Discover the Methods We Used to Hire 45+ Writers and Editors

In 2019, when we were ContentDistribution.com, we worked on a project for a VC-backed startup that turned out to be one of the best SEO campaigns ever. In under 18 months, our client went from 0 to 1,000.000 organic visits per month. To achieve this incredible result, we had to produce and publish high-quality content in large volumes—and we couldn’t do it without expanding our content team. In less than two years, we went from 1 to 45+ writers and editors.

Once we started hiring dozens of people, it didn’t take us long to realize our hiring process was inefficient. Not only were we wasting a lot of time and money doing everything manually but we also missed out on a lot of great writers.

We decided to invest over $100,000+ and hundreds of hours building an optimized and automated system for hiring better and more affordable writers. 

In the next 10+ minutes you’re going to learn:

• Where to hire good Copywriters for a startup
• Why hiring good Copywriters is so difficult
• How to make your hiring process more efficient

Where To Find a Professional Business Writer—Top 15 Job Boards

The following job boards are our top picks when it comes to hiring good and affordable copywriters:

Continue reading this article to discover additional job boards for hiring Copywriters for startups.

Why Is Finding Good Copywriters for a Startup So Difficult?

The best copywriters don’t stay on the market for long because they are in high demand—they are hired faster than any of the hiring platforms can source them. This means that the remaining candidates are often underqualified.

As a startup looking to recruit a Copywriter, you must evaluate as many candidates as possible in a short amount of time and find the great ones before someone else extends them an offer. It often takes evaluating over a hundred candidates to find a single one that is a good fit for your company.

When we first started hiring writers, we advertised only on Upwork. After a while, we began hiring across multiple job boards and our problems only multiplied. We always ran into the same issues, no matter which board we used:

1. Portfolios didn’t accurately reflect a candidate’s abilities
2. We couldn’t track where candidates were in our hiring funnel
3. We used platforms that weren’t designed for testing and hiring writers 
4. We didn’t respond to candidates in time and, as a result, missed out on a lot of great writers
5. Most of our candidates continued to be unqualified

It didn’t take us long to recognize that our troubles weren’t caused by job boards, but rather by our hiring process. We knew we couldn’t go on like that for much longer so we decided to put time, money, and thought into improving our hiring process. Our final product was Workello—an automated funnel designed for hiring better and more affordable writers.

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

We couldn’t redesign our entire hiring process without first figuring out what was holding us back. We broke down our entire process hoping to identify the issue:

1. Attracting millions of visitors each month required us to write a lot of high-quality content
2. Writing high-quality content required hiring a lot of great writers
3. Finding great writers meant going through hundreds of job applications
4. Hiring the top-notch writers required filtering out the bad ones quickly and efficiently

Filtering out bad candidates quickly is where we got stuck—we had to figure out a way to do it.

We discovered that getting people to apply was never a problem for us. Dealing with those applications after they arrived was the issue. We needed an automated system to properly handle all the applications and filter out bad candidates fast so we could identify and hire great ones. We envisioned our dream hiring system as:

• A platform that would serve as a single hub for all applications from all job boards
• An automated system that allows sorting candidates and changing their status with a single click
• A uniform dashboard for evaluating, testing, and hiring writers
• An automated testing system that allows spotting bad writers with impressive portfolios
• An automated communication system to save time on manual email correspondence

Before creating Workello, we used a combination of Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier. It was an improvement over what we had before, but it still missed certain key features, prompting us to create our own automated hiring funnel.

Why Is Writing a Detailed Job Description Super-Important?

No matter what you do, you will receive bad applications. Still, a well-written job description will drastically reduce their number, so you won’t have to sift through a hundred bad ones to find one promising candidate. 

A job description serves two main purposes:

1. To thoroughly describe the role’s responsibilities, the required skill set, and the experience necessary to be considered for the position
2. To “sell” your company to the best candidates—incentivize top-performers to choose your organization over everyone else hiring for the same role. 

The best way to entice top-performers to apply is by highlighting all benefits you offer, including salary increases, opportunities for career advancement, bonuses, PTO, etc.

If you can’t come up with a solid job description on your own or aren’t sure what role you need, you can use one of our ready-made job description templates. All you have to do is make minor tweaks to adapt the template according to the needs of your company, and you can start hiring right away!

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

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

Nobody in our agency was in charge of recruiting new writers when we first started out—it was up to our Editors and Content Managers to handle posting job ads, reviewing applications, and responding to candidates. While it wasn’t a difficult task, it did take up a big chunk of time that could have been spent producing content.

We had to document the entire hiring process before delegating it to a recruiter. We had to do everything the hard way, but you don’t! You can use our documentation and save yourself hundreds of hours of R&D and documentation on the way to scaling up your content ops.

Sign up to Workello for free to get our playbooks for delegating job ads to someone else delivered to your inbox.

Receive Candidate Applications in Your Workello Dashboard

One of the biggest issues we had before launching Workello was the inability to keep track of applications that came in from a dozen different job boards. What solved this problem is Workello’s unified dashboard which allows us to see all applications in one place, regardless of where they came from. 

When you post a job ad, all you need to do is link to a Workello-hosted application form. This way, regardless of the job board you use, all applications will end up in the same place—your Workello dashboard. Due to using the same form, all applications will be in the same format as well. What’s more, you won’t have to worry about candidates sending in incomplete applications and having to reach out to them to request the missing info.

Check out an example application here.

Watch Candidates Stream In

You can use your Workello dashboard to perform any hiring-related task—you can evaluate, test, invite for an interview, extend an offer, or reject Copywriters all from the same place.

By updating their status, you can easily move applicants through your hiring funnel. You can choose one of the following options from the drop-down menu:

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

Reject Unqualified Candidates

Your Editors and Content Managers with access to Workello can evaluate any application you receive. By selecting the Application Rejected option, they can remove the candidate from the hiring funnel if they find them unfit.

Rejected candidates will automatically receive an email, politely informing them they won’t be progressing to the next stage of the hiring process. As a result, you won’t be spammed with hundreds of emails from unqualified candidates asking you for status updates.

Point, Click, Test

Even if your editors or content managers consider an application satisfactory, this does not guarantee that the candidate is a talented writer. You should keep in mind that portfolios are almost never a true representation of someone’s writing skills. A copywriter’s portfolio is made up of their greatest work that’s likely been heavily edited before publishing. You can’t tell how skilled a copywriter is until you test them.

We didn’t have testing in place at first, so we relied on portfolios alone to hire writers. We wasted a lot of money on unusable content that our editors often had to write from scratch. The same goes for copywriters—if you don’t test them, you’ll end up with weak copy that doesn’t convert and thousands of dollars gone down the drain. 

Automated testing was one of the first things on our list when we started working on Workello. When you change a candidate’s status to Test Candidate, this will trigger an automated email that will congratulate the candidate on passing the initial evaluation stage and include a link to the writing test.

This is what it looks like when your candidate clicks the test link in the automated email.

How To Make a Good Test

A good test should allow you to evaluate your candidates based on their:

1. Language proficiency
2. Copywriting skills
3. Formatting skills

Be careful not to go overboard with your test because most candidates won’t be willing to complete it. Most candidates won’t be willing to put in a full day’s worth of work to complete a test assignment for a job they might not get. Still, if your test isn’t thorough enough, you risk hiring unqualified candidates that will deliver poor copy. 

A good test strikes the perfect balance between thoroughness and the candidate’s willingness to complete it. Workello allows you to be a bit more thorough because candidates will value the professionalism and transparency of your hiring process, so they’ll be more willing to invest their time into finishing your evaluation process.

Don’t know where to start when it comes to designing a test? You can use the one we used to hire exceptional writers!

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate submits their test, their status changes to Test Complete, allowing your Editors and Content Managers to review it. Once they finish reviewing it, they can update the candidate status to: 

1. Reject Candidate—The candidate will receive an automated email, notifying them that they didn’t pass the test
2. Invite for Interview—The candidate will receive an automated email with a Calendly link to book a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

The Candidate Status page allows for complete transparency of your hiring process. Candidates can access it at any time to learn about their application status and find all the information about all the different stages of your hiring process in the What to expect next section.

Thanks to this page, candidates will no longer ask multiple questions about their status and clog your inbox with emails. You also won’t have to worry about missing out on top-notch candidates because you haven’t reached out to them in over a week.

You can check out the example of the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

In the past, we had to do everything manually and we struggled every step. Applications were scattered across a dozen different job boards, and we took too long to reply to candidates. Instead of editing and managing content, our editors and content managers wasted time publishing job ads and preparing tests.

We decided to create an optimized hiring system to solve all the problems we faced and our end product was Workello. With a fully optimized hiring funnel, we managed to:

• Scale our content team from 1 to 45+ Writers and Editors in less than 2 years
• Decrease our cost of content by 75%
• Execute one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time
• Let our Content Managers and Editors focus on their primary responsibilities

For the price of a single page of content, you can get access to a fully optimized hiring system that took us over $100,000 and several months to build.

Try Workello completely for free. It’s pre-configured so you can start accepting candidates in less than 3 minutes. 

Where To Find Good Copywriters for a Startup—Additional Job Boards

There’s no reason to limit yourself to a few job boards with an automated system like Workello. Apart from the 15 job boards already mentioned above, you may also post your Copywriter ad on the following websites:

• Scribewise
• Copify
• PeoplePerHour
• The Writer Finder
• Craigslist
• Skyword
• Muck Rack
• Writers Work
• Pure Content
• Certified Writers
• ContentGrow
• Mediabistro
• Pod Reacher
• WriterAccess
• Freelancer