Replacing 5-Star Average Feedback with Job Success Score

[garnorm]

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.

[zaqaryan]

Guys, you just can't simply ruin the fundamental metric everyone worked so hard to keep high during YEARS of work.

I want to point out the issue I had recently. During all these years you could change your feedback score, but you are unable to change the reason why contract ended, which affects Job Success score the most. 

So, in case if you had misunderstanding and client closed the job with negative feedback and low star rate, you could argue/correct something/do some extra work and make him happy. Client will change his feedback, but technically there is no way to change the initial reason why contract ended.

So please, rethink this decision, this was really a bad surprise.

[saja-89]

Upwork just keeps destroying new website with logicless rules...I can't believe you are closing Elance...Elance is something, upwork will never achieve...website is down almost all the time..I need to wait for site to release the money, like 10days, now this? You are making all of our previous efforts meaningless... such a pitty.

[oleg-kislitsyn]

What a great time for your competitors.

1. You will loose a lot of old users. They will not be satisfied by ruining their hard work.

2. You won’t get a lot of new users. It’s really hard to get a first job. But to get a Job Success Score you need to get not 1, but more complete contracts.

I hope that you won’t do this mistake.

[bonniejean7]

You are so right Stephen.

I have compelted 4 jobs successfully, in good time, though one of them has a client issue and it was locked on their end.  For some reason I don't have a job success score, despite responding to interviews and the like in a timely manner and applying for lots of positions.  I may have quickly got those 4 jobs, but what about the people who are brand new to the site?  They will be up a creek waiting for someone to "take a chance" on them.  Not to mention, it is already hard enough to get paid fair rates for what I do.  I have already been passed over by several jobs saying my rates are two high.  These clients are already only paying less than minimum wage on average. It is frustrating, especially since when applying to jobs we don't get to see anything about the potential client.  I have to read between the line of the job post and determine if they will be someone I would want to work with. 

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts... back to waiting on jobs I go.

[rpbservices]

As many scammers as are currently on Upwork, I don't see this working out for freelancers at all. Over 50% of the clients I have come in contact with have been scammers that wanted work done for free or extremely cheap rates. Then when you don't comply, they leave negative feedback which lowers your job success score. This is why Elance is ten times better than Upwork, but with the merging of Odesk and Elance, this is only going to result in a disaster. 

Instead of penalizing talented freelancers for the actions of scammers, how about eliminating the scammers from the site? On Odesk, well over half of all clients are scammers, while on Elance, I have only encountered maybe 10-20% at the most. It's still enough to keep scores much lower than they should be. Eliminate scammers and you eliminate the only problem.

[mjarkin]

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[garnorm]

Hi all,

We're finding many of our responses to your comments/questions are getting buried in this discussion thread. To help you find our replies, we've created this "FAQ" thread here. We've summarized the most common questions/comments we're seeing in this and other threads following this announcement. We hope this helps. 

Thanks,

Garnor

[suznee]

Can one of the mods clarify something for me. I recently hired someone and when the job was complete I gave him good feedback. He did a great job and quickly, but when I gave feedback it was based on the five star system and one question of Would I recommend..... and a question on was there anything I thought Upwork could improve.

So if you take away the 5 star feedback that leaves only the one question to base JS on. There is nothing else. Unless you are marking freelancers down for remarks made about what could be improved on Upwork.

I really would like to know how you can seriously base a huge chunk of the JS system on a question that was designed for companies with a product and on 1 question that should be related to your company and your employees, and base it on an individual person (which by the way we are the product here) not the employee.

I think this is going to self implode. I wanted to be supportive for a long time in what you were doing, but you are just sticking it to yourself every time you turn around a corner.

I wish you good luck, but I doubt your numbers are going to continue going up because you are treating freelancers like employees and low employees at that.

I worked for a company like that once. You know what they closed up shop in x amount of states because their grand ideas which did not include feedback from the employees blew up in their face.

[j_peloquin]

I'm glad that before I started my rant that you where already on point with this foolish change, thank you Stephen. I agree with the points you brought up and have the same feeling about this change. 

[j_peloquin]

If the system Upwork used was more on point I might have a different attitude, but I had a 4.98 rating and a 90% success rate (the 10% came from not fully understanding how the system worked at first), I had one client that ended up dropping me down to 86%, after that occured I had about 5 contracts that I ended successfully (short jobs that I only took in order to boost my rating back up), but havn't seen an improvement in my job completion score at all. I don't understand how if one unsuccessful gig dropped me that low, that 5 successful contracts didn't raise me back up at all.

The 5 star rating system was really the most useful tool I had considering that most of the writing gigs (I do other types of work but that is my main focus) are flooded with low charging freelancers. I have only been on here for a little more than a year, but went out of my way to climb and establish a good profile, or the best profile I could make. To me this is putting the blame on freelancers instead of trying to promote higher quailty clients to join the site. There is also the issue, if I go to compete with someone who has say 90% success rate, but fewer jobs on their record than I do, how does this work out to be in my favor? Out of all of the job groupings on this site, the writing, music and from what I have seen other people post, the graphic designs, seem to be the markets that people are not willing to pay a fair wage for the work at hand. All of us use this site and keep it going, we shouldn't be pushing from moves that is going to hurt one group just because Upwork wants to keep low grade clients happy.