Fat Up with UpWork

[hermanng]

Hi,

the UpWork system is leaning 100% towards the clients and 0% towards freelancers. I was at 100% 2 weeks ago, than one job finished with a 4.25 rating and my score dropped to 92%. No other job cloed or dropped out of the 2 year sequence and this morning my rating is suddenly 86%. I was shocked and really pi**ed. Trying the help chat resulted in the usual copy/paced answers. 

The reason I got the 4.25 rating was (repeat client) that she asked for an NDA on a Sunday and I was not able to supply that instantly because I was out of the office. Her public statement was "

This freelancer achieved great results for our campaigns." meaning that she must have ravaged me in her private statement. Ome other reason I can imagiune was that even though she booked me for 5 hours/week, she got upset when I took 3 hours for the job. She wanted complete re-targeting of her campaign which had to be done individually by zip code and I re-did her ad groups into IKG (individual keyword groups and worked on her neg keyword folder and keywords. A kot for just 3 hours considering the re-targeting took about one and a half hours.

But even this cannot explain todays drop, because that was already implemented last week. Nothing else happened, no other job closed, no other rating was given.

I have enough of this platform because I have 40+ applications out, all of them requiring 90%+ rating and all that work was for nothing now.
There should be no private rating, only public rating. Again, this job causing the initial drop was from a repeat customer .... 

One other thing, I have only 23 jobs completed here because there were a coupple of very long term jobs. The UpWork system really screws people doing long term projects, because they obviously have less jobs completed per year, but high $ value jobs. However, a $10.00 job rating at UpWorks has exactly the same value like a $17,000.00 job that lasted 7+ months. This shows you that UpWorks favors those $5.00 small project freelancers over high value freelancers.

[Anonymous-User]

Are you going to close your account?

[tlsanders]

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Hermann M wrote:

I have enough of this platform because I have 40+ applications out, all of them requiring 90%+ rating and all that work was for nothing now.

That's a big assumption (or an intentional overdramatization). Clients hire freelancers who don't meet all of their preferred qualifications all the time.

There should be no private rating, only public rating.

They tried that. It didn't work. The bizarre social norm that requires giving a freelancer a perfect score if he or she completed the job without killing a member of your family and the frequent harassment of clients who leave less than perfect feedback has made public feedback almost completely meaningless. Without private feedback, it would be impossible to know anything useful about a freelancer's performance.

It would be great if clients told the truth, and it would be great if when they did, freelancers refrained from hounding them ceaselessly until they changed the feedback, but those are not the circumstances we're operating in.

However, a $10.00 job rating at UpWorks has exactly the same value like a $17,000.00 job that lasted 7+ months.

How do you know that Upwork is lying when they say that there are a wide variety of factors that go into the weight attached to a rating?

This shows you that UpWorks favors those $5.00 small project freelancers over high value freelancers.

This is a bizarre statement that in no way logically follows from your prior claims and defies reason. What you're saying is "Upwork would rather make $1 on a job than $1,000." Obviously, that's absurd.

For someone who has made tens of thousands of dollars through Upwork, you spend a surprising amount of time asserting that it doesn't work.

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[abinadab-agbo]

Hermann, there tends to be too much negativity in your posts.

Consider curtailing such kinds of posts, as they do more damage to your brand than you'll ever know.

This post lacks coherence, balance, and as a whole doesn't match your profile as an established freelancer.

Look at the title of your post, to start with.

[afifield]

The best thing here Hermann is to just move on and keep aiming to get work. You still are at 86% and with mostly good ratings on your profile and you should be able to turn that around with a few jobs I'd say. That is my suggestion and people looking for freelancers with 90% + may be just fine with hiring you if you do up good proposals.

I get it was a difficult client, but everyone here gets them at some point, and the best thing you can do from such an experience is to move forward and don't sweat the one that didn't work out.