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Replacing 5-Star Average Feedback with Job Success Score

garnorm
Community Member

Hi all,

We remove 5-star average feedback entirely, and display only your Job Success score throughout most of the Upwork site. 5-star feedback given per contract will remain displayed on your Work History.

 

We’re making this decision because we’ve seen Job Success scores help top performing freelancers win more contracts. This means clients are having better experiences and coming back for more, which in turn benefits the marketplace and generates more opportunities for freelancers overall. The score helps freelancers at all levels stand out from the competition by presenting clients with a complete picture of their differences. This is an opportunity to help freelancers continue to grow their businesses that we can’t pass up.

 

Additionally, you can learn more about Job Success score and how it's calculated in our help article.

540 Comments
droleary
Community Member

@Garnor M wrote:

As outlined in our blog post, starting September 8th, we’ll remove 5-star average feedback entirely, and display only your Job Success score throughout most of the Upwork site.


Yay, here comes an Upwork world where a freelancer with 5 star feedback will be advertised as only achieving 82% success.


We’re making this decision because we’ve seen Job Success scores help top performing freelancers win more contracts.


An Upwork world where newcomers are not welcome.


The score helps freelancers at all levels stand out from the competition by presenting clients with a complete picture of their differences.


Only if by "complete picture" you mean calculated in a way that is completely opaque, reducing their differences to a single number in a narrow range that often bares no relation to the reality of how some clients use this site.


You can also read more about improving your score here.


No, we can't.  That's just some generic advice for working professionally.  I already know how to do that.  What I don't know how to specifically do is improve my JSS on Upwork.  When will that article be written?

 

stephenbrightman
Community Member

Oh what a surprise. You have made a decision for everybody's good, by taking away something everyone was used to and replacing it with a dark, mysterious, secretive metric which has been shown on the forums to be universally despised. You keep saying it's because clients prefer it, but we never hear from any of them.

 

By the way, I presume this means that you're introducing a job success score for clients? - because nowhere does it say that this only applies to freelancers (oh, sorry, we didn'tthink that bit was important.)

 

I'm sick to the stomach at this. Not because I'm afraid for my job success score - but because of the way Upwork has once again treated its freelancers, with downright and utter contempt. I could go on but a) I've work to do while it's still there, and b) no doubt if I said anything too unsupportive of this new imposition then I'd just have it deleted as par for the course. OK - here's the most supportive thing I can think of - at least you put it in the announcements section this time instead of sneaking it into the middle of an old post. Bravo.

prestonhunter
Community Member

Stephen,

I DO understand why this makes you feel uncomfortable. But I hope you don't mind me pointing out that with your (extremely high) job success score, this can only help you.

 

And as much as as this may make you feel sick because of how it was done... I think this has long been telegraphed.

 

I totally agree with many of your points. You're right. There are problems with this.

 

But I think an even more pressing concern is that there are so many contractors on Upwork without the professionalism and skills that clients are looking for. I see this as a good thing for everybody. Even contractors with lower job success scores will benefit because this helps increase client satisfaction, return client business, and means more jobs for everybody.

tedjoshuaangelo
Community Member

RIP Graphic Design, Article Writing and Telemarketing.

 

I still support the idea though! Just want to know if the roll-out includes JS for agencies?

stephenbrightman
Community Member

@Preston

 

like I said, I'm not bothered about my own score, but about the way Upwork continues to tread its freelancers into the ground while giving clients a free run on practically everything.

 

I won't hold my breath waiting for a job success score for clients...

 

but, thinking this though more - if the clients' average is removed, and they don't have a job success score, then how is a freelancer supposed to vet a client, apart from looking back at every job to see the individual score?

 

Except oh, I forgot - you can't do that, because these days most clients only have a small fracttion of their jobs listed on a job page. So freelancers get the short straw again - they're responsible for choosing cients with practically no information to go on now; and of course if they choose a wrong one, whose fault is it??

prestonhunter
Community Member

Stephen,

I don't have an answer for you about how contractor's can assess past contractor's evaluation of clients other than looking at their individual feedback scores.

 

I assume that Upwork's announcement means that client star-based feedback scores will removed.

 

This would be less of a problem if it was easy to see all the client's feedback scores.


Really, I would PREFER to be able to see all the individual feedback scores. That IS something I look at. But the ability to see this has been buggy and unreliable lately.

 

On the upside, we still CAN see where clients are from, how much money that have spent, their average hourly rate paid out, their hire rate, and whether they are payment-verified or not. That's quite a bit of information, in addition to individual feedback ratings and comments from past contractors, when that's available and to whatever extent it is available.

sdunkel
Community Member

Now that is as smart as a couple of other decisions, starting with using the buggy, complicated, mystic oDesk platform and dumping the far better, stable and bug-free Elance platform.

 

While it is hard to fail on distributing 5 sets of stars, just a short moment of not paying attention when selecting reason for termination is enough to ruin one's job success score. And who is going to understand this score?

 

I have 4.99 stars and a job success rate that is jumping between 88% and 93% several times throughout the day. A number that can only be caused by a click on the wrong item. Except for one client, everyone received excellent service. Otherwise, why 4.99 stars?

 

 

I have just read through the information that has been new to me. I was actually expecting to be notified of changes by email. Anyway, why do you want to punish the freelancer for clients' inactivity or failing to provide feedback? On one hand you say that you encourage long-term relationships but contracts with low to no activity are being punished.

 

Most ridiculous is that obviously nobody listens to seasoned professionals here. Instead of considering their opinions, you simply defend your point blindly and at all costs.

yitwail
Community Member

I read the blog post by Jeff Chen alluded to by Garnor, and this is what was stated there:

 

"Currently, when a client views your profile, they see your Job Success score alongside your 5-star average feedback. Starting September 8, we’ll remove 5-star average feedback entirely, and display only your Job Success score throughout most of the Upwork site. 5-star feedback given per contract will remain displayed on your Work History."

 

Note that he only discusses what clients will see. Unless I overlooked something, he did not explicitly say freelancers will no longer see clients' 5-star average feedback when viewing Job Feed. It would be nice if a moderator would confirm or deny whether client 5-star average feedback will also be removed.

kochubei_valeria
Community Member

Hi Stephen and others,

 

Thank you for your feedback. We don’t have a public version of a client Job Success score developed at this time, but it may be something we explore in the future. However, we do contact or close the accounts of clients who have had a poor track record of collaboration with freelancers. 5-star average feedback for clients will remain visible on job postings.

mark8979
Community Member

I read that post as well and the article that it directs to about improving the JSS.

 

It doesn't cover issues about how do you deal with new elements being brought in like what to do about Upwork suddenly closing inactive contracts then hammering your job success score because of it.

 

The JSS is a disgrace, it is secretive and unfairly penalises freelancers for inactivity and apathy by clients.

 

How about introducing an Upwork success score and making that public?

 

Every time there is a 'bug', such as job applications - sorry proposals, going missing, or profiles vanishing, or native English speaker being ineligible to apply for jobs that need English speakers, and the 101 other things that are discussed in the forums, Upwork gets marked down and the score is publicly displayed.

 

These new initiative are just window dressing  to cover up all the problems that are still ongoing.

 

Rant for the evening over