Assumptions about Clients who Don't Hire

[tlsanders]

I see a lot of posts in this forum from freelancers who think clients who don't hire anyone never intended to, or only wanted work for near-free, or that Upwork is creating fake posts, or that clients should be forced to hire, or...you get the idea.

I wanted to share a recent experience posting a job on Upwork. I posted looking for someone to create some templated Power Point slides to use as a base for future presentations. I got 24 proposals. Hourly rates ranged from $5-$80, but clustered up in the $15-30/hour range.

About half of the proposals were obvious cut and pastes in which the freelancers extolled their extensive experience in things like cybersecurity and 3D modelling. Only about half even mentioned PowerPoint slides, and of the few who wrote anything specific to my project, a couple gave me a description of what they would do for me that directly contradicted what I'd asked for. 

I did identify one good prospect. I messaged him and he responded with questions. I provided the information he asked for and he mentioned that it was quite late in his part of the world and asked whether he could respond tomorrow. I said that was fine...and that was on June 2.

Finally, I hired a designer outside of Upwork (at $75/hour). Now, I will close the job without hiring anyone, and the freelancers who bid will say I wasted their time and just didn't want to pay their $15/hour rates and want Upwork to fine me for not choosing one of them.

Just a view from the other side.

[florydev]

Good insights.

I definitely asked this question early on because it was just odd to me that they never hired anyone.  My personal default assumption is that I am just too expensive, which I am perfectly fine with.  

I am sure however that not all my proposals are winners.  I had one not that long ago where the client messaged me to tell me I was just plain rude.  I realized almost immediately they were right (I am not sure I was wrong what I said but I definitely phrased it poorly and probably just should not have said it).

I think I have seen enough to know they go off platform, change their mind, and in, some cases, convince people to go outside of Upwork.   But, the amount of jobs Upwork would have to fake is, in my opinion, is untenable.  I look at a very narrow range of jobs and there is a bunch of them and they are all pretty different.  

Anyone that thinks a client should be forced to hire is kind of missing the point...why should we have freedom if the client doesn't.

[joansands]

So glad you posted that, Tiffany, and I hope lots of people read it.

[lysis10]

It's not really surprising that freelancers who think forcing clients to hire or somehow penalizing them for not choosing someone are broke and I'm pretty sure I have broken light bulbs that are brighter than they are.

[r_satta]

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Tiffany S wrote:

Finally, I hired a designer outside of Upwork (at $75/hour). Now, I will close the job without hiring anyone, and the freelancers who bid will say I wasted their time and just didn't want to pay their $15/hour rates and want Upwork to fine me for not choosing one of them.

Just a view from the other side.

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Good for you, you are going to refund their connects, you are a nice person.
Too bad the majority of clients don't do this and their jobs stays open forever. There is another case, the most popular: when the job expires.

Basically, if a client doesn't log in in 30 days (I don't really know how it works but that's not important here) his job expires and gets cancelled and Upwork doesn't refund the connects in this case.

I made a post about this, I don't really care if they don't hire me, I care when half of the jobs I submitted a proposal to, got 50+ proposals, 0 interview, 0 invites, 0 hired and the same day they posted it online they forgot about it, leading it to expire.

[abinadab-agbo]

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Roberto S wrote:

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Good for you, you are going to refund their connects, you are a nice person..

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I wanted to respond to this point, but I won't.

This is not the connects thread.

See the real Connects thread here.

[r_satta]

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I wanted to respond to this point, but I won't.

This is not the connects thread.

See the real Connects thread here.

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This is a generic thread about generic people and their proposals, from the point of view of her recent job posting.

Obviously people who complain about not getting hired should not be hired in the first place, what are they, kids? But we can't really say much about it, since it's way too generic as I said.

I'm specifying what I think most of those posts are about, included my post some days ago about proposal suggestions (so I am part of those generic people who opened a thread about proposals). What I think is really out of place is your comment, since you are actually saying nothing. I could have easily answered "I wanted to respond to this point, but I won't" and this would have led our conversation to nothingness

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[abinadab-agbo]

Roberto S wrote:

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Good for you, you are going to refund their connects, you are a nice person..

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Ok! Here's my position on that sentence. Clients should not feel pressured or obliged to close a job posting just because freelancer spent their connects to apply. It's already highly generous of Upwork to refund connects when Client deliberately closes their job posting. The principle behind connects is scarcity. It has to be scarce.

Any suggestion that Upwork should find ways to force clients to close their job posting if they won't be hiring any of the applicants, is a bad idea. Whether it be talent specialists harassing the client to take some action on the job or close it, excessive emails asking client to take hiring action or close the job, etc.

As a freelancer, it is your responsibility to convince a client to take action and hire you. If you and the 50 others who applied were unable to convince the client, forget the $0.15 connects you lost and focus on other projects you have. Such is business.

The client doesn't, and shouldn't care that you spent connects to apply to their job. It's your own cost of doing business, and they owe a freelancer no compassion to close the job posting because they've changed their mind and won't hire again.

Here's hoping this doesn't get thrown into the connects thread because of too much mention of the word. Hint: it's what happens when that word receives too many mentions in a thread other than the connects thread. Historically.

[r_satta]

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Abinadab A wrote:

Roberto S wrote:

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Good for you, you are going to refund their connects, you are a nice person..

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Ok! Here's my position on that sentence. Clients should not feel pressured or obliged to close a job posting just because freelancer spent their connects to apply. It's already highly generous of Upwork to refund connects when Client deliberately closes their job posting. The principle behind connects is scarcity. It has to be scarce.

Any suggestion that Upwork should find ways to force clients to close their job posting if they won't be hiring any of the applicants, is a bad idea. Whether it be talent specialists harassing the client to take some action on the job or close it, excessive emails asking client to take hiring action or close the job, etc.

As a freelancer, it is your responsibility to convince a client to take action and hire you. If you and the 50 others who applied were unable to convince the client, forget the $0.15 connects you lost and focus on other projects you have. Such is business.

The client doesn't, and shouldn't care that you spent connects to apply to their job. It's your own cost of doing business, and they owe a freelancer no compassion to close the job posting because they've changed their mind and won't hire again.

Here's hoping this doesn't get thrown into the connects thread because of too much mention of the word. Hint: it's what happens when that word receives too many mentions in a thread other than the connects thread. Historically.

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The fact is that this is not my intention at all. I don't want clients to be forced to close their job posting, since it's their own they should decide what to do with it. But there are no rules at all about job posting.
If in half of the job I made a proposal to (we're talking about 60+ jobs maybe) the pattern is always the same (job posted on day X, last view by the client day X, 0 interview, 0 hired, 9billion proposals) this is something that clearly doesn't work in Upwork anymore. This is not about my ability to convince a client, this is about the fact that I don't even know if the client is reading my proposal anymore (well, I assume it, most of the times the client is not reading it).
I am literally throwing 1$ into the oblivion, since almost all the jobs now costs 6 connects (another thing without rules). 

We need more transparency about proposals and more rules about job posting. In my field, translation, 1/3 - 1/2 of the job offers don't have the necessary requirements to be posted, everytime there are tons of informations missings, which should have been natural to give to the freelancer you want to hire. But obviously we can't ask them anything (because it can lead to work outside upwork).

Take these problems singularly and they may mean nothing, but put all them together and you will start to see why I complain about proposals, and why we should all. To summarize: obviously I'm not complaining that I'm not get hired or something like that, I'm complaining about the fact the lack of information and transparency.

Our discussion may be a little O.T, you're right

[researchediting]

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Roberto S wrote:

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Tiffany S wrote:

Finally, I hired a designer outside of Upwork (at $75/hour). Now, I will close the job without hiring anyone, and the freelancers who bid will say I wasted their time and just didn't want to pay their $15/hour rates and want Upwork to fine me for not choosing one of them.

Just a view from the other side.

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Good for you, you are going to refund their connects, you are a nice person.
Too bad the majority of clients don't do this and their jobs stays open forever. There is another case, the most popular: when the job expires.

Basically, if a client doesn't log in in 30 days (I don't really know how it works but that's not important here) his job expires and gets cancelled and Upwork doesn't refund the connects in this case.

I made a post about this, I don't really care if they don't hire me, I care when half of the jobs I submitted a proposal to, got 50+ proposals, 0 interview, 0 invites, 0 hired and the same day they posted it online they forgot about it, leading it to expire.

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Clients do not return connects. Upwork returns connects under limited circumstances.

In the course of generously sharing her experience with us, Tiffany mentioned that she will close the posting from which she was not able to hire. We don't know why she is doing this. Generally, that sort of decision has to do with one's own business needs, rather than concern about an effect on strangers, especially an effect that one is likely not even aware of. (Why should a client even know of the existence of connects, let alone what they mean to us?) Clients do what they do because it makes sense for their own interests—e.g. contract management—to do or not do any given thing.

I believe, though, that Tiffany's rhetorical point is that even though she closed the job, she is going to be the object of compaints and clamor to police and punish clients for not handling their want ads the way some of us might like.

[emily_reactant]

I know that as a freelancer I've turned down several clients who wanted to take things outside Upwork, so I assume that some of the clients who never hire have found freelancers that are up for risking their accounts. 

Personally I would like to see connects refunded for any job that doesn't hire, even the expired ones. Perhaps now that there are no free connects this is something Upwork could look at doing for freelancers to "give something back" to those of us who stick with the platform through the new connects system?

[versailles]

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Emily G wrote:

Personally I would like to see connects refunded for any job that doesn't hire, 

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They got rid of the free connects for a purpose that would be defeated if they decide to give spent connects back. They want fewer people on the platform who are concerned about the 15 cents that connects cost and more people who earn enough so they don't give a frak at all about the cost of connects.

Upwork is full of people who earn nothing or close to nothing, or so little that these few pennies represent a lot of money. They don't want more of these people. They want less of them.

[richard_wein]

Refunding connects on half of proposals would be tantamount to halving the price of connects. It would therefore halve the effectiveness of the new connects policy. To maintain the original purpose of the system Upwork would have to double the price of connects. I wonder whether those who ask for connects to be refunded would be happy if they got their wish along with a doubling of the connect price.

[feed_my_eyes]

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Richard W wrote:

I wonder whether those who ask for connects to be refunded would be happy if they got their wish along with a doubling of the connect price.

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That would be awesome, actually. They could even triple or quadruple the price if that were the case, and I wouldn't mind. Good suggestion!

[hodgesh]

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Richard W wrote:

I wonder whether those who ask for connects to be refunded would be happy if they got their wish along with a doubling of the connect price.

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The high number of abandoned job posts and the low number of jobs that are worth applying to in the first place would make this worth the extra cost for me.

[researchediting]

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Richard W wrote:

Refunding connects on half of proposals would be tantamount to halving the price of connects. It would therefore halve the effectiveness of the new connects policy. To maintain the original purpose of the system Upwork would have to double the price of connects. I wonder whether those who ask for connects to be refunded would be happy if they got their wish along with a doubling of the connect price.

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While the connect price has gone up for formerly free ones and down for purchased ones, Upwork has simultaneously devalued connects for the most value-imputed jobs. The application price per job has effectively tripled for many of us who work the high end of the market, even if the connects price stays flat. That's not a complaint. I'm on board with the new policy. It's useful though, not to think of connects price as equivalent to either their value or their cost.

[atreglia]

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Tiffany S wrote:

Now, I will close the job without hiring anyone, 

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Perfect.  You closed the job.  Freelancers get their connects back and we're all happy.  This is the way it should be.  You are not keeping the job open because you may have another, you are not wasting freelancers time applying for something that does not exist, and Upwork is not accepting payment for something that is not currently for sale (I seriously question that practice).

Richard W. wrote:

 I wonder whether those who ask for connects to be refunded would be happy if they got their wish along with a doubling of the connect price.

Yes! Bring it on!