In today’s article, I’m going to be sharing with you exactly how I hired six writers within two days of just posting a job and getting applications through the door.
By the end of this article, you will hopefully be able to replicate a very similar process if you need help finding some great content writers.
Have some sort of a system
The first thing you have to have before you even start scaling up your team and hiring a ton of content writers is you want to have some sort of a system. For me, I run everything in a combination of Trello, Asana as well as sometimes I use Notion. And what I do is I have my content writers working out of one of my boards for my different websites as they get assigned different articles, they move that through the board. And then virtual assistant approves that. And then we publish that piece of content.
Create your job description
So the very first thing that you want to do when it comes to hiring a ton of content writers really fast is you want to create some sort of a job description. With this job description, it’s really important for you to outline exactly what sort of work are you looking to get filled.
You want to answer questions like what sort of topics do you want authority on or expertise around from your writers? How are you planning on paying your writers in terms of the rate percent or per article if you’re doing some fixed rate agreement? You’re also going to want to share things like what you are looking for from the ideal candidate. Do you want somebody who responds to you for example, within 48 hours? Or do you want something in which, you know, it’s a native English speaker or somebody with really advanced English writing skills?
Next steps in the application process
Then you’re going to also want to talk about the next steps in the application process. When it comes to me, when I do with all of my applications is to make the candidate first sign in NDA and then get that signed in returned before I then share onboarding instructions. I have a set of onboarding instructions that I give every single content writer that joins my team, just so that they know and are clear on the expectations that are coming for joining my team. And then from there what’ll happen is they will review that, confirm that they can actually follow those instructions before then moving forward in terms of their test milestone.
Once I have them set up with that test milestone, that is the point in which I am really seeing whether or not this writer is going to work out. And then most cases they don’t actually. In fact, if I onboard five writers, only two or three of them are really going to make it through that test milestone.
But the reason why I’ve done this over and over again is because it works in terms of filtering through the really high quality content writers who are able to follow instructions and learn my system, as opposed to the ones who are going to give me work that is really difficult to work with, or really difficult for my team to work with.
But now that you have a basic baseline understanding of exactly how I approach this problem, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to show you exactly the sort of application process I set up, which website I used in order to find content writers really quickly. And then I’ll show you exactly how I got to my six writers within just under two days.
The website I used to find content writers
For this process, the site I used in order to find my content writers was onlinejobs.ph. Essentially online jobs.ph is a great job board specifically for Filipino-based workers. And the reason why I like to hire out of the Philippines is because in many cases you can find some really great English speakers. They’re very kind people and they’re hardworking as well. And it can also be super useful for you if you find yourself running on a tighter budget, because frankly hiring US based writers can be really expensive at times, or even just finding writers from other countries as well.
So onlinejobs.ph is a great place for you to source talent when it comes to finding writers and finding them at a really great rate. It can cost a couple of cents per word, or you can also do it on a fixed contract where you pay the writers a certain amount every single week. And you have some sort of output goal for that particular week.
I’ll leave that to you in terms of how much you want to pay for your content writing. But I recommend that you pay a fair wage in terms of just getting something effective from your writers. It can be a couple of cents per word, it can be a fixed rate per article, whatever it is that you find works for you and your budget is a good place to start.
But when you get onto this website, what you want to do is you want to create a job listing, but in order to do that and to do it effectively, you will have to upgrade your account. Typically, when I’ve used Online Jobs in the past, I’ve only used a subscription one month at a time. I have never found the case where I really needed to consistently keep that subscription every single month.
So your mileage may vary, but personally, I’ve always been able to find talent fast enough within the one month to make it worth the while of paying for that one month subscription. So what you’ll see is that in order to communicate with workers on this site, you do need to upgrade. However, what you’ll see is that the free plan does allow you to have up to three job postings, you can have 15 applications and you can also have jobs approved within two days.
But you’ll notice that the second that you upgrade into the first tier plan for $69 a month, you can actually start to communicate with workers. You get up to three job posts and you also get up to 200 applications per job. I find this middle-tier plan, the pro plan to be more than enough in getting tons of applications of really solid quality. So that’s what I actually used in my particular example here.
You might be able to use premium, though. I don’t know how big you are in terms of what, where you’re, whatever it is what I personally recommend is that you start with just the monthly plan. I know that the annual plan is a huge discount, but personally, I just have never really found that I’ve had to keep an active subscription for more than a month at time.
How to create a job listing
So assuming that you’ve gone ahead and figured that out in terms of what’s best for you, what you want to do from here is you want to create a job listing. So the first thing you’re going to do when you have your Online Jobs account is you’re going to create post a job. And from here that is going to redirect you to create a new job listing. And for this, what I’d like to usually do is have some sort of thing that makes it really clear what the position is for.
For example, content writers needed. And then I might list the particular niches that I need content written for. And then for the type of employment I typically do part-time but you could also list it as freelance, since it is freelance work. And then you’re going to input the job description that you would have prepped earlier. So again, if you do want to see that later, let me know, but in the case where you’re good on that, just put in your job description and then put in the wage in terms of how much you’re looking to pay for your content.
For ID proof score, I like to look for anything above 60, mainly because it does require on this website that they complete a few different identification forms in order to get that sort of score. And then for email contact person, what I recommend here actually is that you create a new email for this particular job posting, just so that all the applications go to the same email as opposed to spamming your main inbox. That’s something that I personally learned just from experience that would be really useful had I done it the first time around.
And then the next thing you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to select the different skills. Typically speaking for content writers, you’re going to select content writing here or writing, and then you’re going to select the sorts of different versions of skills you want. So maybe it’s going to be ghost writing and then you maybe will have other skills where you have blogging, and then you’re going to have, maybe another skill where you’re going to look for web content writing.
Once you do that, you’re going to click the post a job button. And so what’s going to happen from here is your job is going to be listed in their directory, and you’re going to immediately start to get a ton of different applications.
How to screen applicants
And this is going to be really great because what you’re going to do is you’re going to separately create a simple Google form that you can use in order to screen through applications. To do that, what you’re going to do is you’re going to go into Google forms or whatever form builder you want to create, and then create a simple application like this.
I’ve gone ahead and show an example here where it’s talking about, thanks for your interest for ghost writing for us because it’s ghost writing content for the most part on my end. And then from here, we have a ton of work. Here’s what we pay per thousand words or 5,000 words or whatever, how you’re going to pay them, what you expect from them. And then what you have in this particular example is you have them submit their full name. You have them answer questions in terms of what their past experience is, writing for articles or blogs, what their process is when it comes to researching for things that they don’t know about as well as how many word articles they can actually produce every single week, as well as what particular topic areas that they might be interested in, what their expertise is in that particular niche followed by some sort of past article or piece of writing that has been published of theirs.
Other recommendation
Now here’s where I recommend that you work in some sort of 300 or 500 where it’s sample prompt. If somebody is applying for a particular niche, I will look for some sort of common phrase or topic that I know would’ve been interesting in that particular niche. And I will insert that in here as my sample prompt for a writing sample. And the reason why I find this super effective is because it really does give you a better understanding of exactly how effective that content writer is at doing the things that they mentioned earlier on in their application.
So from here, I just ask them what their best PayPal email is, what the secret word is for applying. I recommend in your job description that you always use some sort of secret word, like, you know, Cowabunga or something like that just to make it easy for you to flag out who is just spamming applications to different listings. And then from there, I just have them understand that they are ghost writing for my particular sites.
So once you send this out to the writers, you’re going to notice that there’s going to be a drop off in terms of how many writers actually complete the application. But what I’ll typically find is that if I get about 30 applications, there’s going to be anywhere from five to 10 of those applications that are going to be really solid.
And then from there, I’ll typically onboard around 75% or so of those into a test milestone. The other 25% are going to be totally overwhelmed by the article system that I have. And so they won’t be able to proceed. But what I typically find is from that hiring batch, I always find that I get a couple of really consistent writers or I just get some writers for a couple milestones and then they decide that it’s not for them.
But the reason why we use this sort of process is because it makes it really quick for screening through applications and starting test milestones. I always recommend putting a quick test milestone together where you hire that content writer for one or two articles, just to see whether or not they can follow instructions and whether or not they’d be a good fit for your project. And that is the best way that you can really start to build trust and rapport with those content writers to then write more content for you.
So that’s pretty much all I did. From there, I fielded, I believe around 35 applications or so. I ended up hiring six writers before I started to pause my project and move on. But this was a great way for me to hire six writers in under two days. And it was way faster than having to screen through some other potential websites like Upwork and whatnot in order to see who may have been good.
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