243 Sellers Submitted Proposal For The Same Job Paying Fixed Price Of £83
I have seen a lot of weird behaviors by sellers submitting proposals to posted jobs, but I have to say this one specific job is breaking the record of all times. Check it out:
The job was posted a week ago and has already received 243 proposals! I understand that this is probably a copy-paste job that everyone can do, hence why many decided to send a proposal, but after 40 have already sent proposals, what made the other 203 sellers submit a proposal?! I mean, as a seller when you see 40 have already submitted before you, doesn't it mean your chances are already probably 2.5% at that point to get the job? Why waste a proposal and also waste the time to submit it when PPH only gives 15 of those every month for free?
On top of that, the job has also been favorited with a heart 58 times and garnered 9 likes in Facebook. This has to be the most popular job post of all times! I feel sorry for the buyer who had to receive about this job 30+ emails from PPH every single day...
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Oh yes... Conversation goes like this.
I'll do it in the best way possible.
What is the best way possible?
I will do it.
You're right, Gadi. What makes the last 200 applicants think they have something extra to offer? This site has a lot of very poor calibre freelancers, and that's another thing PPH need to think about. Restricting numbers even more than they do.
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@nancy I think so many people are farming out work to third parties to make a quick buck. Hired a uk freelancer with 800 reviews to get a document of poor quality and they stated when I question why they never checked or proofread before sending it to me.
I 100% disagree with proofing draft content. And the majority of my cleints seem to feel the same way. But I won't try to convince you of that. No point.
Followed by workstream messages that made no sense. Apparently from the UK and degree educated writer points like below
Can you describe to me on more detail what you had hoped to see - what 'good' would look like to you?
And the majority of my cleints
You are entitled to several rounds of revisions, to get it t the point that you
know you'd never actually pay the remoander
That is what we both agreed to in thr Ts&Cs.
please answer the questions int he previous message,
I am willing to submit an invoice for the amouthNow fighting for my money back.
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@Nancy - Spot on with the conversation pattern. Too many out there prove their "superior" communication skills in the exact same manner.
PPH should definitely put some attention to this. It is unreal for a buyer to receive 243 proposals for any job. I would say even 50 proposals for a job are still unreasonable.
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My hearts sinks, Adam.
Like I've thought, there's an 'umbrella' group on here which gets a lot of work and then farms it out. I am sure Mrs V C, who I mentioned last week, is a male. The style of reprimanding me when I complained about writing standard didn't seem female to me. Anyway, all this will backfire on them - cream rises to the top, you know.
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I applied for that, thinking it could use some automation, but as I saw the number of proposals increasing I realised my mistake, because it would be seen as "data entry" and the numbers would be unrealistic. I don't consider moving 7000 rows of Excel data into Word for £83 (or £55 by the time I've charged VAT and PPH have taken their cut) as a quick copy and paste job.
I have noticed that there are far more proposals on projects now than in the past, and sometimes a lot more.
One that surprised me recently was a project that, by some coincidence, I must have viewed almost as soon as it was posted, because it said it had been posted for 5 seconds. It already had 3 proposals. That can only be done by a bot because it isn't physically possible to enter all the fields in the form and post it in 5 seconds. -
I started this post 10 hours ago and now the total proposal sent are 246, 3 new in 10 hours. Statistically it means the buyer is still getting about 7 new proposals everyday. That's crazy.
@Simon - The buyer also has some fault in here. Publishing a job post with a one-liner not even bothering to explain if the job ought to be automated or done manually. I would say the buyer invited the floodgates opening upon him with proposals because of the lack of detailed description (AKA laziness). I see this happening way too often with posted jobs.
I decided to take a deeper inspection of this buyer. I checked his profile. What do you know? He already had a job post from a year ago with 240 proposals. Same pattern of lazy description. The guy didn't learn his lesson, but at least here he specified that it's a manual data entry job in the title & description while also the budget was higher:
Just a word of advice - Before sending a proposal, you should take in account a relatively new stat that PPH with their good-hearted resolution decided to provide - The "Project Awarded" ratio. It means how well the job posts are actually materializing to hiring someone. In this case the buyer has a ratio of 8%. He only hires someone in 1 out of 12 jobs being posted (could almost be categorized as jobs posting spam). For me, that would be a sufficient turn off to skip sending a proposal.
I also noticed the to-good-to-be-true speedy proposals submissions. Nevertheless the elapsed time stat you see in the jobs is not always accurate. I believe that every time the buyer makes an update to the job posting and click save, the timer is being reset. I noticed this behavior in jobs that had more than 20 proposals, it's not possible all are bots.
I do agree with you however that there is an extensive usage of bots for submitting proposals, I witnessed many times when a brand new job is posted, it already has 2 or 3 proposals and it's always the same sellers who are so fast in submitting, let alone in jobs that are not even in their category.
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@Gadi, I think this was a bit of desperation from me and I would have let a project like this pass by in better times. Saying that, the posted projects can be a source of quick turnaround projects, and sometimes even the vague ones are worth following up.
The buyer has some strange stats. They have 72 completed projects but only 8% awarded, which means they are posting a huge number that are not awarded. I've not been on Upwork recently but I sometimes would see jobs posted there as well as here. That could be what he is doing. Upwork have a useful statistic about a buyer where we can see their total spend and an average hourly rate. Some buyers are putting thousands pf projects through and paying $1 - $2 per hour. That is largely why I don't go there much. -
I've probably got rather a poor stat on awarding projects. I used to have such a backlog of projects on the go that I'd seek help, just to catch up a bit.
I'm the top ranked transcriber here, the only TOP CERT, and I'm afraid I just couldn't trust my work to anyone else on this site. Now that may sound like blowing my own trumpet, but I've had to cancel projects because the calibre was just so poor.
I recently posted a transcription project. It was quite a long audio file and would have taken a good five hours to transcribe, editing out false starts, umms, ahhs, you knows, etc. Within minutes an applicant says "I've done it for you - attached." Obviously downloaded my file, posted it into Otter and send me the outcome. He didn't even take time to check that the words were attributed to the correct speaker, let alone correct the lack of punctuation.
I cancelled the project and stayed up all night to do it myself.
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Neil, it actually has now 366 proposals and it shows you wrote the comment an hour ago, so this buyer still received two proposals within an hour for a job posted almost a month ago! Unbelievable - Who are the clowns who keep sending proposals for this job?!
By the way, I've just seen some newbie asks in the Clarification Board of this job something as ridiculous as:
And it passed the moderation of PPH, but a question (or more of a suggestion) I wrote to the buyer about a normal job earlier this morning didn't pass PPH moderation even though I didn't breach any of the rules to post a question in the Clarification Board. PPH - You have some horribly selective moderation rules in place I must say. The question from the screenshot above should not be published, it's a pure spam.
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I put in a request for image editing 2 days ago within 10 minutes I got 25 ridiculous proposals and 15 WhatsApp messages/voicemails and countless emails. One was so desperate, she went through my offer to try and discuss. I had to remove the request and find someone using another platform.
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25 proposals in 10 minutes?! That's unreal. I'm sure there were a few logo creators and web developers. No matter what the job is about (translation, voice-over, transcribing, you name it), there are always a few web developers and logo creators who are sending proposals. I think one should be allowed to send a proposal only if the job is related to their proven skills, otherwise the job postings are absolutely spam machines for buyers and would only keep them away from PPH platform.
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I received 20 in five minutes!!!
A transcription project of an interview between two people. It required editing out you knows, sort of, like, etc and umms, ahhs, - would take about 45 mins tops and I needed it back for close of play 5.30 ish.
I receive this from a designer - Yes i am willing to work with you to make your work the best for you desire at your request
And this from a teacher - I am home at 7.30pm. I can do it then.
I do wish that only those with proven skills OR can actually read the brief would be allowed to send proposals. I've had to cancel jobs because of the low calibre of applicants.
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Totally agree that you should only be able to bid on your skill area. I got an email the other day giving me a free 50 proposals. I have 100 already and have no not made a bid for months. I also got an email last week promoting my service via their email and it was a year out of date. The feedback was 200 short of my current and the price was wrong.
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Adam - For 3 or 4 years I was awarded the free 50 proposals on top of the default ones and I would use maybe one or two a month (I don't see it time-worthy nor productive to send proposals against dozens of other sellers). For some unknown reason, PPH decided to stop giving me this "amazing" benefit.
The problem with PPH advertising your services wrong - You should start a new thread about it and also submit a screenshot to show the invalid data. There are some PPH employees roaming this forum from time to time. I think it's a serious malfunction that their advertising is inaccurate and they should fix it. They are probably unaware of it so it's good to raise this concern.
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UNREAL!
As if people are getting paid already something just by the act of sending a proposal.
This must be PPH world record of all times for the count of proposals submitted for a single job (probably also against all other freelancing platforms).
The buyer should be awarded by PPH a prize for being able to create the ultimate job generating hundreds of proposals.
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