What the work involves

You'll be handed the kinds of artifacts you already produce or critique in your day job — earnings scripts, IR Q&A prep, investor decks, DCF and comps models, MD&A excerpts, S-1 sections, research notes — and asked to judge them against a rubric. Some tasks are pairwise: two model outputs, pick the better one and explain the margin in writing. Others are single-response grading, where you flag factual errors, mislabeled line items, broken accounting identities, misapplied multiples, or language that would draw a Reg FD or forward-looking-statement problem. A meaningful share of the work is rewriting: producing the reference answer a model should have given, at the standard of something you'd send to a CFO before an earnings call.

The written justification carries as much weight as the score. "The comp set is wrong" is not useful; "the comp set includes two companies with materially different revenue mix and no adjustment to EV/EBITDA for the lease treatment difference" is. Reviewers who can articulate why a plausible-looking output is wrong are the ones who stay on projects.

What the platform screens for

Mercor runs an AI-led video interview before any human sees your profile. It probes your résumé for specifics — which deals, which coverage sectors, which parts of the earnings cycle you actually owned — and follows up when answers stay at the level of a job description. Expect technical depth checks on things a finance generalist could not fake: how a working capital swing flows through three statements, what you'd do with a non-GAAP reconciliation that doesn't tie, how you'd handle an analyst question the IR team didn't prep for. Then it asks about availability and holds you to it.

Logistics

  • Fully remote; eligibility limited to the US, Europe, UK, or Canada
  • Asynchronous with deadline windows — you choose hours, but batches have due dates
  • Typically 10–20 hours per week, sometimes scaling up during active project phases
  • Hourly, invoiced through the platform; the $80–160 range is what has been observed and varies by project and seniority, not a guarantee
  • Compatible with full-time employment for most people, subject to your employer's policies and any restrictions on outside work in regulated roles