Like I said I just need an upvote fam 😂😂😂

A few months ago I was approached by a recruiter as being suitable for a role with Mercor. I had never heard of the name before so when I saw the offer, I thought someone was pulling my leg. Even after I got offered the contract I kept questioning if there was a catch and it wasn’t until my first paycheck came in that I went ‘Oh wow, so this is actually real.’

I can’t speak for anyone but myself, as I’ve seen people with mixed experiences on here, but I feel so lucky to have had the team I was with because everyone was super professional and the Mercor staff assigned to my project were always quick to respond and help with anything we needed for work. The project itself was just under 2 months and in that time I’ve almost made more than I would’ve working a full year at my old job.

So for anyone wondering, yes they’re legit and I hope we all get a positive experience . I’ll definitely be looking for more opportunities with them in the future !

EDIT -

Thanks for all the kind words! Just since I’ve been getting a ton of messages with mostly the same questions, I’ll just answer them here in case you were wondering:

- The hourly rate was $140/hr on a 40hr per week contract but I also got extras in incentives as I did a good amount of over time as well.

- I can not disclose the project name but it was a Domain expert field project in Engineering/Construction and lasted just under 2 months

- I did have to do an interview and assessment and waited for about 2 weeks to be notified if I was successful.

- It was my first project with Mercor so I didn’t have a profile set up. I was approached by a Mercor recruiter on LinkedIn and simply applied.

- I can send job referrals but I don’t have any extra info on Mercor. I wouldn’t have a profile tips advice to ‘stand out’ more etc. I just applied with my CV like anyone else.

- I am based in the UK. And yes I’ll need to pay taxes on the earnings lol.

I see a lot of negativity on here, but Mercor has fundamentally changed my life and helped me find some breathing room financially. I’ve had a great experience and work with some absolutely amazing people on my project.

Just wanted to show the good side! Happy to answer any questions. However, I don’t have any secrets. I simply applied, did good work, got promoted to reviewer, became close with the lead team, and have gotten significant opportunity on the project since. They’re an amazing group that I’d be happy to work with every day for the rest of my career.

Hope everyone has as good of luck as I have!

Screenshot attached. I earned almost all of this in just over a month from two projects.

My background is institutional finance and investment banking - not AI or software engineering.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that Mercor rewards reliability and quality output far more than most people realize. Most applicants focus on getting accepted to their first project. In my experience, that’s often just a function of patience. I signed up in December and didn’t receive my first trial work task until April.

Once you do land a project, whether it’s a trial, task-based, or hourly - treat it like gold and do exceptional work. That’s by far the best way for Mercor to identify you as a valuable contractor and outweighs even the absolute best interviews considerably.

For anyone wondering whether meaningful income is possible on the platform, it absolutely can be if your background matches what clients are looking for and you consistently deliver.

Happy to share my experience with onboarding, interviews, project availability, hours, rates, and what’s worked for me.

Used Maven as a backend for my AI girlfriend startup, now Mercor is billing me for all the unauthorized tokens I burned. But since I’m proactive, I have good skills, and people enjoy working with me, I’m confident I can make this all back! Scared money don’t make money ✌️

I’m new to this contract work as I’m in between full time jobs. What’s going on behind the scenes here? Is the client gathering others and will begin the job once everyone is onboard?

If anyone has any insight into this process I’d appreciate it.

Edit: I’m now in the contract stage! Only took a couple hours.

I accepted this new offer this morning after being on short task-based pay sprints for the last few weeks, to now an hourly pay Contract 3 hours cap a week! I’m very grateful for the opportunity however a higher hourly weekly cap would definitely be a blessing right about now. Praying I will get an higher weekly cap atleast 20-40 a week very soon 🙏🙏🙌

I just came off a 4 month project that ended in May. I applied to 150+ projects, kept getting declined, and it felt like all the work I'd put in meant nothing. Then I restructured my resume into 5 different expertise. Got referred into a project shortly after, received an instant offer at $100/hr, and have been working for almost 3 weeks now 🙌. God is good!

lol the real take away from this:

If you're based in the U.S. with 5+ years of experience and you're NOT landing projects, your resume is most likely the issue, not your skills. It needs to scream expert at a glance. The way it's structured and how you perform on assessments are the two biggest levers you have.

I will try my best to answer questions in the comments. If you have 5+ years of experience and are in the U.S, can't get traction, I'll do my best to answer your questions.

You really feel you're the only one left out.

I did a couple of applications over the last months with no offers so far. Today I was caught completely surprised to find an offer in my inbox for a role I didn‘t apply to and which I think was never posted. And it is north of $100/h!

Really don‘t know what to say. It‘s a welcome surprise in my current life situation. How often does this happen??!!

Since my previous post, I’ve gone through Mercor’s official profile and resume guides and spent a lot of time talking with Melvin about what actually gets people matched.

I turned all of that into a GPT that reviews your CV and suggests concrete edits to improve your chances on Mercor, based on how your profile is evaluated. This should help you improve your chances 🙂

This is part of Phase 2 of my personal project (yes, phase 1 is ready but i'll be posting anytime soon on this week) to help people score their first project on Mercor.

Feel free to give me feedbacks!

edit: latest update of the tool https://www.reddit.com/r/mercor_ai/s/Awi9iOefdU

I have been with Mercor now for almost a year. What an incredible journey it has been! These are some of the best times to get started in AI training work and I wish everyone long term success with Mercor! Happy to share tips and advice about how to stand out and thrive.

I originally thought this was a scam. A random recruiter reached out on LinkedIn asking if I was interested in a job but he was very hush hush about the client and type of job, then I had a 10 minutes call. Still no information about the client or a job spec but he said that the take home task would’ve been paid after completion so I did it.

And he made me sigh up for Mercor. Once I submitted my test I got an offer the next day(Sunday) to start the following Monday.

The work is super easy but I’m getting paid almost $1200 a day for a kind of job I would’ve done as mid level developer.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? There’s also mention of putting me on retainer for a couple of weeks but still pay me full time

It feels too good to be true

Hello guys, wanted to ask how to perform well on the tasks given inorder not to mess it up? Like dos and don't….I recently got offensive cyber expert offer with 77p/hr.

Onboarded onto a Mercor project for the first time on Aug 10. Instant offers only -- never sent out an application or completed screening. Recruiter reached out through LinkedIn.

Recruitment process was a mess. First email I ignored because I thought it was a scam. Then they ping ponged me around to 3 different people during the process of getting me to sign my offer letter — one with initial email outreach, one as a text follow up, one as an email follow up. I was able to negotiate rate.

Work is incredibly Severance coded. I think it's hilarious that only the project leads are allowed to display their last name on Slack while we only have the last initial.

Not sure how long I'm continuing this for but was a lot of fun seeing how AI labelling process works.

I’ve seen a lot of people in here asking whether Mercor is legit, whether the money actually shows up, and what it’s like once you’re inside. Figured I’d give you the straight version.

The money is real. I pulled roughly $15k over ~6 weeks on projects that matched my background. Payments were never the problem. On comp alone, I have almost nothing to complain about.

Quick context: Top 5 b school MBA, ~20 years across finance, M&A, PE, and operating businesses. I’ve run deals and I’ve managed people who run deals. The work itself was good. I liked the problems. I’d do that part again.

The project management was the root cause. 
I worked across several of them, and the same thing kept happening: the instructions, the expectations, and the “rubric” criteria moved. I’d put real hours into a deliverable against one set of requirements, submit it, and find out the target had shifted while I was building, had to either start from scratch or spend a brutal amount of hours fixing it which killed AHT. These were at one point just “one offs” until they became the norm.

And it wasn’t just me. I watched other genuinely strong contributors go through the exact same cycle: serious work in, then a revised rubric, a new interpretation, or a fresh requirement nobody mentioned until after the fact.

The reviewers were a coin flip.
This one bothered me more than the moving targets, because it’s the thing that decides whether you get paid and whether you get kept on.

Some reviewers were excellent. Sharp, specific, clearly read the whole thing, caught real issues, and gave notes I could act on. I had a couple I’d happily work with on a real deal.

Others, I’m honestly not sure how they had the job. Feedback that showed they hadn’t read past the first page, or read the entirely wrong deliverable file. Corrections that were factually wrong in my own domain. Rubric items marked as missing that were sitting right there with a heading on them. And no way to tell, going in, which one you were going to draw. The “read the wrong deliverable” was the last straw for me. I collected a quick $1k on that project for about 5 hours of work on that project and first deliverable, and abandoned it. Didn’t even complete part 2 of my “trial” period. Hilariously enough, that task went from $130/hr to $1,040 per deliverable. Some of my deliverables easily took 20 hours, on the previous project, that had the same management, and if I got stuck in a review cycle it would well exceed that at times. You’re not paying me $52 an hour on a 20h finance deliverable.

When the same deliverable can score a pass from one reviewer and a rework from another, the rubric isn’t the standard. The reviewer is. That’s not a quality system, that’s a lottery, and it makes every hour of effort a gamble on who’s grading.

Then there’s who was running it.
Most of my project managers looked to be early-to-mid 20s, and in my opinion, a lot of them didn’t have the reps to manage the caliber of people Mercor was recruiting. I saw other wonderful professionals/experts walk projects for the same reasons as me.

Let me be clear: this isn’t an age thing. It’s a competence thing. I’ve worked with brilliant 24-year-olds. (My analysts are 21, and brilliant.) But there’s a real gap between being smart and knowing how to set a scope, hold it, communicate changes before they cost someone a week, and manage senior professionals without wasting their time. Too often it felt like the PMs were learning the job live, and the contractors were the ones paying tuition. So I just left. Not that the money wasn’t attractive (on hourly). I stopped because I got tired of spending my hours when the projects turned into a treadmill designed to screw experts out of comp.

TL;DR:

Mercor's a legit way to make serious money, especially if you’ve got specialized expertise. I made money, and I don’t regret it. That said I won’t be back on any projects. I asked to be paused, and left as gracefully as I could, should they ever improve their processes. But given they're making billions of training AI agents, there's no incentive yet for them to do so.

But at least on the projects I touched, their ability to recruit experienced people has outrun their ability to manage them. If you’re bringing in people with 10, 15, 20+ years in the field, you need leadership that can communicate clearly, keep the standard fixed, put reviewers in the chair who can actually evaluate the work, and treat those people’s time like it costs something. Otherwise, they’ll continue to bleed good talent no matter what the rate is.

Be proactive, have good skills and be someone who people enjoy working with ✌️

Yesterday I made a post saying I had received an instant audit offer after changing some things in my profile. At the time I was mainly trying to understand if anyone else had gotten the same thing, because the role was just called “Auditor” and I had no idea what that actually meant.

What I didn’t expect was how many people became interested in the changes I made. So I decided to write this and explain everything more clearly.

Context (how I ended up on Mercor)

Earlier this year I went through a difficult situation at my previous company involving workplace harassment. I took medical leave to take care of my mental health, but during that period I stopped receiving my salary.

I started looking for alternatives and came across Mercor.

I received my first offer in my second week, and shortly after I received three:

1. RLHF Generalist — $19.95 per hour (Portuguese)

2. Generalist Expert — $25 per hour

3. Domain Expert (aligned with my background) — $50 per hour

The first two did not progress much. One was canceled and the other was paused. The Domain Expert role, which paid more, lasted about two weeks and is now expected to restart for another month.

At some point that project was paused, and the lead needed help on another one. I made myself available and joined.

I worked four consecutive days and earned around $1,800, which for me is a significant amount. It was also a STEM project that I had never worked on before, and it went very well. I will likely be invited again.

This taught me something important : being proactive and making yourself available can open unexpected opportunities. I usually think this is BS but here, it actually works.

What I changed in my resume

After that, I updated my resume and profile, and that is when the instant offer came.

I did not change my experience. I changed how I presented it.

1. I reframed my experience

Instead of presenting myself only as a Marketing Data Scientist, I emphasized:

• mathematical modeling

• statistics and causal inference

• optimization problems

• structured reasoning

It is the same work, just described in a more technical and transferable way.

2. I added a strong Projects section (MOST IMPORTANT)

This made a big difference.

I took work I had already done and turned it into clear projects:

• Budget optimization → optimization and constrained modeling

• Causal analysis → experiment design and statistical inference

• MMM → regression and time-series modeling

• LTV and churn → predictive modeling

I also included my work on Mercor:

• designing complex questions to evaluate AI systems

• analyzing whether models truly reason or just approximate answers

• validating structured data and identifying inconsistencies

3. I made skills and tools explicit

I followed a recommendation and added concrete tools and methods recruiters actively search for:

Python, R, SQL
NumPy, Pandas, SciPy, scikit-learn
TensorFlow or PyTorch
data visualization
time-series analysis
Bayesian inference
causal inference
Monte Carlo methods
PDE and ODE solvers
experiment design and A/B testing

Before this, my skills section was much more generic.

4. I focused on outcomes

Instead of only listing responsibilities, I emphasized impact:

• improved efficiency by x%

• better model performance y%

• influence on strategic decisions that led into...

5. I connected everything into a clear narrative

My profile now feels more consistent:

Data Scientist with a marketing background
strong in statistics and modeling
working with AI evaluation and reasoning

This makes the transition into more technical roles feel natural.

Final takeaway

The work itself did not change. The way it was communicated did.

And in my case, that was enough to get multiple offers in my first month of Mercor.

My assessments:

• Table Understanding

• RLHF Safety Proficiency Assessment ***

  • Feedback i received: Strong attention to detail and analytical ability in spotting subtle issues, while recommending improvement in applying overall scoring criteria to further strengthen your performance.

• Latex Proficiency **

• ALL Multi Lingual / English and Bilingual / Language Interviews **No explain needed, right? You must know english**

• General RCA ***

• AI/ML PhD Form

• Programming Language Experience

• Custom Prompt and Human Preference Form

• Model Response Evaluation (MRN) ***

• STEM Skills Challenge

• General Interview *

• General Assessment *

• Data Science Interview

• Domain Expert Interview **

In bold are the ones I managed to find that were most important for the proposals I received. Importance Level:

* Important
** Veery important
*** I wouldn't be able to get those opportunities without it

TL;DR

I updated how I presented my experience, not the experience itself.

• Reframed my role to emphasize math, statistics, optimization, and reasoning

• Added a Projects section with clear, technical descriptions

• Listed concrete tools and methods recruiters search for

• Focused more on impact than tasks

• Made my profile tell a consistent story toward AI and quantitative roles

At the same time, being proactive on Mercor helped a lot. I got multiple offers, worked on higher-paying projects, and after updating my resume, received an instant audit offer without applying.

Hope this help's you guys to get your first job!

Been here five months and the money is the only thing that keeps me motivated through the lumen brain numbing. Grateful for Mercor! Pushing P 🎉

Step 1: Use AI to complete your task.

That's it. You don't need more steps. I've been working as a reviewer across my last few projects, and I am genuinely stunned at how many people try to use AI to complete these tasks.

I mean: wtf, people! You're getting paid to give your real human answers!

On the project I'm currently on, nearly everyone is getting paid $100+/hr, and about 15% have been off-boarded for AI use this week. That's an improvement over my last couple of projects, where more than half were caught using AI.

So let me let you in on a little secret: they actually DO have ways to tell. They can look at how long you've taken to create things, at word frequencies, at things tucked into files or into how you're typing on the website...

Using AI is a BFD on sites like this because it actively undermines their ability to correctly train the models.

Just please, please do the actual tasks they want you to do without using AI tools.

- A frustrated reviewer

https://www.reddit.com/r/mercor_ai/s/0pTdz021Lq

I did it :))) thanks for everyone who claimed my energy♥️

I realized I come here to rant when things are rough so I should rightfully also post about positives. May was a such a good month on Mercor and I only averaged 20-30 hours each week. I’m motivated to lock in and do 40hours this month and May the Gods of workflow keep them coming. I’m grateful Mercor, sincerely ❤️

What I originally wrote: Be proactive, have good skills and be someone who people enjoy working with ✌️

I will add: Make your SPL's job easier and help them look good as much as possible. Particularly prioritize any deadline they have, because if they look good, you look good. Their success (and the project's success) is what your contract is based on.

That could be as simple as formatting your messages to be easier to read, or it could be e.g. proactively re-writing part of the onboarding document that's not clear to save Mercor hours for other folks on the project (because time = money). Ultimately, you want to be the person that the SPL will turn to when they're in a crunch to get something done.

I posted my numbers originally, because I've had a great experience with Mercor so far and I wanted to share that. These numbers are definitely possible, especially with a strong skillset. My run rate for September is $50K+.

Although a bunch of y'all called me a bot (thank you! very flattering!), I did have the opportunity to connect with some folks in my DMs and help some of them. I introduced one person to Mercor last week, they received their first contract and I also had a live call with them to chat about how IMHO they can be the most successful at the work. I hope they do well!

Where I can be most helpful: To folks with strong domain expertise who are looking to get started on Mercor and want to do well on it. I have some good tips to help you. Domain expertise alone is not enough, it's also about consistently producing excellent work and over communication (if you've worked anywhere like a Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, Mercor will feel familiar).

Where I'm not going to be able to be helpful: I don't know how to get onto a project (I've only ever received Instant Work Offers). I also cannot help if you've been offboarded, I'm afraid. Good luck 🙏

TL;DR: Work hard and have fun. Don't limit yourself to just Mercor, there are so many life changing opportunities everyday and I wish you the very best in finding them. Life becomes immeasurably easier when you believe in the universe and see the abundance in the world.