What We Wish We Knew About Hiring Writers

In 2019, our content agency, ContentDistribution.com, was a one-man team that just took on a new client. In the next 24 months, our client grew from 0 to 1,500,000 organic monthly visitors, making the project one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time.

To achieve such success, we had to publish 600+ pages each month, which required our company to grow from 1 to 45+ Writers and Editors in under 2 years. Hiring so many people without a sound hiring structure proved to be a nightmare.

When we started posting job ads, we would get overwhelmed with applications quickly. We couldn’t keep track of candidates, applications were usually incomplete or poorly formatted, and we took weeks to get back to the best candidates.

We soon realized we approached the hiring process the wrong way. We needed an automated system that would keep track of applications coming in from various job boards, log their CVs and portfolios in one place, and reach out to candidates without us having to do all of those tasks manually and miss out on great candidates as a result.

We looked for an ideal ATS that would satisfy all our needs, but there wasn’t one. That’s why we decided to invest countless hours and $100,000+ into creating an automated hiring funnel dedicated to content agencies.

In the next few minutes, you’ll learn

1. Where you can find Writers for hire from Singapore
2. Why it’s so difficult to hire Writers efficiently without an automated hiring funnel
3. How automated testing can get you top-performing, affordable Writers in no time

Best Job Boards for Writers for Hire From Singapore

In our search for Writers, we’ve used dozens of job boards—this is our top 17 pick:

Continue reading the article, and you’ll find additional 35 job boards for hiring Writers.

Writers for Hire in Singapore—Should You Focus on Them?

Companies—especially content agencies—have popularized hiring employees from places like Singapore and India because they’re willing to work for significantly lower rates than their U.S.-based counterparts due to the much lower cost of living in these countries.

While they are more affordable, there’s no reason why you should focus on Singapore and disregard all other locations. You can also hire Writers remotely and tap into a global talent pool as you can find workers for more affordable rates all over the globe.

Still, hiring the cheapest candidate isn’t the ideal approach—you’ll end up investing more money in Editors who need to rewrite unusable content.

You need to make sure their work will be up to the standard your company requires, and the only way to do that is to test your candidates before you hire them.

Why Hiring Quality Writers Seems Impossible

Everybody seems interested in hiring Writers nowadays, not only content agencies. Every business with an online presence needs Writers to create high-quality content if they want to boost their online visibility, drive organic traffic to their website, and increase sales.

When you’re on a hunt for high-quality Writers, you need to fend off dozens of other companies and secure the signature of top-performers.

The best Writers get to choose which company they want to work for, and they receive offers almost daily. This means that the best ones get off the market quickly, and the majority of available candidates are bad or mediocre Writers applying for jobs they’re not qualified for.

To find top candidates, you need to evaluate hundreds of applications and spot the few good Writers in a sea of unqualified ones—and you need to do it faster than your competition.

This is what we struggled with. We first started with Upwork but soon cast a wider net and included various other job boards. Every platform we used gave us the same problems:

• We couldn’t sort candidates by their status in the hiring funnel
• Websites weren’t designed to make testing and hiring Writers easy
• Portfolios candidates submitted were unreliable

Applications soon started flying in from Glassdoor, Monster, SimplyHired, LinkedIn, and various other sources. Regardless of the website we used, we could never:

• Track candidates by their status in our funnel
• Keep track of applications and respond to candidates
• Take note of candidates that interested us initially
• Get back to the most impressive candidates fast enough
• Filter out the bad ones quickly

If no ATS was going to offer a solution to all of our problems at once, we had to make one on our own. We invested everything in content, while our hiring process was bare-bones. After a dozen painstaking hiring cycles, we decided it was high time to invest the same level of effort into revamping our hiring funnel.

After years of work, we came up with a fully automated hiring funnel—Workello.

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

If we were to remodel our hiring process, we had to understand the one we had in place and try to pinpoint what was holding us back. This is what we wrote down:

1. Getting people to visit a website required high-quality content
2. Publishing high-quality content could only come from hiring high-quality Writers
3. Hiring top-performing Writers demanded evaluating hundreds of applications
4. Finding the best candidate required sorting out bad ones quickly
5. Sorting out bad Writers—that’s what we didn’t have an answer to

When you post a job ad for Writers, you’ll always have hundreds, if not thousands, of applications coming your way. Finding interested candidates was never a problem for us—what we struggled with was handling those applications once they arrived.

To change things for the better, we went back to the drawing board and tried to establish what our new hiring system had to consist of. The features we knew it had to have were:

1. A single platform that gathers all applications from each job board we have an ad on
2. An optimized system that lets us sort applicants and change their status in the funnel effortlessly
3. A single-page dashboard we can use to evaluate, test, interview, and hire Writers
4. An automatically sent writing test to let us spot bad Writers with impressive portfolios
5. Automated email correspondence that removes the chance of human error and saves time

Our first iteration of the new system was Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It wasn’t ideal, but it improved upon what we had up to that point. It also showed us how we could optimize our hiring process and inspired us to eventually create Workello.

A Vague Job Description Attracts Unqualified Applicants

No matter what kind of job description you shell out, it won’t guarantee that you’ll hire the best possible candidate. You’ll always have underqualified candidates apply, but a detailed job description can reduce their number significantly.

Vague job descriptions leave a lot open to interpretation, and unqualified Writers will take the opportunity to apply. That’s why you should specify every responsibility your new employee will have, as well as all the requirements candidates need to meet for you to consider them. The more thorough you get, the less likely it is for a bad Writer to apply.

You should also use the description as a platform to “sell” your company to the best Writers. Since high-quality candidates have many companies to choose from, you should find a way to persuade them to take your offer.

List any benefits that come with the job, such as salary increase, career advancement, health plan, paid company retreats, and so on.

If you’re not sure what your job description should look like or if you’re looking for a more specific role, you can tap into our comprehensive database of job description templates.

All you need to do is click on the title of a role, copy the template, adapt it slightly to fit your organization, and post it online:

• Writer
• Technical Writer
• Copywriter
• Content Writer
• Digital Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• E-Commerce Content Writer
• Staff Writer
• Law Firm Content Writer
• Senior Writer
• Course Writer
• Website Content Writer
• SEO Writing
• Catalog Writer
• Business Writer

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

In the beginning, we didn’t have a Recruiter to take care of job ad distribution. Instead, our Content Managers and Editors had to visit various job boards and post our ads there.

It wasn’t a difficult task, but it was a time-consuming one. Every day, our team had to spend a couple of hours posting on job boards instead of focusing on content production.

The problem was that we couldn’t hire someone new to do that without documenting the whole process in advance.

We shied away from the task because we knew how tedious it was, but eventually, we had no other choice but to do it. Luckily for you, you won’t have to go through the same process!

When you register for Workello for free, you’ll be able to access and use our playbooks to delegate recruitment and job ad distribution to someone else!

Workello Dashboard—A One-Stop Shop for Your Entire Hiring Process

In the Workello dashboard, you’ll be able to access and evaluate all applications from a single point, regardless of the job board a candidate finds your ad on. This way, you won’t have to check a dozen different job boards each day and sort each application manually.

All you need to do is include a link to a Workello-hosted application form in your job listings, and applications will start showing up in your dashboard. Since every candidate will use the same form, you’ll receive applications in a uniform format. This means that candidates won’t be able to submit incomplete applications, and you won’t have to reach out to them to ask for missing information.

Check out an application example.

Watch Candidates Stream In

Once applications arrive, you can use the same Workello dashboard to complete the entire hiring process. The dashboard allows you to evaluate, test, invite candidates for an interview, and extend an offer to the best ones.

You can move candidates through the funnel by changing their status with a simple click. All you need to do is select an appropriate option from the drop-down menu. Your options are:

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

Every status has been color-coded so that you can figure out how many candidates are in each stage of the funnel at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Writers

When you receive an application, the first step is to evaluate it and see whether the candidate is good enough to go to the next stage of your hiring process.

If your Content Managers deem the application unsatisfactory, they can remove the candidate from the funnel by changing their status to “Application Rejected.”

Doing this triggers an automated email that informs the candidate politely that you won’t consider them for the role at this time.

This automation allows you to focus on better candidates, and you won’t have to spend time notifying applicants manually or responding to their emails about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

You shouldn’t jump to hire a candidate with an impressive portfolio. You need to be aware that bad Writers can hand in incredible portfolios.

The articles Writers include in the portfolios are their best work that has likely been heavily edited and polished to perfection in QA. This doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of their first drafts.

The only way to learn how good someone actually is is through testing.

When we started hiring a large number of Writers in 2019, we didn’t have a testing phase and would hire people based on their CVs and portfolios alone. This was a mistake that cost us thousands of dollars.

Many candidates proved to be bad Writers—they would produce unusable content, and our Editors would edit the work heavily or rewrite it completely. This would cause a backlog and a huge increase in workload for our Editors and Managers.

That’s why testing was the first step we thought of when we started working on Workello.

To test a candidate, you need to change their status to “Test Candidate,” which will trigger an automated email with:

1. Congratulations on reaching the next stage
2. A link to the writing test you made

When they click on the link, they’ll see something like this:

How To Make a Good Test

When you create a writing test, you should make it so it allows you to assess a candidate’s skills regarding:

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

Bear in mind that you need to think about the length of the test as well. You need to create a test that balances perfectly between the complexity of testing and a candidate’s willingness to complete it.

If you make a 2,500-word test that takes 8+ hours to complete, the majority of your candidates will not go through with it.

Workello lets you tilt the balance slightly in favor of thoroughness.

As candidates receive informational emails every step of the way, they won’t have to reach out to your Recruiters for information, and everything will seem more professional and transparent. Candidates will appreciate this and will be willing to put in extra effort and complete a more thorough test.

If you don’t know how to create a test, you can use ours for free! This is the same test we used to hire 45+ Writers for our content agency!

Interviewing Candidates

When a candidate finishes their test, they can submit it and their status will change to “Test Complete.”

After evaluating the tests, your Managers and Editors will be able to assess the test and change the candidate status to:

1. Reject Candidate—Triggers an automated email informing the candidate about failing the test
2. Invite for Interview—Triggers an automated email with a Calendly link they can use to schedule a Zoom meeting

The Candidate Status Page

Workello has a helpful page for candidates too. Your candidates will be able to use the Candidate Status page and find out everything they need to know about their application status.

The page also contains a “What to expect next” section that informs the candidates about your selection process and the number of steps left before they can expect an offer.

This page will help you a great deal as your employees won’t have to spend time on unnecessary email correspondence. Your candidates will also stop sending messages asking about their application status.

You will no longer have to worry about missing out on a top Writer because you failed to respond to their email and they lost interest or found a new job in the meantime.

Check out the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Once we started using Workello, hiring Writers became a breeze, regardless of where they were located. Before Workello, it was one of the worst experiences we as employers had to go through.

Hundreds of applications would come our way every day from various job boards. We had no means of keeping track of them, had to message candidates manually, and found it difficult to track in what stage in the funnel each candidate was. 

This made everything way too slow-paced, and we missed out on a great deal of top-performing Writers because we couldn’t get back to them on time.

Our Content Managers and Editors had to focus on hiring new Writers instead of on their job, and our content production stalled because of it.

Once we developed Workello, our business started reaping the benefits from it. Thanks to the new hiring system, we managed to:

1. Scale our business from 1 to 45+ Writers in 18 months
2. Cut the cost of content by 75%
3. Execute one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns ever
4. Allow our Managers to focus on their job

For us, Workello is an investment that took $100,000+ and years of hard work to develop. For you, it will be an investment equal to the price of a single page of content!

Try out Workello for free! You can start accepting new candidates in less than 3 minutes.

Additional Job Boards To Find Writers for Hire in Singapore

Now that you have a system that optimizes your hiring process, you can expand your search and use as many job boards as you want without becoming overwhelmed.

Check out the following websites to tap into a larger talent pool:

• CloudPeeps
• Zerys
• Scribewise
• NABJ
• Mediabistro
• ASJA
• Staffing agencies
• Clarity
• Alexis Grant Media
• WriterAccess
• Freelancer
• Skyword
• ContentGrow
• Scripted
• Writers Work
• Pitchwhiz
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer group
• Certified Writers
• The Writer Finder
• Virtual Assistant Finder
• Pod Reacher
• Editorial Freelancers Association
• Masthead Media
• Muck Rack
• Journalism Jobs
• Craigslist
• NASW
• Storyhackers
• Copify
• FinCon Community
• NAHJ
• WriteLife Facebook group
• Behance
• Society of Professional Journalists
• HireMyMom