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rkm95
Community Member

How does the Algorithm of Best Match work on Proposals ?

Hello everyone, 

 

I have a question about the Proposals, I wanted to know how does it work from the perspective of someone who is posting a job offer.
I'm sending hundreds of proposals from the best match feed and none of them is even getting noticed by the clients, a month ago, clients used to answer me at least or check my profile, but this doesn't happen anymore, eventhough I didn't make any changes to my profile or proposals. I've had daily profile views of at least 7 or 10, and now that i'm a lot more active, I'm getting 0 views in the 12'th day in a row. 

My availability badge is active, i'm online, my profile is visible and I only propose for jobs in Best Matches feed.

 

Can someone explain how the Best Match algorithm works ?? based on what exactly ? besides the JSS score, the Completed projects or the Matched skills. I'm a little bit confused ... 

13 REPLIES 13
63959f4d
Community Member

It seems that we have experienced the same thing over the last month. I'm facing the same confusion.

 

A month ago, I got job invites in my field from time to time.

But now, I scarcely see any an invite.

 

A month ago, all job posts both in my best-matched and most-recent feeds highly matched my skills and interests, which saved me a great amount of time to search new jobs.

But now, everything seems to have transformed, which means the vast majority of jobs recommended by platform are not related to my skills at all, which includes mechanical engineer, CAD drawing design, PCB design, data entry, etc. However, I know nothing about engineering; I work here as a sourcing agent but not a technician.

 

Apart from issues above, during the past month, the webpage of Upwork responded very very slowly in my end.

 

I'm wondering whether all these issues are related to algorithm or something else.

 

 

rkm95
Community Member

Hey Zhonglin, 

 

Good point, I even forgot to talk about this point, it is happening to me as well , I'm getting jobs that doesn't match to my skills AT ALL, I'm a BIM Architect, and sometimes I found my Best Matches feed showing me stuff like Translation, Data Science and stuff that i'm not related to at all. 

This is becoming a bit annoying since we can't even have a reasonable explanation or maybe an orientation.

tlsanders
Community Member

From the perspective of someone who has posted jobs, it does not work at all. It seems to be based on similar past jobs, but the connections are fairly weak (as they would have to be, given the huge variety in projects)

rkm95
Community Member

Thank you for your response Tiffany, how can you explain me having Job Invitations or At least PROFILE VIEWS before, and now for almost 2 weeks, I have NO VIEWS AT ALL, eventhough my proposals increased by 250% 

tlsanders
Community Member

Well, I obviously can't explain that since I don't know what type of jobs you're bidding on, what your rates are, how good your proposals are, who your competitors are (and so on, and so on). 

 

I have noticed quite a few people saying they aren't getting views lately, though. There are several possible explanations: 

 

1 - Maybe the feature that tells you how many profile views you've had is broken. This has definitely been the case in the past, as I've had more than one period with zero views for a long time, yet invitations from clients referencing things they read in my profile. 

 

2- Seems like a lot of people are saying that competition is ramping up. Increasing the number of proposals doesn't do much to increase your odds if many others are doing the same--especially since such a dramatic increase in proposals suggests that you're probably not targeting as carefully. 

 

3 - Where you show up in search shifts over time. It's pretty common to have a couple of weeks of high-volume invitations followed by crickets when you drop off the first couple of pages. 

 

One thing most freelancers don't seem to realize is that Upwork sends out a lot of email about the freelancers who have sent proposals on your jobs, so it is often possible to do most of the screening without ever visiting a profile or even going back to the job posting page.

sends out a lot of email about the freelancers who have sent proposals

 

Yes, you mentioned the emails are sufficient for a client to decide if they want to look more into the proposal or not, which should explain the little to no views on my sent proposals.

 

And also why do I tend to have a large percentage of interviews vs views, although this is NOT the case on most other people from what I see.

 

(In my case I think, when people is interested on email, they click/view to start an interview. So view = interview)

 

Capture.PNG

 

My viewed:sent = 20%. I see it's around 10% to 30% on most people that have posted their stats. 1-2 persons has 40%+.

 

--

 

But, a moderator also mentioned something goes along the line of "the emails are not enough for a client to decide, they need to click (and view will be logged).

 

I don't like to think it's true, because I'll be very confused why the clients doesn't even open my proposal. The "open" part is before they read it (except the first 2 lines), so "how great the proposal is written" shouldn't really affect anything here?

 

Can anyone share how exactly the emails looked like?

 

Views are the first thing we can improve. No views means no interviews and hires. Statistically higher views means higher interviews and hires.

 

 

ps: I also found a few job posts (from veteran clients) where I've sent proposals to, that has no interviews (and hires) at all. It looks like the client created the job post, and ignored it (or maybe they do read and understand it all from email). This is not always the case but when it is, it explains the no views.

williamtcooper
Community Member

Hi Ramy, the most important factors are your 15 Skills in relationship to the Skills a Business states they are seeking. This will best match the Freelancer with the Business. Create your own custom Match Feed not what Upwork serves up. Thanks!

Thanks for your advice William,

I actually have that set up already, i have specialised profiles and general one, and before I apply to any job, I check the description scope and see the Skills required, that always matches mine.

6bfcdaf8
Community Member

Id verification requests are exploding and upwork has 1 week queue. This may mean so many freelancers are joining now. This means you don't need to invite people, you will be bombarded with applications. There's only one way to win. It's relevance in your proposals. Boosting has zero impact because it doesn't increase your relevance

rkm95
Community Member

Hey Alper, 
Could you please explain a little more what do you mean when you say the way to win is "RELEVANCE IN YOUR PROPOSALS" ? 

6bfcdaf8
Community Member

Hi, i recently created a job post as a client. Received around 50 proposals. Most of them were copy pasting irrelevant proposal texts. Most of them were talking about themselves. Only 2-3 were actually talking about my project. So when i say relevance, i mean you need to read the job post, be the right person to do it and express yourself very well in your proposal text. Try the same, create a job post and see what happens. I couldn't care less about who boosted. 

tgcodes
Community Member

This makes a lot of sense 

Hi Alper,

Could you please let me know what were the rankings of those 2-3 freelancers who were exactly talking about your reuquirements. Does upwork best match algorithms recommend them to you?

 

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