Upwork API job search missing criteria - hourly budget and other

[jzikmund]

Hi,

I am building a custom job search page in my app using Upwork API. Unfortunately I recently found out, that the job search functionality is missing some important criteria that the built-in Upwork  search does have, the most important being:

- budget for hourly jobs (this currently only works for fixed pay, but for hourly this parameter is ignored)

- freelancer level (beginner/intermediate/expert)

- client country

Client Country is at least provided in the results, so even though it's unefficient, I can at least query everything and then filter out the countries I want. But the information about hourly budget and freelancer level is missing even in the results, so there is no way to get to it.

Has anyone found a way to incorporate these, or can perhaps someone from Upwork explain, if there is a chance to add these parameters to the API later on? It would be great if the API had the same filtering capabilities that the regular upwork website has.

 

[LuiggiR]

Hi Jan,

I've escalated your concern and a Customer Support Team member has reached out to you through this support ticket to assist you further.

[jzikmund · Accepted solution]

So unfortunately, for anyone interested, this is Upwork's official answer, and we are out of luck, thank you Upwork *sigh*: 

According to our team, these filters and output fields are not implemented in public APIs, and there are no plans to add them as this is an intentional limitation.

[marc_compte]

Thank you Jan, for letting us know the answer.

This is very unfortunate, indeed. The API is already limited enough for freelancers and the only endpoint that looked interesting is rendered useless on purpose. It is, yet, another failure of Upwork at providing a proper service to freelancers. If I were to say everything I think, I would be violating the forum guidelines. I'd pay to know what the person that took this decision was thinking at that time.

[jzikmund]

Yeah, my thoughts were exactly the same. What point is realeasing API with crippled features, when still anyone who wants to use job search seriously has to go to their website, because there is no other way.. 

Well at least maybe this post saves somone the time, as unfortuanately I already had most of the feature coded when I realised the couple of params is impossible to use and now my whole code is useless and I will again open their website to search for jobs. Sad story, and feels even more bitter knowing that it's not a bug, but actually a feature! Thank you again, Upwork

[marc_compte]

I'd assume someone needed to justify their job position, or a budget, and they decided it was a great idea to throw the money down the drain developing something that has very little use.

I'm seriously disappointed. I'm also thankful my application for the API key did not work right away and I did not have the time to try again. I'm lucky for this and thankful to you for sharing the feedback, so that I can avoid wasting more time on this.

[esadr]

Just recently I got an API key and I'm currently exploring the possibilities, but as far as I can see what you're looking for has already been implemented.

You can find the state and the city with:

op_country
op_city

If the published job has information for the Hourly job type you can get a range as:

op_pref_hourly_rate_min
op_pref_hourly_rate_max

Experience Level you can get with:

op_contractor_tier

where 0 = beginner, 1 = intermediate, 2 = expert

For more information, check: https://developers.upwork.com/?lang=php#jobs_get-job-profile

[jzikmund]

Indeed, again, that could be helpful, but it means querying each job for this detail data, you cannot pass them to search. With the number of jobs I have to filter, this will be a huge amount of useless calls just to find out the job doesn't match my criteria. I might try it, even though I am not very sure how strict limits are put on the api access, but I am worried this is just wasting too much resources to be of any use. My criteria will match 1 job from a hundred, I will need to do like 1000 api queries to get 10 results, that just feels nuts.

[esadr]

I started with parsing the RSS feed because I didn't have API access and it took a while to get the API key. The RSS feed already has some key pieces of information to roughly filter out only what interests me.

I'm currently on about 300-400 API calls per day although official Upwork statistics show a fairly smaller number of API calls.

My goal is to make a bot that will send me notifications for what I find most interesting and a daily display of 100-200 interesting jobs.