job applicants counter

[78f370af]

I am a new freelancer and it is difficult for me to get jobs so I decided to aim for the jobs that have less than 5 proposals because they have less competition, the problem is after I submit a proposal I find that there are over 50 applicants for this job that costs me connects for nothing. So the problem is that the proposal counter does not show the actual number of applicants.

[78f370af]

I forgot to mention that problem doesn't happen for recent jobs only it also happens for older jobs that were uploaded more than an hour ago

[yitwail · Accepted solution]

Mohamed, it's always been like that. Search results are cached, so they're never real time. If Upwork always tried to show the correct, up-to-date number of proposals, to every freelancer who looks at their job feed, the site will probably be too slow to be useful. But anyway, if you're lucky, your proposal will be among the first 50 proposals. It's especially true in categories that have a huge supply of freelancers, like photo manipulation/editing/retouching. You could try boosting your proposals, but that only works if most of the other freelancers don't boost.