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4f19aa7c
Community Manager
Community Manager

Job Post Generator (Beta)

Starting in late April, some clients can use a job post generator when posting a job.

 

Check out the product update for Job Post Generator (Beta) and let us know your thoughts about this update in the comments below.

82 REPLIES 82
celgins
Community Member

I get the feeling a lot of clients will be using this.

20b6b90f
Community Member

Good luck 

6bfcdaf8
Community Member

As a freelancer, one thing i'm missing is well written job posts. Most clients refrain from describing their problem clearly. "I need a node.js developer!" doesn't tell much to me. Jumping on the AI hype-wagon is nice, i'm just scared that this will further motivate clients to share nothing about their problem and post some search engine optimized word salad. This won't bring better close rates. On the other hand, motivating clients to better describe their problems or projects would increase quality of freelancers applying, resulting in better close rates. 

i need

 

What do you need?

 

Use the Academy at the top of the page. You need to learn the rules and create a profile.

decodistny
Community Member

"This five-week test aims to assist clients in defining their job requirements, helping them post more jobs..."

 

So, could someone create multiple fake jobs in quick succession without any kind of manual checks?

I saw that Upwork is testing a new feature that allows some clients to use AI to help write job descriptions.

 

Will this drive some clients to post more jobs or does using AI to post a job even matter?

kfarnell
Community Member


Clark S wrote:

I saw that Upwork is testing a new feature that allows some clients to use AI to help write job descriptions.

 

Will this drive some clients to post more jobs or does using AI to post a job even matter?


Excuse me while I bang my head on a wall...

 

I guess it will encourage some and put off others, clients being people and all that.

 

It matters to me. At the minimum we'll go from 'not totally clear what you want' to 'not totally clear and also boring to read'. But more importantly, there's a whole lot you can read between the lines when an actual human posts. Tone, word choice and amount of detail posted gives useful info about the client, not just the project. AI versions will make it harder to work out whether or not you're likely to make a good fit. In fact, it matters *a lot* to me as I mainly do editing and I take these things into account when deciding whether or not to respond. Maybe it's not so much of a deal to people in other fields or those who are less fussy about who they work with.

 

Yet another nail in the coffin.

celgins
Community Member

I agree, and I think it will make many clients lazy when posting their jobs.

 

I totally expect to see job descriptions where the client generates the description using Upwork's AI algorithm, but never bothers to customize the description based on their specific job. Then, freelancers read the unaltered, untailored job description, think they're a good fit, and respond to it. Finally, the client receives a bunch of proposals and wonders why the cover letters don't make much sense for the job they posted.


Kim F wrote:

Tone, word choice and amount of detail posted gives useful info about the client, not just the project. AI versions will make it harder to work out whether or not you're likely to make a good fit. In fact, it matters *a lot* to me as I mainly do editing and I take these things into account when deciding whether or not to respond. Maybe it's not so much of a deal to people in other fields or those who are less fussy about who they work with.

I couldn't agree more. I wouldn't respond to any job post that sounds like it's AI generated - I want to know if I'm dealing with someone who sounds like a reasonable, professional person who can communicate clearly. This is also going to make it a lot easier for scammers to generate legitimate-sounding job posts.


Kim F wrote:

Yet another nail in the coffin.

Yep. But I guess it doesn't matter, since it sounds like clients are mostly getting AI-generated proposals in response to their posts anyway. 

Exactly.

 

Which raises the question: Why is AI being employed to flood the marketplace with generic job postings when it could be used to protect freelancers from spam, scams and other suspicious activities? 

 

Sounds like the biggest gift to scammers in years.

kelly_e
Community Member

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

 

Already so many job listings demand we prove we are not AI in responding to them, with weird secret words etc.

 

Now there's no proof they are not AI, posting at us. So we make more and more effort to be custom and personal... & they don't even take the time to write their own listing. Too-many-to-one, because UW does not have enough quality jobs on site and is putting their efforts into attracting low-q fls instead of high-q employers... becomes too-many-to-zero.

 

I actually had to ask a job poster in messages the other day, if he was a bot.

 

Tbh he said no... but never having said any more in response, I suspect he was.

 

Now the spams-and-scams can start earlier, with UW's approval.

 

😞

celgins
Community Member

Good points.

 

The announcement states: "This five-week test aims to assist clients in defining their job requirements, helping them post more jobs and ensuring that the right freelancers can find them."

 

I think "post more jobs" is the primary goal, but only Upwork will know if more AI-generated jobs are posted over the next five weeks. I think it might increase spam job posts, and like Christine mentioned, those scammers now have an easier way to create better sounding job descriptions.

kfarnell
Community Member



Clark S wrote:

Good points.

 

The announcement states: "This five-week test aims to assist clients in defining their job requirements, helping them post more jobs and ensuring that the right freelancers can find them."


Twaddle. If Upwork truly wanted the right freelancers to find clients, they'd improve the search process by re-instating the categories they merrily deleted a while ago, and ideally adding more.  (For example, by removing 'creative writing' they've lost the fiction projects that used to occasionally appear to be replaced by romantic werewolves for pennies a book.) And by changing the specialised profiles they removed the ability for clients to find freelancers in specific fields. 

 

There's no point in more jobs being posted unless people can find each other and those jobs are actually awarded.

kelly_e
Community Member

Exactly, Kim—

 

With the freelancer-to-legit-job situation at a low, all "more jobs" (without increasing quality) really means, is "more connects used by desperate freelancers giving Upwork one last fling."


Kim F wrote:


Clark S wrote:

Good points.

 

The announcement states: "This five-week test aims to assist clients in defining their job requirements, helping them post more jobs and ensuring that the right freelancers can find them."


 


I don't see how it will help clients to post more jobs anyway. They either have a role that needs to be filled, or they don't. I doubt that anyone has been thinking to themselves, "I'd post a lot more jobs, if only I could find the right words."

kelly_e
Community Member

More jobs is NOT more jobs of quality. It's not even, more *real* jobs.

 

(Not aiming that at you, Clark, just at the absurd announcement.)

celgins
Community Member

(Not aiming that at you, Clark, just at the absurd announcement.)

No, I wasn't thinking that at all.

 

I, too, was wondering why a client would post more jobs because of AI assistance. I guess if a client has 15 jobs, but is slow to post them because it takes too much time, maybe they would post them sooner rather than later since an AI tool will generate the job description faster? That only makes sense if they have 15 job requirements/roles to fill.

198fa416
Community Member

Hi guys, anyone has an idea on why some job posting have this disclaimer (i.e. "Note: Some of the content in this job post may have been auto-generated using advanced AI.")?

 

Could it be spam? 

 

I've seen a lot of them in the last 2 days...

Hi All,

We recently launched this test for a new optional tool to help clients define job requirements and quickly build enhanced project descriptions.

We're closely monitoring this ongoing test and its impact on job quality, hire rates, and the marketplace. We know there have been some concerns and want to assure you that this test will not affect our Trust & Safety team's work in detecting and addressing spam and scam job postings.
We truly appreciate your feedback! To better track overarching themes and trends, we have consolidated related posts into one feedback thread. Please keep sharing your thoughts with us, and we will keep sharing them with our product teams.

~ Valeria
Upwork


Valeria K wrote:

Hi All,  

We know there have been some concerns and want to assure you that this test will not affect our Trust & Safety team's work in detecting and addressing spam and scam job postings.


I didn't notice this immediately but now I have, I'm horrified. The test should  affect the T&S team's work because the nature of posts is different. Wording etc that identifies scams will be different. Detecting and addressing scams will involve different approaches. When one thing changes, another has to.

 

Ignoring this means scammers are being told to let rip.

e9df0c11
Community Member

sir how i earn money from upwork because I am a student and i have to work on side

I see nothing to prevent it. Upwork does no vetting of the clients, nor do they even look at the job postings. That's supposed to be the freelancers' responsibility to flag the scams for them. There is nothing preventing clients from posting multiple fake or real jobs. With this aid to scam, the numbers and level of deception is going way up. The number of "jobs" real or scams, looks good to the market and investors. Until, that is, you realize 80% and higher of the jobs posted are scams. That does not include the people who are and will increasingly be fishing for cheap prices across multiple platforms.

 

Short-term financial boost in connects, increased scammers, and deleterious impact on the platform will be the result.

the-right-writer
Community Member

Ah, excellent! Upwork is so perfect, without a single area of issues or outright problems they are spending time, money, and 'net space for a wonderful new thingy to make the scammers even better, and the clients deliver an even more confusing tangle of a job descriptions for the betterment of all!

 

Of course, it will allow for more scammers and clients who want to play with AI, believing if Upwork wants them to use it, it must be great. Hey, why not post more projects? With AI, I can create jobs to my heart's content. Cool.

 

Yes, cool for Upwork. As you and other people have stated, this is a good thing for Upwork, but in no way will this help the clients or the freelancers.

 

Upwork, forget the (&$_@(*^+ connects. Obviously, the company is in a big hurt and desperately needs money. I know you want anything with a pulse to be a paying freelancer, but this cash grab isn't working for the platform. Sure, it's going to get you that connect money, but it is destroying the quality of the platform. Set a fee for applying that is high enough to make some real money and stop looking for quick cash in connects. But, this won't happen because Upwork is obsessed with the millions of unskilled freelancers who believe the propaganda and throw connects at jobs they will never get.

 

Prepare for the scams to increase and become even more difficult to discern. I predict that Upwork will continue to use AI, aiding many who use it to pretend to be legitimate clients or freelancers. Gone are the legitimate concerns over plagiarism, who cares. The connects are the thing!

 

 

Jeanne, you've said it so well.

 

We (some of us, anyway) wish for a charge to post, to slow down the spam-and-scams, we wish for more high-quality employers to hear about the site and love it... we get AI help in posting more and more garbage by employers who are of such low-quality they can't put together their thoughts on their own.

 

But we're supposed to keep "optimizing" and making sure our proposals are of increasing quality to infinity, no matter that we know from our track records that the site used to work properly for us... because all that's wrong with the drop in open rate, invites, and jobs is inside our own selves. Did the gas lights just flicker?

alex-nemchyn
Community Member

So the freelancer needs to know that the work is written using artificial intelligence.
And the freelancer should have an AI response function for that job.
And let the two bots talk to each other.
That would be fun.🤣

celgins
Community Member

Okay, Upwork -- now you're just being funny. 😂

 

When this announcement was first released, the title wasn't Job Post Generator (Beta). You also removed the language: "This five-week test aims to assist clients in defining their job requirements, helping them post more jobs and ensuring that the right freelancers can find them." And, you got rid of the phrase "advanced AI."

 

Did you do this because we were being so critical of it?

 

(No, I'm not expecting an answer, but if the actual integration of the feature didn't change, I'm not sure why the announcement had to change.)

Perhaps they're using "advanced AI" to write these announcements...

 

"The job post generator makes it easier for clients to post their jobs, with the goal of ensuring more work is available to talent."

 

🤔

wescowley
Community Member

It was inevitable that Upwork did this given that everything with a textbox has to be hooked up to ChatGPT these days. But I really hope y’all pull this feature.

 

As Kim said, it removes cues that freelancers use to filter job posts. Tone and wording can indicate that a client will be demanding and difficult to work with or that they are obvious scammers. These generic templated posts hide all of that with the pablum LLMs spew.

 

Having an text generator write part of the text makes the requirements listed in the post suspect. We have no way of knowing from the post whether the requirements listed are truly from the client or if they were plucked out of the LLM’s hat just because they statistically go with what the client put in their prompt. Sure, the client should have reviewed the post and fixed the requirements. But how many will really do that given the blind trust some people put into these madlib generators?

 

If you do proceed with this silliness, I hope you’ll at least follow the transparency recommendations of your CS and trust and safety teams and disable the option for clients to remove the "Some of the content in this job post may have been auto-generated using advanced AI” message so that freelancers are aware the post is from a random word generator rather than a client. Please also give us a toggle on the advanced job search to exclude these posts from our feeds so we don't have to waste our time with them.

m_terrazas
Community Member

I prefer a short job description, even without much detail, written by one person. If the work generates any interest, I will ask what is necessary in my proposal.

 

Just looking at the amount of nonsense we've seen on the forums because of this, I don't want to think what we might see in the jobs.

 

And something to keep in mind. Not all of us here are English speakers, we just do what we can.
English speakers, I assume you will be able to distinguish one thing from another (even I have been able to do it here in the forums), but it is not easy for us. So I'm hoping that if a job ad is generated by AI, it's specified in some way, like Wes said.

 

Bad idea, very bad.
And really, stop having so many good ideas and selling them as if they were a panacea, thank you!

colettelewis
Community Member

When I hire someone (which I have not done on Upwork, and now, I never will), I want to 'see' the person behind the proposal. AI generated proposals will be binned automatically. For the moment, they are identifiable.  If I have to waste time to go further, then I will ask for a test - unpaid.

 

Upwork, I simply do not understand your MO. You charge clients $$ to hire. How on earth are they supposed to hire when faced with at least 50 + cloned proposals? Your strategy is seriously, and frighteningly shortsighted. 

a6f0348a
Community Member

This is terrible. Look at these two job posts:

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

I saw them today at different times, and thought to myself: "I'm sure I have read this exact phrasing in another job posts".

When I compared them I was sure at the beginning it is the same client for both ("No way two different persons used the exact same phrasing" I told myself), but you can see the differences between the client meta-data, so it is definitely not the same client. 

When I remembered the announcement about this AI-generated job posts feature, it all makes sense now. 

And if this is our future, it is really terrible.

Now there will be more job posts that will result in me thinking to myself "I cannot tell anything from this general wording about the job or about the client", and therefore I might either not submitting a proposal at all, or submitting one of my general proposals (which I hate) that only shows my profile and portfolio, but tell the client nothing about the way I'm going to solve their specific problem. Upwork might get some more connects, but the end result - No contracts. And for the long run - no clients and no talents in the platform. 

williamtcooper
Community Member

Hi Shannon,

 

This is my updated post for this thread after having more exposure to clients using the generative AI to assist them with writing their Job post. My initial intuition was that maybe this concept might not be the best idea. However, after receiving enough of the generative AI Job posts, I give the concept a thumbs up.

 

The jobs requests are written more clearly and the AI assisted the clients in writing better specs versus a frequently confusing request. Basically, the Job requests are clearer and more tightly written. My vote is to keep this feature for the clients. Thanks!

defa809e
Community Member

I think this is a great idea

8301b9fc
Community Member

it's a good idea

kbadeau
Community Member

I think people without profile photos shouldn't be allowed to reply.

it's a good idea

I know it's been years since I joined, but I remember going through all kinds of machinations to get an acceptable photo. I tried recently, and it allowed me to use a photo with a hat, and one with a book covering most of my face. So, I guess the Upwork algo for photos was changed.

 

I like your suggestion. This forum should be for freelancers, not people selling stuff, spamming, phishing and other scams. Or making statements based on no profile/photo/etc. These people could be anyone.

zoomconcepts
Community Member

As this has been in use for a while now and more and more AI-assisted jobs pop up in the feed, here's another piece of feedback. 

 

The assist is glaringly obvious. The templated 3-4 paragraphs that all use the same structure and sentences are tedious to sift through, because they contain very little actual info. The added filler that's supposedly there to make the job post feel more complete and professional is instead empty, repetitive, and makes it harder to understand what the client actually wants to see, and for the freelancer to make an initial communication compatibility assessment. That especially is harmful for all involved, I think - you waste everyone's time by applying to a job where it's obvious from the first two sentences exchanged with the client that you won't be a match. 

 

Look at this: 

To apply for this job, please submit a proposal outlining your experience, qualifications, and how you can help us with this project. Please include links to past completed projects that demonstrate your skill set. We look forward to reviewing your application and working with you to create a pitch deck that stands out.


What is this? A whole paragraph to repeat the application steps every freelancer should already be familiar with. Entirely empty, completely soulless, 100% waste of space.

 

If you're going to foist AI on us where we can hardly avoid it, at least wait a bit to get a better trained model that can actually add something other than padding.  For now, due to the reasons above, I personally avoid applying to generated job posts. 

 

 

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