Most content moderation in the world is done by people who don't work for the app or website whose rules they're applying. They work for an outsourcing company (people in the field call it a "vendor" or a "BPO") that the platform pays to do the work. The rules belong to a client you may never talk to, and the software you work in was set up by someone on their side.
Almost everything written about Trust & Safety careers is written from the platform's side. This one is written from yours.
The ladder, one step at a time
There is a ladder here, and it goes higher than the field usually admits. It's mostly invisible from outside because the job titles mean something different elsewhere. An operations manager at an outsourcer and one at a platform have the same words on their business cards and pretty different days.
- Agent or moderator. You review posts against the client's rules, with a daily target. What gets you the next step: being consistent, and being the person coworkers ask.
- Subject expert or senior agent. You take the hardest cases and give second opinions on other people's calls. Next step: a record of decisions that held up when quality checkers reviewed them.
- Team lead. Ten to twenty people: coaching, schedules, the daily numbers. Next step: covering for your lead and keeping the numbers steady.
- Quality or training. You check other reviewers' work and teach each new group. Next step: written feedback that changed how somebody worked.
- Operations manager. Several teams, staffing, and the weekly meeting with the client. Next step: being responsible for a number the client watches every week.
- Site or account lead. The contract, how many people it pays for, and the client relationship. To get here, you have to be comfortable talking about profit, hiring fast and people quitting.
What changes when the platform isn't your employer
Whose rules
At the platform: Yours to argue with
At the outsourcer: The client's, and any argument goes through your account team
Whose tools
At the platform: Yours to report bugs in
At the outsourcer: The client's software, usually a stripped-down version
Whose targets
At the platform: Set with the team, and revisited
At the outsourcer: Written into a contract signed before you were hired
Who knows your name
At the platform: The people who wrote the rules
At the outsourcer: Rarely anyone at the client
What you can talk about later
At the platform: Most of it
At the outsourcer: Whatever your confidentiality agreement allows
That last row stings a bit. The client's public report counts your decisions. It doesn't count you.
Write it down while you're still there
The biggest disadvantage of working at an outsourcer is proof. Someone at the platform has a performance record anyone can look up two years later. Yours lives in the client's software, which you lose access to on your last day, under a login that isn't even your name. So keep your own record from the first month, and leave out anything you're not allowed to take.
- How many cases you handled and your quality score, month by month. Nobody keeps this for you after you leave.
- The kinds of harm you actually worked on, in the words the field uses: child safety, violent extremism, self-harm, fraud, spam.
- The languages and countries you covered, and roughly how much of your work each one was.
- Hard cases you handled from start to finish. One line each, no case numbers, no user details.
- How many people you trained, coached or covered for, if you ever did.
- Who the client was, if your agreement lets you say. If it doesn't, "a major video platform" is a normal thing to write, and everyone will understand it.
What comes with you, and what stays behind
What you did, and how much of it, carries over. A hiring manager in this field reads "eighteen months on minor safety at 250 decisions a day, 94% quality score, Portuguese and Spanish" as exactly what it is, whoever was paying you. Making good calls under time pressure carries. So does keeping your decisions consistent with your team's, and so does having taught it.
What stays behind is anything that only makes sense inside one contract: internal tool names, the client's scoring system, the four-letter code for a rule nobody outside has heard of. Translate those into plain words before they reach a resume, or they'll read as noise to everyone except the handful of people who worked on the same account. The field already has enough acronyms.
Getting hired by the platform
It happens regularly, and it's the move most people at an outsourcer are quietly working toward. Two things help.
First, apply where your experience makes obvious sense. Platform jobs that manage outsourcers, check quality, run training or run programs are hired by people who know exactly what your day looked like, and they're a shorter jump than a job writing the rules. Second, the client's own managers have watched you work. When one of them moves into a job at the platform, they remember names.
One honest caveat. Some hiring managers see outsourcing experience as second tier, and no amount of resume polish will change that particular reader's mind. The ones worth working for don't, and that includes most people who've done this job themselves.
Further reading
- Frontline jobs on the board. Moderation and review jobs, from agent level up
- T&S Compensation. Pay by level and region, by the year, month or hour
- Where the job goes after moderation. The five routes up, and roughly what each one takes
- Doing the work without taking it home. Looking after yourself, written for people still reviewing content