Five Years of Editorial Benchmarking at a Leading Academic Publisher

“We''ve used EditingTests.com for five years. The percentile data is genuinely useful in ways other tests are not.”

— Editorial Director, Academic Publisher

The Challenge

An academic publisher specialising in peer-reviewed science journals had been relying on informal editorial tasks and CV review to hire editors for over a decade. The problem was not that they hired badly — it was that they had no way to know whether they were hiring well. Without benchmarks, they could not compare candidates across hiring rounds, could not track whether their editorial standards were consistent across imprints, and could not demonstrate to senior management why one candidate was chosen over another.

The Solution

The Editorial Director introduced EditingTests.com as a sitewide standard in 2021. Every candidate for any editorial position above assistant level was required to complete the Editing Test and Proofreading Test before interview. Internal benchmarks were set by testing 40 existing team members across seniority levels, creating a calibrated performance distribution specific to the publisher''s own standards. New hires were assessed against both the global EditingTests.com percentile database and the internal benchmark.

The Results

Over five years of continuous use, the publisher hired 34 editors through the EditingTests.com process. The Editorial Director reports that the percentile data has been the most valuable element: "We know exactly where each hire sat in the global distribution. When a hire performs well, we can see in retrospect that their score predicted it. When someone underperforms, we can often trace it to a borderline score we accepted under time pressure." The publisher has since extended the use of EditingTests.com to its training programme, using the tests as pre/post assessments for editorial development courses.