where they are in the hiring funnel. By keeping all applicants informed, you won’t have to worry about missing an email from a promising candidate and losing them to another company because you were late in getting back to them.

The candidates will be given access to an automated status page that immediately refreshes as you move them through the different stages. On top of that, they can access the ’What to expect next’ section containing FAQ.

This approach gives applicants an insight into your recruitment ethic and procedure and helps to ensure their continued investment.

Check out an example here.

How Our Investment Paid Off

We’ve been where you are—bogged down in recruitment hell that never seemed to end. We were constantly missing out on good candidates, receiving incomplete applications, and losing track of the hundreds of writers who applied for a job with us.

We remember what it was like before Workello:

• No standardized application format
• Human errors resulting from doing everything manually
• Unanswered emails or replies sent too late
• No way to keep track of the different hiring platforms where candidates apply
• Incomplete applications in dozens of formats
• Overworked managers and editors who handled recruiting on top of their regular duties

Not having an optimized system like Workello ended up costing us big time. Having spent countless hours testing and improving the funnel through numerous iterations, we finally managed to perfect the process and are happy to share the results.

Now, life’s a breeze. Our talented staff can focus on producing great content instead of constantly finding new writers. The system eliminated the need for increasing recruitment and training and led to higher retention of quality writers. Spending countless hours and $100,000+ on optimizing our system was the smartest business decision we ever made. Now, you can enjoy the fruits of our labor as well.

Try Workello free-of-charge. Everything is  configured, so you can set up your automated hiring funnel in 3 minutes and start testing copywriters today!