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addc2353
Community Member

Having a terrible experience

We have been a long term user of upwork.  My latest hire has great credentials and reviews.  She is doing terrible, fails to respond, and her work is not even mid level, it is terrible.  It is like we are not working with the same person. There is no way it is the same person as her profile.  I sit on chat for hours with no response.  How to I get support involved??  The job is over due and now she is not responding. Example of how this job is going, we needed a new template installed in 4 sites.  We gave her a schedule to finish one site per week.  The first day, she copied the template from our existing store and pasted it in 3 of our other stores.  She pasted it exactly as is, with all the same code and links from the other site... and said she was done...  I had to request she remove new template from all the sites, do 1 site at a time and update header, footer, links, images and code site specific - all of this was laid out in the job description. Things have not gotten any better.

ACCEPTED SOLUTION
a_lipsey
Community Member

Hi Chris, you should end the contract immediately. If it is hourly, she will be paid per the normal schedule for any hours she logged. If these hours were logged manually, you can also review the work diary and dispute them if you feel that you are being overcharged for her time. 

 

If this is fixed price, when you end the contract you will have to request a refund for the funds in escrow. If she declines the refund, you can open a dispute, in which Upwork will mediate (but not be able to take sides or rule a determination). If mediation fails you can choose to go to arbitration. 

 

But regardless of disputes, I think you know this freelancer is not going to complete the work. So end the contract and hire someone else. Put your project first and hire someone who will get it done. If they are not performing, you are not obligated to "make it work" with someone who is not responding. 

 

I hope this helps and feel free to ask more questions if you have them. 

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23 REPLIES 23
a_lipsey
Community Member

Hi Chris, you should end the contract immediately. If it is hourly, she will be paid per the normal schedule for any hours she logged. If these hours were logged manually, you can also review the work diary and dispute them if you feel that you are being overcharged for her time. 

 

If this is fixed price, when you end the contract you will have to request a refund for the funds in escrow. If she declines the refund, you can open a dispute, in which Upwork will mediate (but not be able to take sides or rule a determination). If mediation fails you can choose to go to arbitration. 

 

But regardless of disputes, I think you know this freelancer is not going to complete the work. So end the contract and hire someone else. Put your project first and hire someone who will get it done. If they are not performing, you are not obligated to "make it work" with someone who is not responding. 

 

I hope this helps and feel free to ask more questions if you have them. 

addc2353
Community Member

I would love to end the contract, but she already messed up 3 other sites...It is a mess.. I really need her to finish.

 

I agree, the best option is to hire someone else to finish.

Man, she has access to some critical stuff, this is not good.

re: "Man, she has access to some critical stuff, this is not good."


Just change the access credentials.


Preston H wrote:

re: "Man, she has access to some critical stuff, this is not good."


Just change the access credentials.


Exactly. Don't be held hostage. Who knows what happened with this freelancer; it could be anything. She might even be sick or going through something terrible and her performance has tanked. Or maybe she farmed this out to someone else (which obviously is a no-no)...or it could be any reason at all. But regardless, she's doing a terrible job for you and hasn't communicted, so you need to end the contract, change the login credentials of all the sites, leave an appropriate review, and hire someone else.

 

I'm really sorry. How frustrating.

a_lipsey
Community Member

Take time to remove her credentials/access, then end the contract. She is not going to finish the sites in the way that you want. Trying to get her to is only going to waste more of your time. You don't want to waste more time trying to get her to work out when you can move on to someone who will get it done. 

 

I'm very sorry you had this experience. 

re: "My latest hire has great credentials and reviews. She is doing terrible, fails to respond, and her work is not even mid level, it is terrible. It is like we are not working with the same person. There is no way it is the same person as her profile. I sit on chat for hours with no response. How to I get support involved??"

 

I strongly recommend that you not try to get Support involved.

 

It is not Upwork's intention that Upwork Customer Support be directly involved in your management of the freelancers you hire.

 

More importantly:
Why would you want them to?

I have hired over 150 freelancers on Upwork. I have all of the tools that I need to manage them at my fingertips. I don't need to submit a Help Desk ticket and wait a week and then maybe gets back to me and sends me a paragraph from a support desk answer bank.

All I need to do is click a button.

Fire them.

Hire somebody else.

Easy.

prestonhunter
Community Member

Here is a very basic tip for clients who are hiring freelancers on Upwork:

If you don't love the work that a freelancer is doing for you, or if you don't love working with them, then fire them and continue working with the members of your team that you like the most and whose work you value the most. If you need to hire new people, then do so.

 

Another tip:
Proactively plan to never, ever ask a freelancer for money. Don't try to use "disputes" or "refunds." Because what if you ask a freelancer for money, and the freelancer says "no." It is better to STOP PAYING a freelancer, rather than to pay a freelancer money and then later ask the freelancer fo a refund. If you plan to never get a refund, it will save you money in the long run, because you won't continue paying a freelancer whose work you don't love.

addc2353
Community Member

Thanks for your comments.  I changed passwords and actually had to have the pflatform support change the ftp. This took around 3-4 hours to complete. I had set up milestones, so I actually went ahead and paid the first milestone, then ended the contract.  I immdiately hired the next top candidate, and communication was much better. You know, I knew this but needed a little push, thanks. I feel much better about the project..

addc2353
Community Member

OK, so I see how this works now.  I gave this person a 1 star review and wrote a brief description of the issue.  Today, I check her profile, and my job review shows 4 stars and no feedback.  No wonder I hired the wrong person.  The ratings are bogus.

There is public feedback and private feedback. In closing the contract, you would have provided both. The private feedback will not be visible on her profile but it does factor into her JSS calculation. The public feedback does not, it's just eye candy. 

re: "OK, so I see how this works now. I gave this person a 1 star review and wrote a brief description of the issue. Today, I check her profile, and my job review shows 4 stars and no feedback. No wonder I hired the wrong person. The ratings are bogus."

 

I don't blame you if you feel frustrated by what you saw.

 

But that is not how this works.

 

I am not aware of any reason by you would be seeing feedback that is different than what you left for the freelancer.

 

I'm flagging this post to enlist the help of a Forum Moderator to help explain this.

petra_r
Community Member


Chris W wrote:

OK, so I see how this works now.  I gave this person a 1 star review and wrote a brief description of the issue.  Today, I check her profile, and my job review shows 4 stars and no feedback. 


That wasn*t yours.  Yours won't show until she has left feedback for you too or after 14 days, whichever comes sooner.

 


Chris W wrote:

 The ratings are bogus.


They are not

addc2353
Community Member

Ok, but it is the same title and description.

addc2353
Community Member

When I look in my jobs, the one star rating that I gave shows. Aggrevating to say the least.

I agree with Petra's statement that the ratings are not bogus.

I think there was some confusion about what the client saw.

But also:

No client should make decisions about how they manage hired freelancers based on a freelancer's ratings.

 

As a client:
If you hire a freelancer, then forget about her ratings and profile. The only thing that matters at this point is how they perform on this job. If you don't love the freelancer's work, then fire the freelancer and continue working only with freelancers whose work you value the most.

addc2353
Community Member

It even shows the exact price I paid.

Chris:
I understand that you are frustrated by what you are seeing.

 

In case it helps, let me share some of my experience:

 

As a client, I have hired over 150 freelancers on Upwork.

As a freelancer, I have completed over 200 jobs.

Freelancer's can't hack or evade the feedback system.

The feedback system is not bogus. It works as intended.

 

If you have any questions at all about how feedbacks works, please feel free to ask.

 

Also:
There was a freelancer you hired to work on your project.
That freelancer disappointed you.

But that freelancer is in the past. The future of your project rests with you and new, better freelancers who you are hiring.

 

As a client, I have closed contracts on freelancers who did not measure up. And I immediately forgot about them. They are not worth taking up any of my time or thoughts. But if I really want to, I can wait 2 weeks and then check their profile page and I will see my feedback on their profile page.

I have flagged your post again in the hope a moderator chimes in to explain the discrepancy you describe. It seems very odd and I have never encountered anything like that.

addc2353
Community Member

I looked at the feedback again - a fourth time just to make sure. The way they present the information is misleading.  It actually says "no feedback given" - yet shows the freelancers 4 stars. So, when people/me glance at the information, of course my/your eyes to go the yellow stars and think - well, she got 4 stars on this job.


Chris W wrote:

I looked at the feedback again - a fourth time just to make sure. The way they present the information is misleading.  It actually says "no feedback given" - yet shows the freelancers 4 stars. So, when people/me glance at the information, of course my/your eyes to go the yellow stars and think - well, she got 4 stars on this job.


Well, I do hope a moderator will chime in on what you say. I suspect there is an explanation. 

 

However, to your concern: 4 stars on this platform is NOT good. And hopefully when you answered the question about "would you recommend this freelancer" on a scale of 1-10, you rated her low, because that is the private feedback question that impacts her JSS score. The stars are just eye candy; they are cosmetic. It's that recommend question that gets factored into her JSS. 

 

Did you type in written feedback or did you just do the star ratings? 

 

For whatever it's worth, probably the best use of your time is to not worry about her and her ratings any longer. You hired the next person on your list (congrats!) and you just said it's already going much better. Focus on working well with the new freelancer, and let go of any thoughts about the old one - it's just a waste of your time and energy. Put your project first, not the old freelancer's rating. 

Hi Chris,

 

We checked and the feedback system is working as designed and feedback is showing in Work History correctly. There are two important things to note about feedback:

  • The system is double-blind, which means that feedback won’t be visible until both parties provide it for each other. So you'll see feedback you provided in the contract room (only accessible to you when logged in). However, it won't show on the freelancer's public profile until they also provide their feedback.
  • The contract and feedback will only show in freelancer's and client's Work History if at least $1 was paid on the contract. That means, if a full refund was issued by the freelancer or from Escrow, the contract will not be shown publicly. That said, the contract's outcome may still be counted in the freelancers Job Success score.

 

You can find more information about it here.

~ Valeria
Upwork
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