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jasoncsimon
Community Member

Recent drop-off in invitations

Hi folks, I figured I'd ask the crowd to see whether anyone else is experiencing this, or whether it's just a temporary fluke, as can happen from time to time.

 

I'm a top-rated freelancer as I have been working steadily with a few excellent clients for a while.  I have been used to seeing 4-5 new invitations come through per week, most of which I had to decline because I was too busy.  Now I have one of those occasional gaps with my current clients, I've noticed that I've seen virtually no invitations come through for the past few weeks.   Is this just a case of bad timing?   Lately I did notice that there was an increase in those "enterprise client" requests coming through from an Upwork rep, and not once did those materialize into work, but even those appear to have stopped  (the last one was a week ago..)

Nothing has changed on my profile, my rates have not changed, and I have not changed my status in any way.   I did just pick up a new client through a connect, but I almost never have to use those and now I see that we are going to have to pay for those, and I'm hoping to pick up a few more clients before that kicks in.... however almost all of my good clients have come from invites in the past.

Is this just a case of bad timing, and I should just wait for things to change, or did Upwork recently change something that will affect the way that clients pitch for jobs?

Hoping it's just a random bit of not so great luck...

4 REPLIES 4
dsmgdesign
Community Member

It says your profile is not public. Not sure if that has anything to do with it?


David S M wrote:

It says your profile is not public. Not sure if that has anything to do with it?


I have it set to "only upwork users" which is how I always had it. That shouldn't affect invites, should it?

It could have something to do with the recent changes in how Upwork handles invites. Now, clients only get 3 free invites per job post. To get more, they have to move to the Plus tier, which costs them $50/month and gets them 15 invites per post, or Business, which includes unlimited invites per post...for $500/month.

 

So more than likely the drop in invitations is because clients on the Basic tier are being much more careful with those three invites, rather than simply sending them out to everyone that looks qualified. Essentially, they're probably pre-vetting before even asking them to apply.

 

In theory that should mean that what invites you do get are more likely to lead to a contract, but I haven't seen where that's actually worked out that way (for me anyway, YMMV).


Michael S wrote:

It could have something to do with the recent changes in how Upwork handles invites. Now, clients only get 3 free invites per job post. To get more, they have to move to the Plus tier, which costs them $50/month and gets them 15 invites per post, or Business, which includes unlimited invites per post...for $500/month.

 

So more than likely the drop in invitations is because clients on the Basic tier are being much more careful with those three invites, rather than simply sending them out to everyone that looks qualified. Essentially, they're probably pre-vetting before even asking them to apply.

 

In theory that should mean that what invites you do get are more likely to lead to a contract, but I haven't seen where that's actually worked out that way (for me anyway, YMMV).


well if that is the case  that is indeed frustrating, as with those where it looked like a good fit for me, I could "close" more than 50% of the time.  I have a feeling that I wasn't getting too many basic requests lately, but I'm not sure. The "spam" requests that I used to get (when I wasn't top tier) had pretty much stopped;  almost all of them were good, except for a disturbing recent trend toward someone wanting $1000 worth of work for 200.   That's not gonna happen.

I guess this may theoretically take time, as clients may become frustrated by the "free tier," though I'm not optimistic about this, as my experience as a consumer is that if something stops being available for what I was already paying, I usually will stop using it, or find alternatives.  

I understand Upwork's position on this I suppose.  They aren't making enough off our work, so they're trying to make more off of clients.   I hope those "good clients" magically reappear soon.   I'm hoping those people behind Upwork know what they're doing;  I've liked the success I was having here.  I may have to start reaching out more onto other platforms.  That's also frustrating.. I put a lot of work into developing a rep here.  

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