Just a guess from me..
Even though we get to bring our Elance profiles over, I think there is a wait time where the algorithms need to "digest" and "understand" where we are. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of throttling with new Upwork providers, and Elancers have to go through a little bit of a wait time to see results. Similar to Google where people think that changing something yesterday affected their rank when really what they did 3 months ago is the more likely culprit. I kinda suspect Upwork's algorithms are the same. They need to calculate where you are in terms of expertise, level, seller ability, etc.
As I do more work on Upwork and interface more with Upwork users rather than Elance, I seem to get more responses, contact, etc. It takes some time.
