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carla1019
Community Member

Are my expectations too high?

My business has quarterly events and I've hired freelancers to create newsletters using mailchimp. I provide all the content and the graphics, all they have to do is format and upload it. When i do this myself, it takes 1 hour. I understand a freelancer may want to take a little long to double check their work so I'm okay with them taking two hours per newsletter. But if I hire a freelancer on Friday and they don't complete the task until Wednesday and he logged 4 hours on his timesheet, am I being unrealistic in wanting a faster turnaround?

 

I even asked in advance how soon can you complete the task and he said by EOD.

 

This has happened with multiple freelancers taking extremely long to complete a simple upload and formatting job. I'm almost at the point that I'll just do it myself.

5 REPLIES 5
waqar_ripper
Community Member

Hi Carla, This is a top rated freelancer, Waqar S. Your expectaions are not too high; simply you need a nice, punctual & detailed oriented Virtual Assistance, who can meet your deadlines. 

While for others already hired freelancers, you can leave a bad review on their profile, I know that's bad to freelancer but in professional freelancing that is really important to get a feedback what we people deserve after getting the project done. 

Thanks 

sam-sly
Community Member

I don't know whether this applies to your situation, but sometimes when clients have issues with hourly jobs taking longer than expected it is because they are hiring very low rate freelancers. Many freelancers at the lowest price points do bid on jobs where they don't have the skills yet so you are paying for their learning curve. Some may even work intentionally slower.

 

Also, if the freelancer is taking the time to pay attention to details like proofreading and making use of the formatting options it may take longer than you take. (Though as a MailChimp user four hours sounds like a long time to spend formatting a newsletter if the freelancer isn't writing any of the content or creating/editing graphics as well). 

 

About the turnaround time. Most successful freelancers will schedule work in advance especially if they are making a living completing relatively small projects. So the fact you hired on Friday and the freelancer did the work on Wednesday isn't necessarily uncommon.  The freelancer should communicate with you about their availability before accepting the work. If the freelancer promised to do the work by end of day Friday, that is unacceptable. The exception might be if you didn't send the material to the freelancer in time (though it doesn't sound like the case). 

 


@Samantha S wrote:

I don't know whether this applies to your situation, but sometimes when clients have issues with hourly jobs taking longer than expected it is because they are hiring very low rate freelancers. Many freelancers at the lowest price points do bid on jobs where they don't have the skills yet so you are paying for their learning curve. Some may even work intentionally slower.


 Also, remember that the folks with the lowest price may not have 'fast' internet connection either.  One way to speed up the process might be to write down the instructions - step-by-step (You say you can do it in an hour) that you have perfected.

Thank you for your response!

jr-translation
Community Member

You can give a feedback which reflect some of the issues without writing anything if that makes you better. If the freelancer promissed to finish on Friday and did not even start until Wednesday there is definitely an issue.

You can also check the timesheet if it is filled out properly and check the progress on the screenshots

.

For future jobs you can limit the weekly time. Next time limit it to 2h.

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