Working with an outsourced moderation team

A lot of the everyday reviewing in Trust & Safety is done by outside companies hired to do it. In the industry these are called vendors or BPOs (business process outsourcing). The people doing that work will never show up on the platform's org chart, but someone at the platform is in charge of the relationship. This guide is for that person.

Done well, the job is checking quality, planning how many reviewers you'll need, and being an honest partner. Done the way most contracts quietly encourage, it's nodding at a monthly slide full of green numbers while the real work drifts somewhere else.

Read the contract like you'll live with it

Because you will. These are the parts that decide your year:

• How much work, in which languages. Get a guaranteed number of reviewers for each language and type of work, not one big total that hides the small markets.
• The quality bar. Measured how, checked by whom, against whose scoring guide? A vendor grading its own work by its own guide is marking its own homework.
• Growing and shrinking. How fast they can add reviewers when reports spike, and what a rush costs you.
• Wellbeing support. Counseling, rotating people off the hardest content, limits on how much they see, and protective tools, written into the contract rather than assumed.
• Leaving. How much notice, how the handover works, and what happens to all those trained reviewers when you go.

Reading the rules the same way

Your policy is the written rules for what's allowed on your platform. The moment it crosses to another company, it starts to drift, because every unclear sentence gets read twice: once by your team and once by theirs. The fix is calibration. Both teams look at the same hard cases together, see where they'd make different calls, and talk it through.

Do it with the vendor exactly as you do it in-house. Hold shared sessions on the same tricky examples. Talk through disagreements instead of scoring and punishing them. Walk through rule changes live instead of emailing a list of edits. A vendor team that can ask you "what did you mean by this line?" without filing a form is worth more than a point on the quality score.

A quarterly review that isn't just a show

Skip the slide deck of green numbers. You've seen it. It's always green. Ask for these instead:

• Ten cases you pick, worked live: five where the vendor's call differed from your quality checkers, and five from the messy middle.
• The confusion list: rules their reviewers keep flagging as unclear, with counts.
• One number they're worried about, which they raised before you found it.
• Wellbeing support people actually used: how many saw a counselor, and whether rotation happened.

That last one gives it away. A vendor that reports how many people really used the support is running the operation you think you paid for. A vendor that tells you the program exists, attendance unknown, is reading you a brochure.

Looking after people crosses the contract too

Outside companies handle more than their share of the most disturbing content in the industry, often with the least power to demand support. Some of this field's worst chapters happened exactly there. Hiring out the work doesn't hire out the responsibility.

In practice, put wellbeing support in the contract with the same weight as the quality bar, and check it the same way. Make sure the reviewers at the vendor have the same blur and mute settings your own team would refuse to work without. If a bid is cheaper because that part is missing, it isn't cheaper. You can hire out the reviewing. You can't hire out what the reviewing does to the people doing it.

When the numbers slip

• Tell a bad month from a pattern before you raise the alarm. One missed target is noise. Three is a conversation with the vendor's site manager.
• Ask what changed on their side: people quitting, a new client, a gap in training. Vendors work for lots of clients, and your team feels the weather from the others.
• Try fixing it together first. Another round of calibration and training beats contract penalties, which mostly buy you resentment.
• Keep a record of what you raised and when. If it does end with you leaving, that file makes it a decision rather than a grudge.
• Remember the people aren't the company. The reviewers working your cases tomorrow are the same ones from the awkward meeting, and some of them will be your coworkers one day.