The basics: I applied via the website, took a short grammar test which had me correct some obvious, less obvious, and (frankly) some not very important grammar problems. I received an automated email with a copy of four very different types of writing that I had to edit and send back within a day. It was supposed to take three hours and it did. Seemed like a lot for unpaid time though. After ten days, I received another automated email (I've never heard from anyone in this company personally which is never a good sign) saying there were too many errors in my mock editing assignment.
The details and my opinion: If you have even the smallest desire to collaborate on some level with the author of the piece of writing I doubt this is a good fit for you. I've worked as a tutor for writing for many, many years, and as an English professor for a while as well. I have a Bachelor's and Master's in English and received straight As throughout my English programs. Now, I've known a lot of pretentious people in this field, and I hope that it's clear that I'm not one of those in this review, but you can feel free to think what you want. I'm just trying to help others...and yes, perhaps get out some of my annoyance.
I recognize that tutoring and editing are very different, that providing feedback for a student and editing a lab report are very different things. One (tutoring/teaching) is obviously much more involved and collaborative than the other (editing). However, I've come to understand that writing (even grammar) is not black and white, correct or incorrect, but rather a much grayer area. From my limited experience, this organization does not think that way; instead, they see black and white, wrong and right, and delight (like many) in being right, correct, and telling others they are wrong. I had hoped for more understanding of the complex and always somewhat naturally collaborative relationship between writer and editor. This hope was encouraged by the invitation in the sample editing assignment to use the comment function to ask questions of the author. Perhaps this was some sort of trick though, and I would discourage applicants from doing this actually, as it seems unlikely these comments are read. My suspicion is that the paper is simply reviewed by a grammar-mistake-identifying software (which obviously can't think like a human and understand comments with questions).
I believe that the goal for remote editor is to create a human correcting machine, like a program that detects and fixes errors without concern for the author's intentions; I believe that the editing work I did on the sample pieces was not reviewed by a human - it was reviewed by a similar kind of software that detects errors.
If you like to think that writing, editing, and grammar, are fully black and white, correct and incorrect, and you get some level of joy out of telling people who, in other contexts, would be smarter than you, that they've used a comma incorrectly, then this is the job for you. Make sure you use that grammar correcting software that probably exists out there on the Internet (that my students use that makes their papers even more unintelligible) on your sample editing passages before you email them back to human resources for review.
