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Eliot's avatar
Eliot H Community Member

Why I'm stopping hiring on Upwork after 15 years

I've been using Upwork for over 15 years, dating back to when it was oDesk. Throughout this journey, I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring talent for various projects. Overall, it has been a positive experience. However, I've noticed some concerning changes recently.

 

Whenever I post a job, instead of receiving proposals directly on the platform, I am inundated with messages on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other channels. These individuals seem to find my contact information through a simple Google search, likely to avoid paying platform fees.

 

The main issue with this is that I typically post jobs to get assistance with projects I’m completing for my clients. When I share a detailed job brief, such as one for website design, these freelancers bypass Upwork and contact my customers directly with proposals. Upwork doesn’t seem to have any policies or enforcement measures to prevent this behavior.

 

Given these challenges, I feel I have no choice but to end my relationship with Upwork, which saddens me after such a long and mostly positive experience. 😥

17 REPLIES 17
Jennifer's avatar
Jennifer M Community Member

From what I hear, invites are the way to go. I heard it's all ChatGPT junk and scammers, so just from what I'm being told, it's easier to invite. Invite people with a long long history where scamming for a few grand or even a few hundy is not worth it because of the value of their account. The clients I work with stick to US only to limit the scamming even more, but accounts earning hundreds of thousands of dollars every year have no interest in scamming or leasing their account to some scammer.

 

This is just the little things I hear from clients if we have a decent relationship to chat about these things.

Sterling's avatar
Sterling K Community Member

Wow it's really sad. I was delivering for a client a day early on a project. In the middle of it he had some sort of schitzophrenic lapse and accused me of scamming him. 

 

It was funny because I recorded his whole tantrum as I was in the middle of delivering early with an extra feature he asked for.  I had mentioned I could make his webmap draw drone paths not only in a square but a polygon, too.

 

As I was delivering this for some reason he had a complete meltdown some where else. IT was literally insane to be like -- and again I literally have this on video loom - hey man I got you this extra feature in for free because it was just a few more lines and he starts texting me that I'm scamming him.

 

When I handed him the loom, and the next day the project (I took a day to cool off) he really was speechless.

 

Then I of course raised my prices on him because if you're going to scream at an american who is happy to bring you quality well then you deserve to get what these clients are complaining about.

Sterling's avatar
Sterling K Community Member

You also have clients who think upwork is some sort of dating service. I had a client make up a 20k job, get me working on it, suddenly be like oh we can't afford your rate but can I have your phone number. Then try to hang out with me in my personal time and play vidoe games like that was the intention.

 

It's not just chatgpt. A lot of clients are just creeps or petty. 

image.png

 

Now I have to fight some bs report he did to force me to "reskill" because I don't want to spend my personal time with some weirdo client.

Jennifer's avatar
Jennifer M Community Member

oh my weee little noob, I get crazies too. You think out of all the jobs I have I haven't got some crazies? Generally, the worst people I run into are other freelancers. Sometimes I get legit clients do some strange stuff. It's part of the game.  I could tell several stories of crazies. It gives me the giggles. Crazy people make me laugh.

Nabeel's avatar
Nabeel H Community Member

Oh, that's unfortunate. May I suggest that instead of leaving Upwork, you consider inviting freelancers to apply for your job? You can then directly send a contract to a freelancer you've worked with before or one you believe has great potential.

Emmanuel's avatar
Emmanuel N Community Member

Simple solution here is to message freelancers directly, since you are old on the platform, I believe you have this perk, search freelancers under the skill you are looking for and send a message and find out who can handle it.

Mykola's avatar
Mykola A Community Member

You are very patient if still here. Most of clients gone 2 years ago when this trash began.

Sorry to hear but you cannot resolve that. Upwork have other goals than connect you with reliable freelancer.

Adam's avatar
Adam P Community Member

Do you have any facts to back up your claims?

Nikola's avatar
Nikola S Retiring Moderator

Hi Eliot, 

 

I am sorry to hear about your negative experience with these freelancers. I would like to let you know that if you wish to post jobs publicly, you may want to avoid sharing the client's website link or any other identifiable information before reaching the interview stage with a freelancer. I understand your frustration and see that this is not ideal. I assure you that I will share your experience with our team for further review. 

Additionally, contacting clients before the contract starts is against Upwork's Terms of Service so I encourage you to let us know if a TOS violation has happened by using the Flag as Inappropriate option throughout the platform. You can learn more about user reporting here.

 

You can also click on my name and send me a PM with more information about the freelancers you are referring to. I will be sure to look into your report and escalate it accordingly.

~ Nikola
Maria's avatar
Maria T Community Member

As you've been told, you'd be better off sending out invitations, but keep in mind that they now charge for responding to them, so I recommend you be very specific in the wording of your job posting. There will be people who won't respond because of the expense if they don't see a good explanation of what you're looking for.

 

ETA - By the way, it would be nice, although I know it's a pain, if you could tag the profiles of the people who are doing this. You'd be doing us all a favor :))

Luce's avatar
Luce N Community Member

Maria is right, now that Upwork charges freelancers for answering an invitation, wise freelancers will not respond to vague invitations. They will select invitations that seem to truly correspond to what they are interested in. I also suggest that you let them know that you are willing to pay a reasonable price for the job.

Honey's avatar
Honey V Community Member

Potential Solutions and Considerations:

  • Strengthened Platform Policies: Upwork could implement stricter policies to prevent freelancers from soliciting clients directly.
  • Enhanced Monitoring:
Lala's avatar
Lala R Community Member

Don't be sad not all people are same here but some do such things after bypassing Upwork policies 

 

Just mention the limited information which are necessary for the projects and Don't add any personal information or any source which hope to lead them to your clients 

James Thomas's avatar
James Thomas G Community Member

Sorry to hear this. It's not easy for either clients or freelancers. We freelancers also get "invites" and "messages" from a variety of sources as well. Thankfully, since most of my work is on Upwork, I can circumvent emails and chats. It's also fun to read how they personally are inviting me to a job because of my great track record and then underneath it says "must be 23 years old to apply." 

It's sad to see you go, and this is the unintended consequence of being "scammed without end."

 

Adam's avatar
Adam P Community Member

Sounds like you need to switch up your strategy. I would look to start and form an agency rather than arbitrage talent for short term work. 

Harvey's avatar
Harvey E Community Member

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.

 

 

James Thomas's avatar
James Thomas G Community Member

Can I make a recommendation? Part of doing proposals to clients is we like to use your name in our cover letter. If you are going to redact personal or company information, could you at least make up a name to use, or use a surname and a letter? I'd rather write to Mrs. T. than "client." Also it will cut down on the spam a little to add personal things to a job posting.