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veloxpro
Community Member

The $29.99 Premium job posting is a waste of money

I created a perfectly defined $300 job with clear requirements and very few qualifications for freelancer, a C++ programmer. And when posted, clicked to include the service of assistance "to locate talents", which costs $29.99. Here is in short what happened:

  • I received an obviously automatic chat message from **Edited for Community Guidelines** which included " I'll start connecting you with top talent for your job"
  • I sent a profile of a freelancer as example of a good candidate
  • "sure thing, we will go through the job post and applicants and will keep you updated with what we find"
  • 6 hours later from me: "Ok, thank you. When can I expect any candidates from you?"
  • response: "our SLA is 48 hours"
  • Nothing happened 50 hours after publishing the job, I found a freelancer via other source and closed the job
  • Immideately, the messages room brcame archived, so I didn't have a chance to ask the agent whether she did anything related to the promised service

What did I pay for? The dispute menu relates only to job payments, so how to dispute this payment? It's not a lot of money, but it gives a feeling of being tricked into giving money for nothing. And on top of that I had to spend time trying to figure out how to deal with that. And it seems that complaining here and warning others is the only option available

13 REPLIES 13
VladimirG
Community Manager
Community Manager

We're sorry about your bad experience with using this feature Sergey, I'll take a look and follow up with more information soon.

~ Vladimir
Upwork

I clicked on agent's avatar in the chat and it leads to a hidden profile titled "Upwork Talent Specialist" with $15/h rate. So, it seems that Upwork suggests to hire some random "talent specialist" freelancer to assist "locating talents".

 

During 50 hours when the job was published:

- There was zero assistance

- No one was hired

- There is no indication that any job was done. No indication for an attempt either

But if it's a freelancer (not an Upwork employee), then why no dispute is available? This lack of feedback channel (except of here from Vladimir) only strengthens the feeling of being tricked

 

 


Sergey B wrote:

I clicked on agent's avatar in the chat and it leads to a hidden profile titled "Upwork Talent Specialist" with $15/h rate. So, it seems that Upwork suggests to hire some random "talent specialist" freelancer to assist "locating talents".

 

During 50 hours when the job was published:

- There was zero assistance

- No one was hired

- There is no indication that any job was done. No indication for an attempt either

But if it's a freelancer (not an Upwork employee), then why no dispute is available? This lack of feedback channel (except of here from Vladimir) only strengthens the feeling of being tricked

 

This post explains much. Maybe not to the OP, but certainly to all freelancers who receive nonsensical invitations from Talent Specialists. 


 

lol....talent specialists do it again...


Reinier B wrote:

 

This post explains much. Maybe not to the OP, but certainly to all freelancers who receive nonsensical invitations from Talent Specialists. 


 


I'm actually super-surprised. Based on interactions with them and the jobs they sent me, I have always assumed that the talent specialists were $3/hour freelancers who were not native English speakers.

Hi Sergey,

 

As an update, our team will reach out to you directly soon and provide further assistance. To clarify, Talent Specialists are part of our team and aren't being hired directly by clients. I see the massage room was archived after actions you've taken on your job post. To further clarify, in addition to posting on the forums clients do have an option to contact Customer Support from their account with concerns like the one you shared here. I apologize again about your experience, our team will be able to share more information with you directly. Feel free to follow up here if you have any further questions, concerns, feedback or need help regarding this or any other job. Thank you.

~ Vladimir
Upwork

Thanks for your reply, Vladimir. 

 

>> in addition to posting on the forums clients do have an option to contact Customer Support from their account with concerns like the one you shared here

 

I'm hiring via Upwork since long before this platform was named Upwork. But I couldn't find any other support channel. I tried again after reading your message, still, no success. I'm sure you don't imply chatting with support bot, right? The only other relevant button on support.upwork.com/hc leads to here.

 

Before clicking on support link I made sure that I'm logged as a client, with our company account (not as a freelancer). But on the support page it appears that I'm logged as a person and there is no option to switch to company. Perhaps this is a bug that explains why I don't see options to contact support directly

 

 

 

Upwork, please give this client his $29.95 back and do whatever is required to ensure this kind of thing stops happening immediately!

And Vlad, I think everyone needs certification on this.  In general terms only - but every user has the right (let alone need) to know what is going on.

hello

by mistake i clicked on this premium job feature i was just checking and it deducted the amount

can it revert back ? i do not want to use it

Regards

Hi Khan Jahanzeb,

 

I can see that you already have an open ticket regarding this issue. One of our agents will update your ticket and assist you further. 

~ Joanne
Upwork
veloxpro
Community Member

 

I've received the refund. It's the right thing to do, but given the time spent on support and communication, I don't feel very thankfull for that. I hope that at least it will warn others.

 

For the Upwork team, here are few ideas

 

This "Talents location" service is offered as a single mouse click just before posting a job. It was very surprizing to realize that its SLA is 48 hours.

 

The charge should be somehow success based (now it's instant).

 

And I don't mean a random success where the hired freelancer happened to be one of a hundreds invited by the agent  That success can be achieved even by a primitive bot. But because bots don't charge $15/h for nothing, this money can be used to make the bot actually smart. Given the amount of data you gather every day, there is enough statistics to build really smart "talent search" bots who will likely outperform even good human specialists. But this also requires a well defined success score that gives some weight also to the score given by clients. 

 

Best,

S

Getting your job featured is good.

 

Ignore the talent specialists.

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