Finding Minority Freelance Writers Can Be Difficult—Our Experience Can Help You

Before we developed Workello, we were a highly successful content company—Content Distribution.com. What propelled our business was an ambitious SEO campaign that we ran for a VC-backed client. In under two years, we managed to increase the number of their organic visitors from 0 to 1,500,000. 

To reach this goal, we had to consistently publish hundreds of high-quality, fully SEO-optimized articles each month. This required us to scale from a one-man startup to a 45-person content agency in just 18 months!

Building such a large content team in such a short time period meant we had to scale at an incredible pace. For the first few months, we were stuck in a never-ending hiring cycle. Our hiring system wasn’t as efficient as we had hoped, and many issues plagued us from the start.

Applications were coming in by the dozens, and we were quickly overwhelmed. We couldn’t follow up with candidates on time, it was impossible to track where each candidate was in our hiring funnel, and we had to respond to hundreds of emails each week. 

Everything was improvised, chaotic, and disorganized. We knew we needed a solution—and fast!

As no ATS could solve all our problems at once, we decided to create our own. With the same eagerness that propelled us to success in the content business, we got to work and invested hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into R&D. 

The end result of our investments? A unified, fully automated hiring platform—Workello!

In the next 15 minutes, you’ll learn where to find minority freelance writers at affordable rates and how you can streamline your hiring process to cut hiring costs in half and find better writers, faster.

Don’t Know Where To Find Minority Freelance Writers? Check Out These Websites! 

We used numerous job boards during our hiring spree. Here is a selection of the 15 best ones where you can find minority freelance writers:

Why Is It So Hard To Find and Hire a Competent Minority Freelance Writer?

Content agencies and businesses who want to establish a strong online presence and drive qualified organic traffic are always looking to hire skilled writers. The best freelance writers are snatched in an instant by companies like ours. 

As a result, the vast majority of candidates on popular job boards are unqualified. Finding a good minority freelance writer is even more difficult, as more and more companies are putting emphasis on diversity hiring. 

Great demand for talented minority writers creates scarcity, and scarcity leads to competition. To find a suitable match for your business, you need to evaluate and test as many candidates as possible in a short time. You also need to spot and filter out the bad ones fast if you want to find the ideal minority freelance writer before another company contracts them.

Our search began on Upwork and LinkedIn, but we soon cast a much wider net and included other job boards. Still, the same issues cropped up no matter what site we tried:

• It was hard to track candidates’ progress through our hiring funnel
• There were no options to target a specific kind of freelance writer
• Candidates’ portfolios often painted an inaccurate picture of their real competency

Applications were arriving from Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster, Craigslist, Facebook, and via email. But with each new job board we used, the same problems persisted—they only multiplied. No matter what we did, we couldn’t:

• Log candidate applications efficiently
• Respond to candidates’ emails on time
• Follow up with candidates on time (or ever)
• Track candidates by their application status in our hiring funnel
• Identify and filter out poor writers with exemplary portfolios

While we invest a lot of time, money, and effort into content, virtually no effort went into our hiring process! We decided to rectify that, and went on to invest $100,000+ and countless hours of hard work into developing our ideal applicant tracking system—Workello.

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

Before we could revamp our hiring system, we had to know exactly why it failed, so we don’t repeat the same mistakes. We broke down the problem into the smallest elements possible and concluded the following: 

1. To attract millions of organic visitors, we had to publish large quantities of high-quality content
2. Only skilled, experienced writers can create excellent content
3. To find a single skilled writer, we had to trudge through a hundred applications
4. To identify and hire a qualified writer, we needed to quickly eliminate the sub-par ones from our funnel
5. Efficiently filtering out bad candidates—that’s what we didn’t have an answer for

Getting candidates to submit applications was never a problem—handling all the applications once they came in was the issue. We wanted to tackle that and other problems with a single platform, so we wrote down all the features our ideal applicant tracking system had to have:

1. A unified platform that would collect every application no matter where it was sent from
2. An efficient tracking system that would allow us to sort candidates by their status in our funnel
3. An integrated dashboard with the functionality to test candidates, set up interviews, and ultimately hire the most promising writer—with one click!
4. Automatic tests that would allow us to spot poor freelance writers with shining resumes
5. Automated communication to keep candidates up-to-date without wasting time on unnecessary manual correspondence

For the first iteration, we used the formula Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. This model was a start, but it was still nowhere near what we had envisioned. The ideal system—Workello—would arrive many iterations later.

Read on to learn how you can leverage Workello to streamline your hiring process, find talented minority freelance writers faster, and reduce hiring costs by up to 50%!

A Comprehensive Job Description Attracts Better Applicants

Regardless of how well-crafted it is, no job ad can magically ensure that only quality candidates apply. There will always be bad applicants, but a super-specific job description that emphasizes the right skills and requirements candidates must meet will reduce the number of unsuitable candidates drastically.

The criteria should be transparent and unambiguous—and the more explicit you are, the better your chances of turning away lackluster writers who don’t meet your minimum hiring standards. That’s why you should precisely state the required job experience, writing credentials, education, and any particular skills that are essential for the role. You should also emphasize the fact that you’re looking for a minority freelance writer.

Bear in mind that you should also give talented minority freelance writers an incentive to work for you instead of a competing company. You can do this by looking up the current market rate for the job and offering them slightly better compensation. Since they are freelancers—and don’t enjoy any of the benefits of salaried writers—even a marginally better rate or a long-term contract can win them over.

If you don’t know how to create a job ad or aren’t sure what it should include, feel free to consult Workello’s extensive knowledge base. Below is a selection of pre-vetted job description templates you may want to use—click on the title that matches your needs, adapt the contents slightly, and you can use it right away!

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

When we first began our hiring spree, we didn’t have dedicated Recruiters to post job ads, screen candidates, log applications, and handle correspondence. Instead, we passed on this duty to our editors and managers. The task wasn’t particularly hard, but it was very dull and required them to take time away from their actual roles.

This distraction eventually turned into a problem, and our content production slowed down to a crawl as a result.

We needed a specialized Recruiting Coordinator, but to hire one, we first had to document our entire process and provide them with instructions on it. This would take us even more time, but there was no way around it—so we compiled all the required documents. Now, you won’t have to!  

Upon registering for Workello for free, you’ll get immediate access to our playbooks, which you can use to delegate the recruitment role to another person!

Workello’s All-in-One Dashboard Makes Hiring Easy

With Workello, you can post your job ads across as many hiring platforms as you deem fit without worrying about manually logging applications from a dozen different sources. Workello allows you to add a link to a Workello-hosted application form to your job ad, so the incoming applications will all end up in the same place—your dashboard—regardless of what website candidates applied on.

This also ensures all applications will be in the same format, making pre-screening much easier and faster. The best part is the fact that you’ll receive zero incomplete applications since candidates won’t be able to hit “submit” unless they fill out all the required fields. You won’t have to waste time emailing candidates to request the necessary information ever again.

Here’s an example of an application form:

Watch Candidates Stream In

Workello’s dashboard will serve as your single point of input for all decisions you make in the course of the hiring process. You can use it to review portfolios, send tests, invite to interview, and extend job offers to the most accomplished minority freelance writer. 

To update a candidate’s status, you only need to choose the corresponding option from the drop-down menu:

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

All the statuses are marked with a different color, so you can tell at a glance how many candidates you have in each stage of your hiring funnel at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Freelance Writers

When an application pops-up in your Workello dashboard, you can alert your editors and managers so they can evaluate it and determine whether the candidate should progress to the next stage. If they fail to meet your criteria, you can reject them by updating their status to Application Rejected with the press of a button.

When you do this, Workello instantly sends them an automated rejection message informing them that they will not be moving on to the testing stage.

Such automation means that your recruiters no longer need to waste time manually informing each applicant that their application had been rejected.

Point, Click, Test

Portfolios might be a good starting point when evaluating candidates, but you should never base your hiring decisions on portfolios alone. They’re almost never an accurate representation of the writer’s skills since candidates only include examples of their most refined work that has gone through at least one round of editing.

To gauge a writer’s first draft capabilities, you need to test them with a written assignment.

When we first started hiring, we made the rookie mistake of extending offers to people based on their portfolios alone. We didn’t have a testing step in our hiring process, and it came back to bite us since we hired dozens of people whose actual skills weren’t even close to what their portfolios suggested. We wasted hundreds of hours and a boatload of money rewriting their articles from scratch.

This is when we decided that automated tests were one of the essential features our new system needed. Testing a candidate to see exactly how good they are is now as simple as licking the Test Candidate option from a drop-down menu. Doing so triggers an automated email message that:

1. Congratulates them on passing to the tasting stage
2. Sends them a link to the written test along with writing instructions

When they click the link, they will be directed to a page that resembles this one:

How To Make a Good Test

A written test is a reasonable demand that experienced candidates are already used to. TIn fact, top-performing writers will probably be more than willing to demonstrate what they’re capable of. 

The test needs to be complex enough to allow you to accurately gauge the writer’s:

1. Mastery of language
2. Capacity for conducting independent research on a given topic or niche
3. Article formatting

That said, the test assignment must be too complex. You can’t reasonably expect a freelance writer to spend the full 8 hours writing a test article they won’t be paid for, for a job they might not get.

The ideal test must strike a balance between thoroughness and the candidate’s willingness to complete it. Workello gives you a bit more leeway— you can tip the scales in your favor and make a slightly more elaborate test! After all, our communication system is so efficient, ensuring that candidates are always updated on their current status, that many won’t mind putting in a little extra effort. What’s more, they’ll recognize you as a respectable company with a professional hiring process!

There’s no need to waste time devising an overly original, over-the-top test. If you’re in a hurry, feel free to swipe the one we used to test hundreds of writers!

Interviewing Candidates

When a writer turns in the completed assignment, their status will be automatically changed to Test Complete. Your editors and managers can then review the test assignment and gauge their performance. 

If the test doesn’t meet your standards, you can immediately remove the candidate from your hiring funnel by selecting Reject Candidate. This will trigger a polite rejection email, letting them know that you won’t be extending an offer at this time. 

If you’re satisfied with the quality of the content a candidate submitted, you can move them to the next stage by updating their application status to Invite for Interview. They’ll receive an email congratulating them on moving onto the next stage, with a Calendy link to schedule an online video interview.

The Candidate Status Page

Candidates want to be notified of any application status changes as soon as possible. Rather than manually responding to questions like “have you received my test?” or “when will I hear back from your company,” you can let them know exactly what the status of their application is in real-time. 

Workello Candidate Status page lets applicants see where they are in your hiring funnel and provides extra information on your hiring process in the “What to expect next” section. This helps reduce transactional questions to a minimum, so your recruiters won’t be buried under a mountain of emails every single workday.

You can check out the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Workello makes hiring writers seem like a breeze. But, when we first started hiring, there was nothing like Workello on the market. The hiring process was a grueling journey in which every step was fraught with obstacles.

We were receiving dozens of applications daily from numerous platforms. Handling them all was almost impossible, and we couldn’t follow up with many of our candidates in time. Due to this, a good number of talented writers lost interest or got hired by another company.

There were more than a few incomplete applications, so our editors had their hands full manually contacting candidates for missing info. They also posted ads and distributed test assignments, making it hard to keep up with the demands of their primary role. As a result, content production slowed down to a crawl.

We poured all of our effort, investing thousands of dollars and many days of work, into developing a fully automated hiring funnel, specifically designed with content teams in mind—Workello! Now, you can get access to Workello for a price of a single article. 

This is what we managed to accomplish thanks to Workello:

• Scaled our team from 1 to 45+ writers and editors in just 18 months
• Reduced the cost of producing content by 75%
• Worked on one of the most successful SEO projects ever
• Enabled our managers and editors to get back to their main duties

Try out Workello for free! As all settings are pre-configured, you just need to create an account, and you can start posting your job ads in less than 3 minutes!