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polyniki
Community Member

No Upwork hours while completing fixed price jobs

Hello all,

I realised that some clients require a certain amount of completed hours on Upwork. What if a freelancer has accepted and sucessfully completed fixed price contracts only? Will Upwork still show 0 hours? It kind of makes no sense.

Thanks!

7 REPLIES 7
feed_my_eyes
Community Member


Polyniki V wrote:

Hello all,

I realised that some clients require a certain amount of completed hours on Upwork. What if a freelancer has accepted and sucessfully completed fixed price contracts only? Will Upwork still show 0 hours? It kind of makes no sense.

Thanks!


No, it doesn't make any sense and it makes me feel unfairly disadvantaged for having done mainly fixed price contracts. But when I want to bid on one of those projects, I just start out by saying, "I see that you'd prefer to work with a freelancer who has completed X hours of work; most of my contracts were on a fixed price basis, so they don't count towards my hourly total. However, I have successfully completed over 300 projects ..."

 

I can't say that I've met with much success when that happens though; possibly the client gets bored with my defensive tone and doesn't read any further. 🙂 I plan to limit my bidding on such projects now that I'm paying for connects.

kochubei_valeria
Community Member

Hi Polyniki,

 

Hours Worked information on freelancers' profiles is based on the hours they tracked and billed clients for on Hourly Contracts. Fixed-price contracts don't count in that number. That said, if you strongly believe that you qualify for a job and can successfully complete it, you can still send a proposal to it even if it has a preference for certain number of hours.

~ Valeria
Upwork

Hello Valeria, thank you for your reply. However I suppose that clients can even search for freelancers and filter them based on their total hours, so freelancers that have completed fixed price contracts would never appear in the results. Or the client might receive my application along with, say, 20 others, and do a quick filtering themselves when they see the little red exclamation mark and never bother to read my cover letter. Am I wrong?


Polyniki V wrote:

Hello Valeria, thank you for your reply. However I suppose that clients can even search for freelancers and filter them based on their total hours, so freelancers that have completed fixed price contracts would never appear in the results. Or the client might receive my application along with, say, 20 others, and do a quick filtering themselves when they see the little red exclamation mark and never bother to read my cover letter. Am I wrong?


I think you are right. I have a similar problem with translation of English to German, some clients want a freelancer in Germany. Now I'm in Austria, so should I explain that this is a German speaking country? Should I expect the client to know that, or will he confuse it with Australia? Should I mention Sound of Music, even if nobody here knows or likes it? My solution is to skip those job postings, too...

AveryO
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Polyniki, 


If clients will apply a filter on their freelancer based on the hours billed, and you do not have any hours billed on your profile, you will not appear on a client's search result. I would like to clarify that this filtering is through the freelancer search page. 

However, I would like to note that when clients receive proposals from freelancers, they are arranged according to how the freelancer's proposal, and proofile best matches the client's needs. In this case, even if you do not meet the qualifications set by the clients, you still have the chance of being seen by the client based onyour proposal, and profile. There are a lot of freelancers here who did not meet the criteria of a client, but continued to apply, landed the project, and ended the project successfully. Hopefully, this doesn't deter you from applying to jobs in the marketplace. 

I hope this helps!


~ Avery
Upwork

Out of dozens of proposals I’ve only once had clients overlook their criteria.   Clients feel overwhelmed by  the sheer number of proposals and use heuristics, such as number of hours...even when they’re listing a fixed price job! You end up losing connects.

 

Upwork’s algorithms discourage risk taking by penalizing even one or two mistakes, I.e., test assignments on stretch jobs and using up credits for jobs where you don’t know if the client is flexible. I hired as a client and it was hard to set up parameters, even though  I’d been a freelancer myself.

 

 


Catharine G wrote:

Out of dozens of proposals I’ve only once had clients overlook their criteria.   Clients feel overwhelmed by  the sheer number of proposals and use heuristics, such as number of hours...even when they’re listing a fixed price job! You end up losing connects.

 


Yes, that's been my experience as well. When connects were free, I was willing to take a chance on bidding for projects where I didn't meet the hourly criteria, but times have changed.

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