Hiring Writers Is Tough—Learn From Our Experience

Before we created Workello, we were an ambitious content agency called Content Distribution. We took on an equally ambitious client and managed to grow their organic traffic from 0 to 1,500,000 monthly visitors in just two years. 

Thanks to our team of fantastic writers, editors, and SEO experts, we executed one of the  most successful SEO campaigns ever. To make this possible, we had to scale the team from 1 to 45+ writers and editors in record time. Since we didn’t have an optimized hiring funnel, this was an uphill battle.

When we started hiring new writers, we ran into problems practically from the get-go. We couldn’t keep track of all the incoming applications, and sorting candidates by their application status was borderline impossible. We couldn’t respond to every single candidate in time, which resulted in losing some great candidates to companies with better hiring funnels.

We spent so much time reviewing dozens of applications day after day, trying to eliminate bad ones only to spot an ideal candidate a week or two too late. 

There was no solution on the market that would help us solve all our issues at once, so we decided to build one. We invested $100,000+ and countless hours to create an optimized and automated hiring system designed specifically for hiring writers—Workello. 

In the next ten minutes, we will show you how to copy our system, and you will learn:

1. Where to find writers for optimized Amazon listings at any price point
2. Why hiring writers for optimized Amazon listings is so difficult
3. How Workello can help you hire better, more affordable writers faster

Where to Look for Writers for Optimized Amazon Listings

The table below presents the top 10 job boards where you can find writers for optimized Amazon listings at any price point:

The Main Reasons Why Hiring Top-Quality Amazon Optimized Listing Writers Is Feels Impossible

No matter where you look for writers for hire, you will quickly come to the same conclusion—most of the candidates are unqualified. That is the first problem you will run into. It will take you time to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

That leads you to your second problem—competition. You are not the only one looking for skilled writers, so the company with the best-optimized hiring system usually wins. 

You are looking for writers for optimized Amazon listings, which also complicates things. You are not looking for just any writer; you need someone who:

• Knows how to conduct keyword research
• Has a working knowledge of SEO
• Keeps current with ranking factors and algorithm changes
• Can create unique, relevant, and captivating product descriptions

If you don’t have an automated hiring funnel, you are likely having trouble:

• Sorting candidates according to the status of their application
• Spotting bad candidates quickly
• Contacting each applicant manually
• Keeping note of candidates that you remember liking

Two weeks into your hiring cycle, it will become apparent that it’s not that important where you look for writers for optimized Amazon listings but how you look for them. You will undoubtedly have to go over a hundred applications to find one competent writer. That part is a given; once you accept it, you have to find a way to go over them faster than your competitors. 

That’s exactly what Workello allows you to do—streamline every aspect of your hiring funnel so you can identify and hire the best writers, faster! 

Use Pre-Hire Testing To Find the Best Writer

Regardless of what job boards you advertise on, you’ll always end up with more unqualified candidates than top ones. No applicant will admit they don’t know what they’re doing, and their portfolios will inevitably paint a positive story.

If you don’t want to hire someone and discover they’re underqualified the hard way, you need to enhance your hiring process and introduce pre-hire testing.

Tests will let you gauge the candidates’ writing quality first-hand. The issue is—with hundreds of applicants to deal with, you’ll quickly lose control and won’t know where in the funnel each candidate is. You need skill assessment software to sort that out for you. 

Workello automates the entire hiring process and provides support for hassle-free testing. You only need to create a free account and:

1. Set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes with the pre-configured settings
2. Add a Workello link to all your job ads (existing or new)
3. Wait for applications to arrive
4. Send tests to filter out poor candidates with impressive portfolios
5. Interview, reject, and hire candidates from your dashboard

Streamline Your Candidate Assessment Process With Workello

Workello is high-volume recruiting software that will help you set up your job post, assess candidates, send and log tests, and review them. You’ll be able to reject candidates, invite them for an interview, and extend offers without ever leaving your dashboard.

Workello can help you test content writers, regardless of your specific needs. With our pre-hire assessment software, you can test copywriters, SEO copywriters, SEO writers, and technical writers. Need to fill other roles on your content team? Test content marketers and related roles in Workello effortlessly.

Sign up for Workello for free and streamline your hiring process effortlessly.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

When we first started hiring, we had no clue what we were doing. It didn’t take long to realize that you can’t just post job ads on a dozen-or-so hiring platforms and expect to find qualified writers in a few days. 

We had to completely change the way we did hiring, if we were hoping to get to those top-performers before other companies.

We broke down our entire work process to understand the root cause of the problem. Here’s what we wrote down:

1. Only excellent content and great quantities of it can increase conversions
2. Only the best writers of optimized listings can do that
3. We need to evaluate a hundred applications to identify one great writer
4. To hire that one writer, we need to filter out bad candidates fast
5. To filter out bad candidates fast, we had to…?

Getting people to apply for a job at our company was never our problem. In fact, we received so many applications that we didn’t know how to deal with all of them. That was our biggest problem—we didn’t have a system that would allow us to handle all the applications we received efficiently. 

We asked ourselves the most critical question—what features should an ideal hiring system have? After a few brainstorming sessions, we came up with the following list:

1. A single platform that gathers all the applications in one place regardless of the job board they come from
2. An optimized system that allows us to move candidates through our hiring funnel effortlessly
3. A unified dashboard that will enable us to evaluate, test, reject, schedule interviews, and hire writers from that one page
4. An automatically sent writing test to help us eliminate unqualified writers fast
5. An automated communication system that eliminates human error and saves time

Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier combination was our first attempt at creating a system that solves all of our issues at once. While it helped tremendously, it needed a lot more work. After months of R&D, we finally had a hiring system that allowed us to reach excellence—Workello. 

Everything Starts With a Great Job Description

A job ad is a fundamental part of hiring new employees. It is your first contact with candidates and a chance to attract the best ones while deterring unqualified ones from applying. To that end, a job description must be thorough, detailed, and transparent.

If you write down all the requirements that the position of writer for optimized Amazon listing must meet, unqualified candidates will get a clear message that they would be wasting their time submitting their applications. 

Specify what technical skills the candidates must have and the required previous experience to be considered for the role. For example, you should highlight that working knowledge of Ahrefs and the ability to do in-depth keyword research is mandatory for the role.

Don’t worry if you don’t know how to write a job description from scratch. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel—we have an extensive database of job description templates you can customize to suit your needs. 

Here are some examples:

• Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Technical Writer
• SEO Writing
• Copywriter
• Freelance Copywriter
• Senior Copywriter
• Catalog Writer
• Conversion Copywriter
• Business Writer
• Digital Content Writer

One Dashboard—As Many Job Boards As You Want

One thing that makes Workello fantastic is that no matter how many job boards you use to source applications, they will all end up in a single place—your unique Workello dashboard. This is made possible thanks to a Workello-hosted application form that every candidate must fill out and submit, regardless of where you post the job ad.

Click here to see what our application form looks like. 

Watch Candidates Stream In

Once candidates submit their applications, they show up in your Workello dashboard. From there, you can easily move candidates through your hiring funnel by clicking on the appropriate application status. 

When you open the drop-down menu, you will see the following options:

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

Each application status is color-coded, so it will take you seconds to tell how many candidates there are in each stage of your hiring funnel. 

Reject Unqualified Writers

Some candidates will not meet your basic requirements, and you will be able to quickly eliminate them from your funnel by changing their application status to Application Rejected. 

The moment you do that, a candidate will receive an automated rejection email. You will save a lot of time because you won’t need to inform each unqualified candidate manually. 

Point, Click, Test

Unqualified candidates with lack-luster resumes will be easy to spot, and they will cause you no trouble. Bad candidates with good portfolios are a whole different story and they’ll be a thorn in your side unless you learn how to quickly identify them. 

One thing you mustn’t do is base your decisions solely on the portfolios you receive. Candidates will send you only the best samples of their work. Naturally, these samples have gone through at least one editing session.

The only way to see what a candidate’s first draft would look like is to give them a test article to write.

If you fail to test candidates, you risk making a very costly mistake. You can easily end up hiring an incompetent writer whose articles you either can’t use or your editors will have to rewrite completely. 

We’re talking from personal experience. One of the priorities when we started working on Workello was to ensure no more unqualified candidates went under our radar, so we implemented a testing feature.

When you spot a candidate with an impressive portfolio, change their application status to Test Candidate. This action triggers an automated email that:

1. Congratulates a candidate on reaching the next stage of your hiring process
2. Provides them with a link to the writing test
3. Gives them instructions on how to complete and submit the test

Clicking on the link in the email opens a tab that looks something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

Creating a test is not a walk in the park because you have to find a perfect balance between test thoroughness and candidate willingness. 

Your test needs to be detailed enough so you can evaluate a candidate’s:

1. Language proficiency
2. Formatting skills
3. SEO knowledge
4. Research skills

At the same time, you have to be careful not to make the test too demanding. No candidate would be happy to invest a whole day working on a test for a job they may not even get. 

Still, Workello allows you to shift that balance a bit more in favor of test thoroughness. Your candidates will receive information instantly whenever their application status changes. Your job ad was detailed and informative.

So far, you have done everything right and made an excellent first impression. Candidates will want to invest a bit more effort and get the chance to work for you. 

If you don’t know how to create a good test, you can snatch ours. Click here to get the exact one we used to evaluate hundreds of candidates. 

Interviewing Candidates

When candidates submit their tests, they will no longer be able to access them. Their application status will automatically change to Test Submitted. That will be your editors’ cue to review them.

If a candidate’s test meets your company standards, your editors can change their application status to Invite for Interview. The candidate will receive an email with a Calendly link to your calendar and instruction on how to schedule a video interview at their convenience. 

On the other hand, if the writing test was unsatisfactory, your editors can change a candidate’s status to Reject Candidate. This will trigger a plight rejection email, thanking the candidate for their time and informing them about the unsuccessful outcome of the test.

The Candidate Status Page

We did our best to optimize our hiring system, but we still received dozens of emails every day, and we wasted so much time replying to them. The emails always revolved around the following several questions:

• Have you received my application?
• Have you reviewed my test?
• When can I expect to hear from you?
• What happens next?

Even when we only had to copy-paste the replies, it was still a few seconds we couldn’t afford to lose. 

To mitigate this, we created an automated Candidate Status page. This is what applicants can see on their end. 

Whenever their application status changes, they will be able to see it. We also included the What to expect next section, where candidates can read about your hiring process. 

This page ensures you don’t lose any more great candidates because you were too late to respond to their queries or failed to respond altogether. 

Click here to see an example of a Candidate Status page.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Reading all this, you probably think that hiring writers is pretty simple. With Workello doing half of the job for you, it most certainly is. But that’s not what hiring writers looked like for us when we first started.

It seemed that we ran into problems every step of the way:

• We couldn’t track where all the candidates were in our hiring funnel
• Many applicants slipped through the holes, and we never reached out to them
• We regularly missed out on fantastic candidates because we were too late to contact them
• Manual correspondence took too much time
• We didn’t know how to eliminate bad candidates quickly
• Our editors didn’t edit—they composed tests and posted job ads
• Our content production suffered

If we were to continue to excel at what we do, we needed to find a solution to this situation. But we couldn’t find anything that could effectively resolve all of our problems at once. 

So we decided to develop our own system, which allowed us to:

1. Build our team from 1 to 45+ writers and editors in only 18 months
2. Run one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns of all time 
3. Lower the cost of content production by up to 75% by hiring a team of non-native writers
4. Let our editors and managers do their actual jobs

We invested over $100,000 and months of work into developing Workello, and it is the single most important investment we have ever made. 

What cost us a fortune to make, you can get at the price of a single page of content, and you can try it out for free!

Workello is pre-configured, so it will take you less than 3 minutes to start automating your hiding funnel and accepting applications!