I'd like to make a suggestion about the compulsory questions that make part of submitting a proposal.
I take it that there is a list of standard questions suggested by Upwork and clients can add there own. These questions are compulsory and cannot be left empty when submitting a proposal.
In my experience, only very few clients use this for genuine questions. Many simply use the standard questions which are quite frankly just a waste of time. I've see clients post a one-liner job description and then use standard questions like: "what is the most challenging part?" "What suggestions do you have?" "what parts are most similar to other jobs?" ...when the job description is completely unclear. Some clients seem to just add a bunch of these standard questions, (I've seen many with 5 questions, all useless generic questions), without even thinking about it.
The problem is that we cannot leave them empty, even if the client invites us fo the job. I normally end up just putting something like "refer to cover letter" and then provide a cover letter as I normally would and answering only genuine non-standard questions.
It takes a lot of time to craft a custom response to a job invite/application. If I were to answer all of those questions (especially the standard ones) properly for each job invite it would take much more. The tendency nowadays also seems to be that many clients invite a huge number of freelancers and then never reply back, so I'm not willing to waste my time answering useless questions knowing that I might not even get any feedback, they don't even decline! In fact, I have even declined invitations that were otherwise interesting just because I saw the questions and didn't want to waste my time.
I have seen a few clients use this feature correctly but asking specific and direct questions requiring a short answer, but they could have asked that in the job description anyway.
I suggest the following:
- Remove them, clients can still ask any genuine questions in the job description
- Keep them, but remove the standard question suggestions (which forces clients to use this feature for real questions) and make them non-compulsory.
