Copywriter
Freelance · Two pieces a week, edited by hand
Make our writing sound like a person wrote it.
About us
Attuned is a Tokyo-based software company built with organizational psychologists. We measure what drives people at work across 11 intrinsic motivators, then help line managers do something with that in their next one-on-one.
We publish a lot: blog articles on motivation and management, plus landing pages for the leaders who buy our software. More and more of it starts as an AI-assisted draft, and some of it reads that way.
About the role
We need a human editor with a good ear. You’ll read our blog articles and landing pages and show us where they sound machine-made. What we want is the genuine article: not the indefinite kind, which could be any article at all, and not the definite kind, which has made its mind up before the reader has. (Apologies. Cutting sentences like that is most of the job.)
You won’t use AI for any of it. No ChatGPT or Claude, no “make this sound more human” prompts. This is editing the slow way: read it twice, then mark it up, with nothing fancier than spell-check. Most pieces take 30 to 60 minutes.
What you’ll do
- Review two pieces a week, blog articles or landing pages, some from the back catalog and some published that week
- Cut the parts that read as AI-written: stock openers, claims with nothing behind them, lists of three for the sake of three, conclusions that just repeat the intro
- Make each piece easier to read, so a busy line manager can skim it and still get the point
- Keep it in Attuned’s voice (below) and inside our writing guidelines, which we’ll send before your first piece
- Flag where a claim needs a source, or where the psychology is being stretched further than the research goes
What you’ll hand back
For every piece, one document (Google Docs is fine) with:
- Line-by-line edits in suggestion mode or tracked changes, so we can see both versions
- A comment on each meaningful change saying why. “Reads better” doesn’t count; “three sentences in a row open with ‘This’” does
- A few lines at the top on what should change in the piece as a whole and why, plus the one fix you’d make if you could make only one
Here’s the kind of note we mean:
But although this can work in some contexts, research shows that relying on extrinsic motivation alone does more harm than good.
Bonuses can get dull work done. But Deci, Koestner and Ryan’s 1999 meta-analysis of 128 experiments found that tangible rewards tend to undermine intrinsic motivation for tasks people already find interesting.
“Some contexts” and “research shows” both ask the reader to take it on trust. Name the study, and say which tasks.
What Attuned sounds like
Think of an organizational psychologist who has read the papers, sat through the management meetings, and finds the gap between the two faintly funny.
Informed
We do the reading, so a claim comes with the study’s name and its figures.
Rooted in psychology
We name the motivator doing the work (autonomy, say, or feedback) and how it changes what people do, rather than leaving it at “engagement.”
A little irreverent
We’ll poke at management fads and the annual engagement survey, dryly, and never at the reader’s expense.
Requirements
Must have
- Native English speaker
- A degree from a university in Canada, the US or Europe
- Editing or copywriting experience you can show us: published work, a portfolio, or pieces you’ve edited
- An ear for rhythm and very little patience for filler
- Deadlines you keep without being chased
Nice to have
- A background in psychology, organizational behavior or HR
- B2B or content marketing experience
- SEO basics, so you know not to cut the search phrase a page is built around
- Some familiarity with Japan or Japanese business culture
What we offer
Your markups go straight to whoever owns the piece, and you’ll see what they kept. Two pieces turn up every week, so there’s no hunting for the next gig, and the subject is the psychology of why people bother at work.
Details
| Contract | Freelance (independent contractor) |
|---|---|
| Rate | US$20 an hour |
| Hours | Up to 10 hours a month |
| Workload | Two blog articles or landing pages a week, one or two per hour |
| Location | Remote, anywhere |
| Tools | Google Docs or Word, in suggestion mode or tracked changes |
Our values
- Be Ethical: fairness and consideration guide what we do
- Own It: ownership over excuses
- Kind-hearted: kindness is the strongest tool we have
- Deeply Understanding the Customer: start from their view, stay humble
- Try-Assess-Tweak: try it, measure it, keep improving it
- Add Lift, Not Drag: be the thing that moves work forward
- Transparent: openness is what builds trust
Interested?
Send us your CV and a link to writing or editing you’ve done.
Then show us how you edit. Pick any article on our blog, mark up the first 300 words or so, and add a line on why for each change. Budget about 20 minutes.
Apply nowUsing webmail? Email us directly:
We don’t read applications that skip the editing sample.
