How to Hire Freelance Writers in 5 Steps (Ahrefs’ Process)

This usually leads to you asking yourself two questions:
How do I choose the best ones?
How will I even have time to filter through that many applications?
In this post, you'll learn how we set up a process to answer these questions.
Step 1. Create an application form
Most job listings tell applicants to email the hiring manager their cover letter and resume. That works well when looking for full-time hires but not for freelance positions because they often attract hundreds or thousands of applicants.
There's just no way you can review that many resumes without losing it. As a result, suitable applicants often slip through the net and you miss out on great writers.
One way to solve this problem is to have all applicants apply through a Google Form.
Here are two reasons why this makes sense:
It helps you vet applicants fast and efficiently - Google Forms funnels applicants into a Google Sheet, so you can review all applicants there instead of sifting through emails.
It allows you to test writers' skills and knowledge at scale - You can easily ask questions designed to judge applicants' knowledge, skills, and experience with the topic at hand.
In terms of what you should ask applicants, I recommend a mix of multiple-choice questions and ones with short answers. Multiple-choice questions help gauge knowledge and experience, whereas "short answer" questions allow you to judge writing ability.
Here's one of our multiple-choice questions:



The answer to this question is something that we expect most experienced SEOs to know. But it may trip up those with less experience.
Here's an example of a "short answer" question:



We designed this question to help us judge the applicant's ability to explain things succinctly and accurately.
If you're curious about our application form, here it is.
Only a handful of these questions are for vetting purposes; the rest are to get basic details like their names, email addresses, Twitter handles, etc. It's essential to ask for these details, as it's the only way to get them when applicants aren't applying by email.
Step 2. Post your job
You now need to attract candidates to your application form, which you can do by creating a job listing and posting everywhere you can.
Here are the four things you need to explain:
What you're looking for - Keep it short. Tell applicants what the position entails.
What skills you require - List everything you expect in applicants.
Who you are - Give some details about your company. (Keep it short; don't bore people.)
How to apply - Send people to your application form.
There are plenty of job boards where you can submit your listing. We posted to ProBlogger, Swipe Files Job Board (prev. Hey Marketers), our careers page, and a few others.



We also posted in a few Slack and Facebook groups.
Given that every applicant goes through the same process, the more places you can post your job listing, the better.
Step 3. Vet applicants
Every aspect of the vetting process takes place in the Google Sheet. This makes life super easy, as everything is in one place. I recommend splitting the process into automated and manual vetting to make things as quick and efficient as possible.
Automated vetting
Here, the idea is to disqualify applicants who don't fit the bill, give a preliminary score to the remaining ones, and clean up the sheet to make manual vetting as quick as possible. Here's how to do it in three steps.
A. Disqualify
There's no point wasting time reviewing applications from folks who can't follow basic rules or don't meet basic criteria. So it pays to disqualify them automatically. The beauty of Google Sheets is that you can do this easily with filters and formulas.
You'll recall that we asked all applicants to define two terms in under 50 words. As we wanted to disqualify those who exceeded the allowed word count, we added two additional columns with formulas to count the number of words in each definition.



Then we filtered to exclude rows where the definitions were above 50 words.



We then filtered for a few more criteria:
Rate per 1,000 words - We excluded anyone who didn't put 10-1,000. (This was primarily to exclude applicants who couldn't follow instructions and gave a price per word.)
Years of experience in SEO - We excluded anyone with "