New system aimed primarily at matching newer sellers with buyers

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1902 comments

  • Code and More LLP

    @Deb Google Joomla and spend ten minutes reading and you will probably know as much as the swarm of £2/hour freelancers who list it as a skill

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  • Deb C

    @Graeme yeah I did that last night, but being a newbie I think I should only charge £1.50 an hour to begin with. Nancy, yep I too woke up to the amazing news I had yet another 85 credits, I'll be lucky if I manage to use 5 the way this sites going :/  

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  • Asraa

    Dear Moderator,

    could you please tell me, why my comment has been eliminated? Yesterday night I wrote a comment, but it isn't here now. The newer comments are here, but my comment has been ignored. Why? Is there something wrong with my comment?!

    Thanks

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  • Paul

    85 free credits

    That's close to three proposals a day for the next month.

    Nancy, I'm sure you're so talented you can find 85 jobs this month that fit your profile, but I suspect for mere mortals like the rest of us, it would be a tough ask. You might have a busy month ahead and doing a lot of waiting and watching for that two-hour window to expire.

    I don't understand why PPH would be spreading credits like confetti while trying to improve proposal quality.

    There's no coherence in their behaviour is there?

    Proposal and seller quality is an issue - no problem we'll promote sellers with little to no track history, with or without the right skills and hold back the people with the right skills so they can't bid. To help this along we'll spread free bid credits around because the people who have the skills and can get work won't possibly make a proposal if they don't have three free bids a day.

    Madness.

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  • Rebecca

    Did you get an email regarding the credits or did they just appear? I haven't got them. I just have the ones left from the 100 I bought recently and then the usual 15 at the start of the month

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  • Emily

    The free proposal credits aren't a new thing, I've been getting them occasionally since I joined, they seem to just select you sometimes to receive them - the email says it's because you're a top seller, but I don't know what it's actually based on. It's always many more than you can realistically use. I'm not complaining about that though, free credits are great!

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  • Milos

    Hello PPH,

    I think you have a wrong approach with this new feature. Instead of not letting other freelancers bid on the job, you should've just given the freelancers that "fit" a free bid and maybe find a way to highlight their bids. Like, in the first two hours, the people that "fit", get their proposal sent to the employer with a "PPH recommendation" while others can bid too. This, I think, is a better approach because it's not based on punishing the freelancers that don't "fit" but promoting the ones that do.

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  • Asraa

    Dear PPH admins! Would you please login to my account and try to apply for a job?? From yesterday  I'm looking for a job for which I could apply. There is not even 1 single job for which I could apply. My skill tags include graphics design, logo, logotype, advertising design...... But I cannot even apply for a simple logo design or flyer edit! What should I do now?! How can I work here?

    "Graphics Design" itself is very diverse and universal. It includes logo, banner, brochure, banner, flyer, stationery, Corel, PS, AI, etc. However, I can't even try editing a logo! Is there anyone listening at all?!

    From hour to hour, I am checking my PPH account hoping a note of change. :-|

    It is now dead actually. Please remove this troublesome useless bug and let PPH go on like it did before.

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  • Luke

    That's one other point, is any one else irritated that it is tagged as 'Graphics Design' instead of  'Graphic Design' ?

    Just me? oh well. 

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  • Asraa

    I think both of them are correct. However, "Graphics Design" is more popular and sounds better and is more universal.

    And also "stationery" is correct rather than "stationary". I've recommended this to admins. PPH includes "stationary" in skills list. This is not correct.

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  • Julian

    @ Faryad  you are correct grammatically, however Stationary describes my PPL job situation perfectly!!

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  • Asraa

    @ Julian

    Lol! You are right! All of us are now stationary! I'm feeling like a potato in front of my monitor now. And I hate this:

    "You can't send a Proposal to a job that's not relevant to your primary skills. Browse other jobs"

    :-|

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  • Bryony

    As someone who's received a lot of these "you have been selected to bid" emails I'd like people per hour that it hasn't encouraged me to bid on any of them. I think I've had about 40 this month and hardly any of them have been relevant to my skillset!

    The skills tagged in our profiles are too vague for this to work and often Buyers wont really understand what skillset they require so will tag any old skill that sounds about right. This means myself and many others are getting spammed by irrelevant emails and its really putting me off using this site at all.

     

    If there's an issue with poor quality work then maybe you need to look into dealing with those sellers directly rather than inconveniencing everyone. I also think you need to give more guide lines to buyers on what quality they should expect for the price they offer as if someone is offering £20 for  7 hours work then obviously they're not going to receive a professional finished product at the end.

     

    I've gone from using this site regularly each month to maybe once a month, not because I cant get the work, but because things have become so convoluted with CERTs and now this new feature it feels like its more effort than its worth. I actually thought your site was brilliant when I joined in 2011 and wish it could be more simple like it was back then. Oh well...

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  • Deb C

    The more i read about this the more my blood boils. Once again little people sitting wherever playing with their whatevers have no idea what goes on the in the real world. This is one of the toughest ways to make a living and a site that is supposed to help us is making it even tougher! Do they care that, thanks to their sheer stupidity and inability to listen to the very people who make their money for them, my earnings are now less than half what they were a couple of months ago, yet my outgoings remain the same! Let's hope Maven come through on their promises as I foresee a mass exodus to a site that actually gives a s**t about freelancers. Oh btw, my new skills for today is 'flash action script added to a banner' go me! :/ 

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  • maik

    waaay too many chiefs at pph _ obviously!

    a load of senior and middle management 'vacant suits' _ all trying to justify their own worth to the company by messing up the REAL worth of the company _ if you read between the lines of pph support desk replies it's easy to see that the actual pph work-force have had enough of the upper echelons as well _

    WELL DONE peopleperhour.com _ you've managed to turn a prime steak into something equivalent to dog food

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  • Chris

    @Bryony, Deb, Maik - Couldn't agree more. I feel like such a fool for investing so much time into this website now when I could have put my efforts elsewhere i.e. my own website. 

    Before this job matching craziness, I would have put PPH head and shoulders above any other freelance site out there. Purely for the fact that you can actually find decent paying work here. Unfortunately now you can't apply for most of it, even if you're ideally suited to the job. 

    I just cannot believe that they're persisting with this despite all the tension it's caused. They've annoyed so many of their sellers already and it's growing by the day. I can't help feeling like many there's some ulterior motive at play here..

     

     

     

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  • Asraa

    Is there anyone out there who could tell me WHY they do this and WHY they don't stop this mess???

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  • Mike

    I am furious, I have complained about this numerous times, today I have been offered to translate a document into Chinese - I barely have GCSE French. I have been blocked from 3 jobs though that I DO have the skills for (graphic designer). I have patiently waited my 2 hours - the job has now gone. PPH TAKE THIS FEATURE OFF PLEASE!!!!!!

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  • Asraa

    Mike, my team and I have lost almost 30 projects form yesterday. Don't worry. You are not alone.

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  • Chris

    I'm as frustrated as you, Mike. All we can do is keep writing to customer support until they get the message. Really arrogant of the decision makers at PPH to see this level of backlash and still persist with this stupid idea. 

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  • Deb C

    I don't think they will take any notice of us until we start disappearing in our droves, and even then they'l probably shrug their shoulders as they will still have the £2 brigade and while they won't as much per job the turnover will be huge. I wish this new site was up and running now or I'd be off!  Sick to death of sitting here for 12 hours a day in the hope there'll be a job I can actually apply or and that I will be the lucky one amongst the 50 or so other bidders

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  • Emily

    “You're one of the most qualified Sellers for the Job "Proof-reader Farsi required" because of your skills in Proofreading”

    Brilliant.

    I don’t even list proofreading as a skill. And meanwhile, someone who actually speaks Farsi and has a great eye for detail who happens not to have listed proofreading as a skill is being told they can’t bid at all.

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  • Fiona

    @Emily - chances are even if they have listed proofreading and Farsi they will have to wait 2 hours. Meanwhile many French speaking graphic designers with a specialism in Aardvark impersonation will have been identified as perfect for the job.

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  • Suzanne

    Well may I say that as a professional Aardvark impersonator I'm steaming. Got a bid offer to create a website for graphic designers in Farsi. I wouldn't mind but detailed design work on a computer is impossible for me because my snout gets in the way.

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  • maik

    request submitted to pph support _ 1724GMT _ 01072014

    hi _

    my question refers to pph support feed _ http://support.peopleperhour.com/entries/74562353

    i have been monitoring this feed for the last 4 days and can report that it now has 130 entries posted on it _

    pph has marked the feed as 'answered'

    please can you answer the following _

    a) what does 'answered' actually mean to pph staff

    b) is this feed still being monitored by pph staff

    c) what (PRECISELY AND IN DETAIL) is being done to resolve the issue that is the subject of this feed

    i look forward to a prompt response _ preferably from the level of pph management

    thank you

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  • Chris

    Good work, Maik. Be sure to post the response you get here. 

    If it's anything other than generic and placating I'll be extremely surprised

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  • maik

    thanks Chris

    my biggest worry is that anyone who puts their 'head above the parapet' on this issue

    is in danger of having their account suddenly closed _

    and thereby the ability to report back here at all _

    i'm beginning to think we should all be sorting an alternative 'meeting place'

    in case anyone is interested (or in case i can't report back here....)

    my email is inputforcolor@gmail.com

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  • Deb C

    Last week I went after a job to be told you know what, so I sent a message asking to be invited, I was and won the job and the client has now left PPH due to the fact that, as mentioned earlier, he would not have found me if I hadn't asked for the invite and he needed somebody quickly.  Now however, that has changed too, and you can no longer ask to be invited to a project during this 2 hour window so that says to me they know exactly what they are doing if they have also blocked this line of communication. It makes me physically sick to know how much money they have made from all of us in the past yet we are treat like garbage. 

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  • Mitch

    52 people want this answered! Surely that means it is a failure, you are shooting yourselves in the foot with this new system. I continually get invites to jobs do not have the time or experience for, yet jobs I do I'm locked out of.  Just admit it's a failure already so we can all a less stressful time.

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  • Asraa

    Well I am a native Farsi speaker and I can't bid on that famous Farsi-proof job!!! REALLLLY FEEEELS GOOOOD!!! 2 persons from US and India can bid on that job, but I can't!!! God give me some more patience please!!!!!!!!

    I am getting crazy.

    REPEAT FOR THE 4TH TIME:

    "I CANNOT BID ON EVEN 1 JOB OF MY PROFESSIONS; EVEN 1 JOB."

    For more than 30 times I've changed my skill list; reversed them, changed its words, played with the words, and still no luck.

    Now it includes these keywords:

    Graphics Design, Logo, Logotype, Illustration, Stationary, Books & Magazines, InDesign, Website Design, Website Development, Character Design

    And I cannot even bid for converting a logo, designing a business card, or illustrating one page for a book!!!! GOD!!! I am slapping in the monitor now!!!

    Is this a game? Are PPH staff awake? Is there someone out there reading these things???? What should we do now? Sometimes I think to myself may PPH wants to close its website and this is a polite way of saying farewell to its customers. Don't you think so?

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