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andras-kovacs
Community Member

The chances are not equal to getting a job

The chances are not equal to getting a job. By the time a job appears in my job feed it is already posted for 5 to 10 minutes and 10-15 Freelancer already applied. I reload the page every 1 minute so that can't be the reason. Everybody would like to be among the first 10-15 applicants but I have a handicap because of the delay. It is very frustrating. How can freelancers write a unique, not canned proposal so quickly? Certainly, I know the answer. They're simple cheaters.

 

Writing a not canned polished proposal takes at least 20 minutes but by the time the number of applicants is 50 +. In my opinion that would be fair if there would be a period(30-60 minutes) when the freelancers wouldn't be able to send proposals to add chances for honest, serious freelancers.

 

Applicants should be displayed in random order at client side so the cheaters wouldn't have the advantage of being 1st, 2nd, 3rd .... applicant. Then everybody would have the same chance to get the desired job.

8 REPLIES 8
2a05aa63
Community Member

It's not a question of survival for the client. They don't hire the first available freelancer, they choose the one that fits their needs. The rate and experince is much more importain, than the number. Most clients take more than 1 day to hire someone.

There's no need to spend 20 minutes on the cover later. Write as many sentences as the job description, not more.

Use a RSS feed to get the job post as quick as they are getting posted.

 

 

Twenty minutes to write a cover letter?

That sounds like a lot for most jobs.

Maybe it sounds weird. But when I apply for a WordPress website design/development jobs and want to stand out by offering a theme that suits best for client needs then I have to do some research and offer that.  It worked in the case of some of my previous client but it is time-consuming.


Andras K wrote:

Maybe it sounds weird. But when I apply for a WordPress website design/development jobs and want to stand out by offering a theme that suits best for client needs then I have to do some research and offer that.  It worked in the case of some of my previous client but it is time-consuming.


Yeah, that's a losing proposition on a site like this. It makes sense with a warm lead that you're communicating with directly, but not when the client is going to be getting dozens of proposals all at once (and you probably don't have enough information to guess at what they want, anyway). 

 

Choosing the theme is part of doing the job, not putting together the pitch. I work in marketing and I know that doing some of the investigative work up front and showing what you can do is common in the industry when pitching to a human in a more interactive setting, but it will just eat up all of the time you could spend working if you try to do what with every cold proposal here.

petra_r
Community Member


Andras K wrote:

 

Applicants should be displayed in random order at client side so the cheaters wouldn't have the advantage of being 1st, 2nd, 3rd .... applicant. Then everybody would have the same chance to get the desired job.


Proposals are NOT displayed to the client by when they were submitted, but by "best fit" (as determined by algorithm)

 

There is NO advantage to being the first, second and third to apply unless the client is looking to hire instantly which most do not.

 

I am fairly sure I have never spent 20 minutes to write a proposal, or anywhere near that.

 

tlsanders
Community Member

It sounds like you're seriously overinvesting. It's very rare that a proposal takes me more than five minutes to write, and I definitely wouldn't spend more than 10 unless it was a very large, high-dollar job. 

For most jobs, I don't think there is any advantage to trying to be the first, or one of the first to send a proposal.

 

The exception is when a client is trying to hire as quickly as possible, for work they want done RIGHT NOW.

 

Sometimes, as a freelancer, I am in the mood to work on projects like that.

Sometimes, as a client, I hire for work like that. This is often live training work. Done using screen-sharing.

 

Clients use very specific wording to indicate that is what they want.

Unless you are monitoring the new job feed carefully, you are not likely to see jobs like this, because they are usually posted and then removed quickly, as soon as a freelancer is hired.

 

If you see a "rush" job or a job posting asking to work with freelancers "right now", and that job post is a few days old, and many people have already applied... Then obviously something is amiss. That looks like a client who doesn't know what he wants.

florydev
Community Member

Hopefully, there is a lot of thinking and editing in there because if it is twenty minutes of writing I can tell you that nobody is doing twenty minutes for reading.

 

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