How to hire a podcast editor in the UK

Most people who set out to hire a podcast editor treat it like buying a microphone: read some reviews, compare prices, pick one. Then they are surprised when the applicants are weak, the first episode comes back wrong and the editor goes quiet in month two. The mistake is upstream. Hiring an editor is a recruitment problem, and the quality of the people who apply is set almost entirely by the brief you wrote. This guide is the recruitment process end to end: where UK editors actually are, what a brief that attracts good ones contains, how to run a paid test, and which questions cannot be bluffed.

Two things it does not cover. Whether you should outsource at all is argued in DIY versus outsourcing, and what an edit should cost is in the editing cost guide.

Where are UK podcast editors actually found?

Four places, and each one changes what kind of person you get.

Freelance marketplaces. Upwork and its competitors give you volume: post a job and you will have thirty proposals by the morning, each with a public review history. The trade is that you are one of many jobs on that editor's board, the reviews measure whether earlier clients were satisfied rather than whether the work was good, and the platform takes a cut that the editor prices in.

Podcast-specific job boards and communities. Smaller pools, better matched. The people here already know the difference between a raw Riverside track and a mixed export, so your brief needs less explaining. The trade is that the best people are usually already busy, and you have less leverage on rate.

Agencies and studios. Some sub-contract individual editors, some run in-house teams. You pay more, and in return one person being ill in week three does not stop your show. Joycast is a small studio, and we say more about the team option further down.

Referrals from other show owners. The strongest evidence you can get: someone whose show you can watch tells you who edits it. What you give up is negotiating position, because an editor who arrives by recommendation knows it, and their rate reflects that.

Whichever you choose, the brief is the same, and it is the part most people rush.

What should a podcast editor brief include?

A vague brief gets vague applicants. "Looking for a podcast editor, weekly show, must be reliable" attracts everyone, which is the same as attracting no one. A specific brief filters the field before you read a single reply, because the wrong people will not apply and the right ones will recognise the work. Every line below does a filtering job.

The show and its audience. One paragraph. A property show, a climate show and a cybersecurity show each want different pacing and a different amount of jargon on screen. Naming the audience lets specialists self-select.

The format. Solo, two-person interview, panel, multicam video with per-speaker remote tracks. Editing a solo audio show and switching a three-camera interview are different jobs with different rates, so this line changes who applies more than any other.

Episode length and cadence. Raw length, not finished length, because raw is what they are cutting. "Ninety minutes raw, cut to about forty-five, weekly" tells an editor whether the job fits round their existing clients.

Deliverables per episode. The full list: the master, the number of short clips and their aspect ratio, whether an intro is wanted, thumbnail, titles, show notes, chapter markers. Editors quote on this list. Leave anything off and it either costs extra later or does not arrive.

How files will be handed over, and how big they are. This is the line almost every brief omits and it is the one that stalls the first week. Raw camera files from a three-angle shoot run about 8.5GB per camera before anything is done to them. Once synced, multicam takes run 9GB to 14GB per angle. Finished masters in our archive run 2.1GB, 3.4GB and one at 16GB, and nearly every finished export we hold is well over 400MB. A brief that does not say how tens of gigabytes get from your machine to the editor's and back will produce an email on day two asking how you would like to send the files, followed by a day of uploading. State the tool (a shared drive, a transfer service, a portal), who pays for it and what happens when a download fails halfway.

Software and what comes back. If you want the Premiere project so a future editor can pick it up, say so. If you only want the exports, say that, because it changes how the editor organises the work.

Who owns the files. You do, and the brief should say it, including project files and raws. Editors who object at brief stage have saved you a conversation later.

What you pay and when. A per-episode figure and a payment cycle. The editors you want will not apply to a brief that says "competitive" because they cannot tell if you mean £40 or £400. If you are benchmarking, a professional UK edit of a full video episode starts around £280, with clips, intros and thumbnails priced on top.

The brief, ready to copy

Paste this into the job post or the email and fill in the brackets.

Show: [name], [one sentence on the audience and subject]
Format: [solo / interview / panel], [audio only / single camera / multicam with per-speaker tracks]
Recorded on: [Riverside / Zoom / in-studio], [number] separate tracks per episode
Raw length: about [X] minutes. Finished length: about [Y] minutes
Cadence: [weekly / fortnightly], published on [day]
Per episode we need:
  - Master episode, [16:9 video / audio], [resolution]
  - [N] short clips at [9:16 / 1:1], captioned [yes / no]
  - Intro: [none / standard / with B-roll and animation]
  - Thumbnail: [yes / no]
  - Title options and show notes: [yes / no]
Handover: raw files arrive via [tool] within [X] days of recording. Expect [X]GB per episode.
Return: finished files land in [folder / portal]. Project file [required / not required].
Software: [Premiere Pro / DaVinci Resolve / other], project returned in [format]
Ownership: all files, including project files and raw media, belong to [show owner]
Pay: £[X] per episode, invoiced [per episode / per four-week cycle], paid within [X] days
Revisions: [state your policy]
First step: one paid test episode at the full rate, then a decision

That last line matters, and it gets its own section.

How do you run a paid test episode?

Pay for one real episode at the rate you would pay every week afterwards. Not a free sample, not a discounted trial, and not an old episode you have already published. An unpaid test attracts people with time on their hands rather than people with clients, and a discount tells the editor what you will think the work is worth later.

Judge two things. The result, obviously: is the cut one you would publish, are the clips the moments you would have chosen, does the audio sit at a consistent level, are names spelled the way you spelled them. And the process, which most people forget to watch. Did the editor ask anything before starting? One who asks about the guest's name spelling, which camera is the host and whether you want the pre-roll chat kept has done this before. Did they flag anything wrong in the source? Real recordings have problems: a track that drops out, a camera that stopped early, a mic that clipped. An editor who quietly works around one of those without telling you will do the same at episode thirty. And did they deliver exactly what was on the list, in the folder you named, in the format you asked for? That check sounds petty. It is the best predictor of what the next fifty handovers will feel like.

Which interview questions cannot be bluffed?

"What software do you use?" tells you nothing. Anyone can name Premiere. The useful questions describe a real fault and ask what the editor would do, because the answers separate someone who has handled an actual archive from someone who has watched tutorials. Each question below comes from something seen in our own work.

"The guest's track is missing from the multicam for twenty minutes. The transcript has blank timestamp gaps where they were clearly talking. What do you do?" On one four-episode interview show, three of the four episodes came in with the guest's separate remote track absent from the finished multicam transcript, leaving long stretches with a timestamp and no words. The guest's audio existed the whole time as a separate per-speaker file. A good answer: stop, check the raw per-speaker files, re-sync the missing track, and tell the client the session was fine but the package was incomplete. A weak answer talks about cutting round it.

"Every speaker in the transcript is labelled Unknown. How do you attribute the quotes?" Premiere's automatic transcription does not identify speakers by name. Across the shows we edit, every auto-transcript comes back labelled Unknown or Speaker 1, 2, 3, so every attribution in the show notes and every caption on a clip has to be inferred from context and checked against the picture. An editor puzzled by the question has not worked from a transcript on a multi-speaker show.

"The spoken intro says the guest runs Denby Joinery. Every filename says Denholm Joinery. Which goes in the title?" The editor cannot know, and the right answer is "neither, until I have asked". The wrong answer is picking one. A candidate who says they would check with you before export is telling you they will not publish a guessed spelling.

"Two guests in one episode. One transcribes cleanly and gives five usable quotes. The other comes back as single words: Right, Yeah, Was also. What can you do with the second one?" Nothing in an edit recovers that. The honest answer is that it needs re-transcribing from the original synced audio, or re-recording, and the client needs to hear that early rather than after the clips are cut. Candidates who claim they can fix it in post are guessing.

"How do you want the files delivered, and why?" The "why" is the point. Editors who have done this have a preference and a reason: separate per-speaker tracks rather than the mix, camera files named by angle, the episode number in every filename. Ask because mislabelling is not hypothetical. We have opened a transcript filed under EP03 that turned out to document EP04's conversation, and found EP15's files sitting inside the EP14 folder. Both took time to untangle and both could have sent the wrong episode out. An editor with a system for this has been burned by it.

Should you hire one editor or a team?

Neither answer is right for everyone, so here is the honest version of both.

A freelance editor is cheaper, and on craft is often better: one person who knows your show, cuts every episode, and gets steadily faster at hearing what you would cut. The cost is continuity. Freelancers take holidays, get ill, take on a larger client, and sometimes stop replying. If a missed week matters, one person is a single point of failure, and no amount of interviewing changes that.

A team costs more per episode and covers the gap. The work is documented so a second editor can pick it up, and an editor's holiday is the team's problem rather than yours. What you lose is the single relationship, unless the team keeps a named editor on your show, which is worth asking about before you agree to anything.

Specialist knowledge cuts across both. A team that has cut episodes across property, climate, crypto, recruitment, AI policy, cybersecurity and the trades has seen most formats before, but so has a freelancer with a long client list. What you are really buying with a team is cover, not talent. Our own client library only counts shows with three or more episodes of real work, and it includes a show at 79 episodes and another past 40, the kind of run length where continuity matters more than any single edit.

Joycast is a small studio: Matt leads every edit, with a second editor alongside. A base edit is £280 per episode, clips are £35 or £65 each, intros £100 or £220, thumbnails £40, titles with show notes £30, with 10% off at three or more episodes in a four-week cycle. We bill per four-week cycle with no minimum term, revise until you are happy, and the files are yours. That is one option among the four in the table above, not the conclusion of the article. If you have a strong referral to a freelancer with capacity, take it.

Where to start

Write the brief first, using the template above, before you post anywhere. Then pick your channel, ask the questions, and pay for one test episode at the full rate. If the answers and the episode are both good, you have hired well. If either is not, the brief is still written and the next candidate costs you an afternoon.

For the wider decision, how to choose a production company covers the contract terms and what full service should mean. If you would like Joycast on the shortlist, spec the episode on the configurator.