Talent wasted a week of time as then declined offer and blatantly lied about reasons

[e3280d36]

Talent placed bid on project. I sent offer. No response so I messaged. No contact all week. Messaged again Talent told me I requested a phone call prior to offering job. My account has been funded snd it says pending waiting for talent to accept. Said even if I did request a call he never responded to my messages to have a call for a week. Talent then declined the offer and said that I changed the amount of funding. My post offered $100. His bid was $100. I funded $100. I asked why he lied. He said that the description is different. Nothing changed. He responded to a post. I didn’t invite him and repeated the exact job stating he could do it in his Cover Letter. I have lost a week of work and am being lied to. Why should I do ?

[a_lipsey]

It sounds like this freelancer doesn't want to work with you. Cancel the offer, and reach out to your 2nd choice. Or repost the job.

[prestonhunter]

re: "What should I do?"

I am an Upwork user, not an Upwork employee. What follows is my opinion:

You need to improve your hiring technique.

You seem to be blaming one individual freelancer for "wasting a week of your time."

You should understand that this freelancer is not important. He is not interesting. He is not a part of your project. You never even hired him. You should not waste your time thinking about him.

If the timeline or deadline is important to you, there are simple, straightforward ways that you can use to hire freelancers and get work done quickly.

One very basic technique is to hire multiple freelancers.

If I definitely need something done by the end of the day, I can post an hourly job posting, and then hire 3 to 5 freelancers to work on the project as a team project, giving each the same assignment. I can then be sure that I'll get the work done in time. If one freelancer does the work, then the project is over. This was a team project, so I close the contracts on all freelancers, and probably only had to pay one person for any work. Because nobody else did any work by the time the work was done.

Or if more than one freelancer worked on this, that is fine. I wasn't trying to optimize for minimal cost. I was trying to optimize for getting the work done quickly.

After reading your post, I felt that you really thought a lot about this freelancer and cared about him. You care about his imperfections and mistakes.

I don't care about him at all.

I care about my project.

With my technique, I had the same project. I spent about $100.

But I had the work done within a day.

You CAN use fixed-price contracts if you want, but it is messier because it ties up money in escrow. I don't advise using fixed-price contacts to hire multiple people simultaneously because it will probably cost more.

If you don't want time wasted like this, then hire freelancers you have worked with before, or hire using hourly contracts.

You can even hire sequentially, one freelancer at a time. Hire Bob. After one day he hasn't done anything. Fire him. Hire Zack. After one day he hasn't done anything. Fire him. Hire Ted. He turns in great work. You are done.

A lot of my success as a client comes from my expectation that a significant percent of hires will fail. I plan a accordingly.

[marginhound]

You might want to soften your approach to dealing with freelancers...

• We're independent contractors, not employees. Job postings & proposals are invitations to talk, not binding committments. Both parties are free to walk away at any time (before an agreement occurs).
• An unhappy or aggressive client can do a lot of damage to my future income with a bad review. This generates a certain level of caution among experienced freelancers. I won't accept an offer unless a) I'm comfortable I can deliver good results and b) I trust the client is reasonable & fair.

Consider at the interaction you're describing from the other side of the table. Clearly there was a communication gap. Which degenerated into an angry prospective client calling me a liar. And I can make this problem go away by rejecting your offer.

Seriously, given that choice... why wouldn't the freelancer walk away? Would you trust your reputation & future income to someone who is obviously not in your corner?