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Steady work beats bonus payouts
Why experts show up
Mercor credits its supply of experts first to the experience: getting paid on time, well, and transparently, with everyone involved caring whether the work is dignified and fairly paid. That is a requirement for a great referral program, since nobody refers friends to a job that sucks. A sourcing team that finds people in every corner of the world with very specific skills fills the gaps when demand spikes for one skill set.
What brings them back
Competitors do crazy bonus payouts for short-term sprints, and that doesn't get people to come back as much. What does is a lot of work, visibility into what's coming up, the feeling of growing a skill set, a choice between a few jobs, interesting work, and great communication from the people running the project.
Long-term pay
Signing up for online work is a foreign experience, and getting hit with a 100-page instruction document is part of it. Knowing you'll be paid highly for a long time for something you can do for a long time is what keeps people interested.
Why do short bonuses fade as motivators?
Psychologists call it the overjustification effect, where an outside reward replaces a person's own reason for doing something. In a 1973 experiment by Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett, preschoolers who were promised a reward for drawing later drew less on their own than children who were not.
How does skill growth keep workers engaged?
Self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, names three needs that sustain motivation: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Growing a skill speaks to competence, a choice among jobs to autonomy, and clear communication from project leads to relatedness. Researchers have used the theory to study work motivation in many countries since the 1980s.
Why do referrals tend to lower turnover?
A 2015 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by Stephen Burks and colleagues examined referred and non-referred hires at firms in several industries. Referred workers were generally less likely to quit. Referrers put their own reputation behind a candidate and can describe what the job is really like, so mismatches shrink.
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