What the work actually involves
Most tasks fall into two shapes. The first is authoring: you take an engagement you actually ran — the client situation, the data you had, the constraint that made it hard — and turn it into a case prompt, then write the reference answer a model's attempt gets graded against. The second is grading: a model produces a market sizing, a profitability diagnostic, a cost-to-serve analysis, and you judge whether the segmentation makes sense, whether the driver tree is MECE and load-bearing, and whether the recommendation actually follows from the arithmetic. A recurring ask is the hardest one: flagging answers that look clean and well-structured but would be taken apart in a partner review or a client steering committee.
What the screen is looking for
The firm name on your resume matters less than whether you owned the analysis and the client-facing recommendation rather than producing slides for someone else's. The AI interview probes for professional experience in strategy, operations, or transformation consulting, and for the ability to explain reasoning in writing — the deliverable in this work is usually a written rationale, not a score. Comfort with ambiguity is also screened for: tasks arrive underspecified and the platform wants people who flag unclear instructions rather than quietly guessing.
Logistics and honest expectations
- Fully remote and async; you confirm where you work from at application.
- Observed rates have run $90–120/hr, set per project by scope and depth — not guaranteed, and the actual number appears on the specific project listing.
- Hours are project-driven and irregular. Some weeks nothing; some weeks a burst of grading with a short turnaround.
- This standing listing issues no accept or reject decision. You may hear within a week or not for several months, depending entirely on what Mercor's clients are running.
- Completing the domain expert interview and joining every network you qualify for improves match odds; you sign up once across all of them.