No job was recommended for last two days?!

[Md Rahatur R]

I had complains with the job feed before. But it is getting worse now a days!
According to the oDesk’s job feed it seems that for my categories (which are very common ones) there were no recommended jobs to apply to for last two days!
See the attached screenshot.

[Preston H]

I don't know, Rahatur. I find that the job feed function works perfectly fine.

You already know you can change the job feed configuration yourself be changing which searches and search parameters you save, right?

Also, you can manually do searches using other parameters. There are a lot of search choices. You may wish to experiment more with different choices.

[Suzanne N]

He is not the only one. Most of my recommended are more then 4 days, and I have seen it at 7 and 10 days for the Recommended jobs. I can look at newer jobs but as he pointed out the recommended can be days old.

[Susan B]

Wow! I've never touched the recommended button. I've very carefully set my paramaters - keywords, job types, etc. to cull out a lot of junk. From there - usually the headlines are enough to know if the posting is in my wheelhouse or not.

I'd unclick the recommended button and spend the extra 10 or 15 minutes scrolling through everything.

(Apologies in advance is I actually misunderstood what's going here - after writing this, I kind of wondered if I missed something).

[Aseem B]

I think there is some confusion here. Thre are 2 functionalities provided by odesk.

1) Job feed: Where we select the search criteria. (Eg. Search for c++ key word). I think that the job feed as mentioned by Preston is up to date as compared to the search results. Search results having problems is a separate issue. 

2) Recommended job feed: This I find is more based on some matching algorithm( Refer Odesk's Mad Robots). So there are issues with this same as there are issues with AutoHide feature. I usually ignore the recommended jobs section as the jobs being shown (while being mostly related to my profile) do not match the criteria I have for selecting clients like verified payments, long term jobs etc. 

[Garnor M]

Hi Md.,

I've asked the team to take a look so we can resolve any issues causing a delay in the Recommended jobs.

[Suzanne N]

Garnor,

I don't think recommended jobs has ever worked right, at least not for me. My recommended jobs now the top one is 6 days old. That doesn't do anyone much good when they are getting Recommended jobs that are that old. I do as other's have mentioned and search differently but it would be nice if the recommended did work right.

[Preston H]

Hey gang, I don't know what to tell you. There are some serious flaws with oDesk in certain areas. But for me the Recommended jobs feed is really quite good. I trust that you don't see it that way because it is not working right for you. But it really does automatically put job listings right in front of me that are right within my wheelhouse. And they are not old jobs, either. Maybe it is because what I do is quite specialized, or maybe it is for some other reason, but I often focus my job application sending efforts right on jobs that are put before me on the job feed. I typically don't find better jobs by doing manual searches or by scrolling all new jobs.

[Garnor M]

Hi Preston,

That seems to be the case, as the specialization you do makes the feed that much more precise. That said, we're looking into this functionality so we can better deliver prompt, accurate results. This isn't likely to change much in the next month or so, but it is something we'll be improving, so thanks for raising it on this thread. 

[David G]

Preston, I think you might be looking at the job feed while other people are talking about the recommended list. They are two different things.

The job feed is the first thing you see when you log into oDesk (at least that's what I see). This gives me a list that meets the parameters I have set in a job search.

The recommended list requires that you hit another button. That's located under the search terms of your job feed.

While the job feed gives me fairly good results, the recommended job list is basically useless. The top job on the recommended list is over eight days old but I've just seen a bunch of editing jobs in the job feed that fit my criteria.

Of course, I don't think the job feed catches every job I might be interested in either but it doesn't do badly.