I would strongly advise new clients not to put any company information in the listing at all. They should also ask their freelancers not to put their company name or PoC in the feedback, as this is a way for spammers to get contact information. I also recommend this to all freelancers who care about their clients. I'm not sure if it's possible to contact Upwork and redact any information related to your company or name in feedback or past postings, but it might be worth a try. Upwork could definitely do more on the platform to ensure that a client's identity remains private unless they explicitly want it revealed or are in direct communication with a freelancer.
The problem is that there is just too much desperation on the platform. It was the worst when Upwork released the "network" feature. My freelancer account started getting bombarded with requests from people doing SEO, Upwork marketing strategy, lead generation, and all that nonsense just to find some work. You had to reject them about 3 times before the system would block them from trying to add you to their network. It's features like this that may have good intentions, but end up being terrible for pretty much everyone involved.
On the rare occasion that I want to hire someone through Upwork, it's exactly what others point out - just a bunch of generic ChatGPT garbage. A lot of people don't seem to be willing to put in the effort to write a proposal and just take the easy way because everyone else is doing it. I don't mind if someone uses AI, but it depends on how they use it. If they just give ChatGPT a one sentence prompt and then copy and paste it, that tells me absolutely nothing about them. It might as well be empty.
There is good quality talent out there, but I would be really curious to see what percentage of users that would be, assuming you filter out freelancers who
- Are scammers
- Are spammers
- Use AI for their entire proposal or profile
- Clearly lack the skills for the job
- Don't speak the specified language at the level required for the job
- Share their account with others
- Bought their account
- Used a stolen identity
- Use someone else's profile picture
- Charge 20 hours when they only worked 1
- Say yes to everything but never deliver
- Are magicians who randomly disappear without notice
And I'm pretty sure we can add at least a dozen more items to that list. I've worked with other companies before, and we hired some contractors through Upwork, which was difficult. We hired a UI designer who thought Open Sans Hebrew was a different typeface than Open Sans. Another tried to add jQuery to an Angular app just to add a widget. This freelancer also imported Bootstrap when we already had a design system in place (thank God for git). And then there is one who tried to take the easy route by just generating all his work with AI. This was despite the fact that the company was paying industry standard rates. With Upwork, if you want quality talent, your only options are to either look at those with higher than average rates, or find unrecognized talent like those who are good at what they do but just don't know how to promote their profile, or those who set their hourly rate pretty low when they could easily double it.
As Jennifer pointed out, the best way is to invite. Personally, I also find consultations and DMs to be good methods. In my experience as a freelancer, the best clients I've had were the ones who looked around, knew what type of person they needed, and ended up just selecting 1-3 freelancers that fit the criteria. From there they either sent me a DM or an invitation and it ended up being a pretty painless process for both of us. It really makes things easier for everyone to do it this way, rather than just putting out a listing and hoping the right person takes the time to apply.
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