What happens after you apply

I have applied to this work myself, on micro1, Mercor and Ethos, and been paid for it. Almost nothing about the process is what people expect. This is what I wish someone had told me before the first one.

The interview is an AI, and it opens the same way every time

There is no call with a person. An AI asks you to briefly describe your experience, then builds on whatever you said, asking follow-up questions and listening to the answers. Once you have done one, the shape is familiar.

Some roles add a written exercise on a timer. In one of mine I had to explain how I would prepare an executive presentation, how I would build the storyline and which charts I would use, and then actually write part of the outline. It is closer to a work sample than to an interview.

That opening question matters more than it looks, because everything after it is generated from your answer. A vague summary produces vague questions and a weak transcript. Make it specific to the role you are applying to.

Four things I would do before starting

1. Read the topic screen first. There is normally a screen before the interview that describes which areas will be covered. It is easy to click past. Do not.
2. Prepare with an AI. Take those topics and rehearse, especially concrete examples from your own experience. You are about to be asked for examples, so have them ready rather than inventing them live.
3. Make the experience summary match the role. Same career, different emphasis each time.
4. Upload a tailored CV every time. The hiring manager is different on every project, so the thing worth highlighting changes. A generic CV wastes the one chance you get to point at what matters.

What to ask for, and who is even asking

This is where real money is won and lost, and the platforms do not work the same way. On micro1 you name your own rate. On Ethos, when I applied, you could not: it was fixed per role, $80 or $100 depending on the role. On Mercor the band comes from the platform.

Top of each advertised band, counted once per distinct rate so a platform repeating one band across hundreds of listings cannot skew it. Method on the methodology page.

What worked for me, and this is one person's experience rather than a rule. On Mercor I asked for the highest rate I could, and it landed once, on a project where they were clearly short of people. On micro1 I aimed at roughly 5 to 10 percent below the top of the advertised band (on a role advertising up to $80/hr, that is about $74/hr) and that worked.

The asymmetry is worth naming. Asking near the top costs you nothing on the roles that are desperate, and those exist. Asking far below the band costs you the difference for every hour you go on to work, and nothing later in the process corrects it upward. Nothing in this directory is listed below $10 an hour, so if a conversation drifts under that, it has left the part of this market the site is about.

Apply wider than feels right

Getting in is harder than the work afterwards. Project requirements are often vague, and you may well fit a role you have talked yourself out of. Most of this work comes down to looking at what a model produced and explaining what was good or bad about it, and a lot of ordinary professional judgement transfers straight into that.

So apply to everything that roughly fits. The cost of a application you do not get is an hour. The cost of not applying is the whole project.

The thing that actually decided it for me was speed

This is the advice I would keep if I could only keep one. Apply the day a role appears.

I waited two days before doing an interview once, and missed the first wave of a project because of it. I got in on the second wave. Projects fill in waves, and the first one is the one with room in it. Two days was the whole difference.

That is genuinely why this site exists. I got tired of finding out about roles late, so I built something that watches the platforms for me, and then made it public because the problem is not mine alone. If you take one thing from this page, make it the alert rather than the rate advice.

What other people report

My own experience covers three platforms. Where other applicants have described a process publicly, it matches what I saw, and adds two details worth knowing.

• micro1's AI interviewer is called Zara, and it is asynchronous and recorded, so you answer in your own time rather than booking a slot. It also asks for a government ID upload before you can finish, which some applicants stop at. Worth deciding how you feel about that before you start. Source.
• On Mercor, some roles include a task of around 25 minutes where you share your screen, and replies tend to come back quickly compared with ordinary hiring. Source.

For the other platforms in this directory I have neither applied myself nor found a description worth reprinting. When that changes it goes here, with its source attached.

Applied recently and found something different? Tell me at contact@aipaylist.com and I will correct this page. Some outbound links are referral links, which never affect what is listed here or how it is ranked. Details on the disclosure page.