New system aimed primarily at matching newer sellers with buyers
So now it seems I have to wait two hours before I can bid for a job. This is extremely unfair. Not only do experienced creatives/designers have to compete with an unfair playing field, ie people offered to do a job for £10 when it is clearly worth £100, we are now not allowed to bid for jobs as soon as they appear on PPH. What kind of system is this?!
Awful. Unfair. Unprofessional. Discriminatory.
Regards
C. Howe
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In agreement with 95% of comments already posted.
I too think this is a badly conceived and implemented feature by PPH. I have come back to the platform after a couple of months being busy on other work, only to find that I cannot bid immediately on jobs that are perfect for my skill set (graphic design). I have today checked my skills in my profile and all the ones I've included (why only 10 allowed?) are the most relevant to what I do. However, some of the 'pre-set' choices offered are too generic and so I have sent PPH several emails today requesting that I can include such skills as 'Brochure design'; 'Leaflet design' , 'Graphic design for print' and 'Stationery design' – not simply the tags of 'Brochure'; 'Leaflet'; Graphics design' ; and 'Stationary' that are offered as choices. By the way PPH, please note the correct English spelling of 'Stationery' when referring to writing and other office materials.
I hope this complete travesty of a system is rectified or removed as soon as possible.
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This system is ridiculous - bizarrely I've been 'selected' to bid on jobs that I have no skills of at all. How they select the sellers is a mystery. I could have provided a great service to some of the jobs that I missed out on - they were perfect for what I offer but having to wait the 2 hours is really diluting my bid. Surely the point of opening the job on here is to get a broad range of sellers so that buyer can choose? Or are PPH saying that they are having problems with substandard quality of work from some freelancers?
Please change the system back!
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@people per hour admin
Surely you must recognise the extreme dissatisfaction this has caused among your regular sellers? Don't you think that will impact your bottom line if you refuse to modify it. Also, people above have speculated that job posters might be annoyed that their jobs are getting poorer responses. Again, in this web age, people can easily move to other sites.
I used to think that PPH was the best of the numerous freelance job bidding sites, so I mainly concentrated on this one, however as a backup I also am registered on several of your competitiors.
Although I can see that this system might be a trial for Digital Donkey or whatever it is misnamed -I hope this is untrue- what's more likely to happen if you annoy thousands of freelances and job providers, is A More Agile Competitor will Eat Your Lunch. The internet has a Darwinian aspect to it and companies which are not the fittest, don't survive.
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Same issue with me too. Its tedious. I am getting told I am 'ideal' for everything in Business Support as a category. I am not ideal at all for admin, data entry, training on various software applications or all of the other 30 I have been 'specially selected' for in the last week. Its painful and I cannot remove myself from the notices either!
How PPH allow this to continue is beyond me, its basic customer service and a switch off of a function that is flawed.
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Up till now I haven't bid on anything as I have been working with existing non-pph clients and editorial articles.
As I was on the site I checked the jobs and there was a technical writer job which is right up my street, hitting several skills I have.
I WASN'T ALLOWED TO MAKE A PROPOSAL. I have just sat around for 1 hour, doing nothing - till I can bid.
I looked at the one person that had bid. he was a Cert 1 with no jobs done and zero feedback. In my view he was completely unsuitable for the job. I'm not being unfair, everyone has to start somewhere. Basically the client has had just this one useless proposal till the 2 hour limit expired. I've commissioned several jobs through PPH, and you used to get a deluge of proposals virtually from the moment you pressed "submit"
PPH can you not recognise this is commercial suicide? It is not unknown for clients to submit jobs to PPH and **other freelance sites** simultaneously and pick what they think is the best proposal.....I think that is unfair but clients will vote with their feet.
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As a software developer I am stunned that they ever introduced this system. Any competent company would have simulated the effect of this system in a parallel test environment and used historical data to analyse how the change would impact their business. It's patently clear we are the guinea pigs in an unproven system.
Of course, I say how it could have been tested, but it should never have had the go ahead in the first place.
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I'm getting really annoyed now at not being able to bid on jobs that I am skilled in and interested in. Over the past 2 days I have been selected to bid for well over 20 website development jobs when I don't have this skill yet I haven't been selected for a single admin job when that is what I do. I have been monitoring the jobs that I am interested in and quite a few have been awarded in the first 2 hours before I am allowed to bid. Thank goodness for my hourlies or I'd be earning nothing. Oh and can I add that in the past week I have been contacted by a few buyers to undertake work that they had previously awarded to another freelancer who has then subsequently let them down.
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Hi.
In the last few weeks I have noticed how my income has reduced bit by bit. PPH is my only source of income and I am extremely worried that this is happening. The answer " the budget is too high" is more and more common in this past few months, even when I know that my prices are not expensive at all. Some of my clients have serious complaints on the website, things like double billing seem to be really annoying for them, so they have withdrawn from the site. The implementation of the Cert system seems to me the worst of all the ideas so far: I have no clue of how to improve it (except by annoying my high school friends with sharing and liking requests on Facebook, which I find humiliating), specially since I haven't changed my work style since last year, and I have dropped 40 spots in the cert. I am about to be demoted to the following level, and I still have no clue of what should I do different, because before this was implemented, I was doing GREAT.
The projects with budgets that won't buy a bag of peanuts are more frequent each week, leaving almost no room for everyone to get semi-decent (not even great) jobs, specially the freelancers that don't want to work for peanuts, but for real food (I mean, the good professional ones). I don't want my career going in the direction of one hundred Big Mac-priced logos a week. This is not right and it shouldn't be supported and encouraged by the website. So, the conclusion would be: the website that is taking a % of my invoices shouldn't try to force me to work like this. And it seems to me, given the facts I have stated before (and I have to admit, the creation of DeskDonkie), that you are doing it. And for some reason, the quality of the clients have decayed as well, flattening almost to the level of other freelancing sites.
The site is constantly changing, adding new features that are supposed to help us, but these features are implemented without any warning, feedback or even a simple email. I pay a % of each project to the website, and as far as I know, PPH is not here to do me any favors, so I expect that if something is going to be implemented, I should at least be aware of it. I also expect that the conditions that helped me go up the ladder remain still, and not change every two months to give birth to something completely new, usually unfair and quite illogical (like implementing this matching system without de-bugging it first).
Sometimes it seems as the PPH owners think that the freelancers are just playing and experimenting with their sabbatical year, and that we shouldn't be taken too seriously.
You launched an april fool's joke stating that the jobs would be separated by gender. This was so absurd that everybody should've laughed. But most of the people believed it, quite a lot of people reacted in a bad way to it, and most of us at least checked the information. This should be taken as a warning that we do believe that you could implement such an irrational measure, and that the freelancers (and probably the clients) are not taking the site too seriously anymore. If you ask me, this goes against your fidelity program, because if I can't trust that my trajectory here is going to be taken into account at all times, then I cannot, by any means, make this website my only income. I need it to be dependable. And to explain the point further: I am constantly in fear that I will be completely out of work one day thanks to a new and random change of the game.
It's time, I believe, that you start taking your freelancers a bit more seriously.
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"PPH is my only source of income"
Bad idea! Freelancer's should diversify - in particular you should build a base of your own clients outside PPH. Even if this problem is sorted out, you need to plan for contingencies such as PPH being taken over or going bust.
I suspect that PPH is refocusing on small and cheap jobs - more hourlies, more quick and simple jobs and fewer complex and long term ones. I specialise in large jobs, so I expect that I will gradually get less work from PPH. Its disappointing as PPH was just begninng to work well for me, but lower quality markets tend to be larger (McDonalds is a much bigger business than Gordon Ramsay's) so I can understand why PPH would want to go after the bigger and faster growing market.
"Cert system seems to me the worst of all the ideas so far: I have no clue of how to improve it"
Bill lots of work through PPH.I have gone from 1 to 5 in the last few months. It helps if you have external clients.
I agree the system is broken: its simply not intelligent enough. For example, I just discovered that I cannot bid for some database jobs I can do because the client as tagged the job with the name of a particualr RDBMS, whereas my profile uses generic terms like "database" and "SQL". PPh should develop a true AI and then implement this!
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Vanessa, great post.
Graeme, chasing an expanding market of small jobs is the worst strategy. Better to process a smaller number of larger value jobs, the site's reputation would be far better. It is fast becoming the "six pound land" of jobs.
PPH should never have implemented this at all, they don't need AI, nor are they capable of it.
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Paul, the point of my comment about AI is meant to satirise the impossbility of automatic matching.
I disagree about the desireability of chasing the market for smaller jobs: more importantly PPH appears to have decided ont their strategy so perhaps it wouold be more constructive to focus on how to deal with it than trying to change their minds.
I already had plans for a new hourlie that I hope will do much better than my existing ones, and one possible strategy is to adjust to using PPH for that sort of work, and for existing PPH clients, and get other work from elsewhere.
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It's quite simple.
There are a few freelancing platforms out there and which one you use is gonna be a question of which one works best for you.
Peopleperhour worked out well for me. It had more cons than pros compared to the others. But now this a serious CON. And I have to start using the other platforms more.
At first, I thought, PPH want me to purchase skills so that I'll be selected for jobs. But no, it's not even that. What's the point?
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Not holding my breath but it seems they might start to be taking some notice. After frequently contacting them regarding this pathetic feature, I have just received the following reply:
I am sorry that this continues to create such a large amount of problems for you. We will be making some changes in the way the matching filter works and we may be looking to remove part of the feature that doesn't allow users to bid on certain jobs. This will likely be enforced next week and we hope to see a dramatic change on how the whole thing functions.
Still a little vague for my liking but I wait with baited breath to see if anything changes. A little concerned by the 'may be looking' bit.
Mike
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Dear Valued PPH Users,
We have read the forum posts and the reactions to the matching feature and we can see that it has indeed created many issues for a large amount of our users. We tried to implement the new feature as to avoid low quality work that was becoming a trend on the site due to freelancers undertaking work that was not in their skill sets. This created numerous issues and undervalued the quality and credibility of the site as a whole. We decided to try this curated matching feature in order to improve the situation and in no way to create more problems or to damage anyone's chances of getting work on PPH. We do however understand that this may not have been successful to many of our users.
As such, our development and product teams have deemed it necessary to re evaluate the way the feature works and we will be implementing changes towards the middle of next week. At this point I do not have the absolute specifics of what these changes will be, however, they are based on the feedback that we received from all our users and especially many comments made in this forum.
The necessity to be more communicative during the release of any new feature is also duly noted and an absolute concern on our part. We failed to advise our users of the changes and this is not the relationship that we want to have with our customers. We will be producing site wide announcements every time a new feature is either introduced or changed in order to have complete clarity on what we are including. We hope this will rebuild our trust with our entire user base.
Our goal is to always improve on the product that we already have and this sometimes may mean that ideas and features will be successful and other times they will not. We do want to stress that we do listen to your opinions and suggestions and are always open to your feedback. I would like to ask for your patience while we make these changes until next week and we hope to see a drastic change in how the matching options work.
My sincere apologies for any inconvenience we may have caused you and we do strive to offer you better support and features in the immediate and long term future.
kind regards,
Michael
PPH Customer Support Manager
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I find that response to be very disappointing. It means they are continuing with this madness as though a tweak will make things right. Enforced. That says a lot.
A seriously bad idea is a bad idea, no matter how much you play with it.
At a very basic level:
If you favour some users above others, you disadvantage the others that you do not favour.
If you favour newcomers to PPH, you're introducing sellers with no track history to buyers as preferred sellers - you are gambling with PPHs reputation.
If you are pre-selecting even established sellers, you are again gambling because you cannot hope to have a selection algorithm that can do this reliably.
If you are selecting some sellers for a preferential introduction to buyers, you are implying that I am some second-class seller and you are duping the buyer that this preferred selection of sellers is the best solution to their problem.
The whole thing stinks.
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We tried to implement the new feature as to avoid low quality work that was becoming a trend on the site due to freelancers undertaking work that was not in their skill sets.
This is an admission that low-quality sellers are degrading the site.
This created numerous issues and undervalued the quality and credibility of the site as a whole.
I agree.
We decided to try this curated matching feature in order to improve the situation and in no way to create more problems or to damage anyone's chances of getting work on PPH.
I accept that, but it is a completely flawed idea and it contradicts the stated purpose of the feature - to introduce newcomers.
Here's a simple suggestion. If you want to raise the quality of proposals allow buyers to rate proposals ( I suggested that earlier) and throttle back the ability of sellers to make proposals if buyers judge them to be of poor quality/irrelevant. Even reducing the number of free proposals available to low quality sellers will help.
Newcomers to the site should concentrate on making quality proposals, not making a lot of proposals to get that first job.
This feature is just going nowhere and is a bad idea entirely that doesn't solve the problem of low quality proposals at all.
Please don't bother to curate me. I'll move on.
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Oh, and while we're at it doesn't PPH think there might be a correlation between bargain-basement sellers and low quality at all? At one stage the lowest fixed price proposal was £15 and now it's £6 - might that not have some influence? Hourly jobs at well below the minimum wage and way, way below a UK living wage. Hardly a way to attract quality, is it?
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Here here. I agree with Paul. I work in admin so there are a ridiculous amount of freelancers from other countries that are willing to do the work from as little as £2 per hour and for data entry work their rates are often even lower! I just can't compete with that. Luckily there are some buyers out there who specifically want a UK based English freelancer or who are happy to pay more to guarantee that a good job is done or else I wouldn't earn anything. I think that on our profiles where it says rate per hour there should be a minimum, also on our hourlies, and lastly on jobs posted. I recently saw a data entry job asking for items of data to be manually scraped from over 36,000 companies on a directory and the buyers budget was around the £30 mark!! Unbelievably there were people bidding for the work. When I looked at the bidders profiles they were all from countries such as India, Pakistan etc. It's clearly not a fair job market and also encourages the use of cheap labour with workers not being paid a reasonable rate for the job done.
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This feature does not need a tweak, it need radical change. WHy do you not address some of the obvious problems first: abuse of clarification questions, asking for skype or similar contact in clarification questions or even job postings, poorly described or inaccurately tagged jobs, etc. If you sorted some of this out the low qality sellers will become less active.
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Rebecca, if people can do the job in another country cheaper, what is wrong with that? Its called free trade. If people who make electronics and clothes and cars and everything else have to compete with people in low cost countries, why should you be exempt? When you are the buyer I am sure you are happy those low wages are keeping things cheap!
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Graeme, there are a lot of great talented people working in India, Pakistan and other places. They are educated and well able to compete with the west.
Unfortunately besides the great people there are tons of people who are clueless, astonishingly poor English skills and a complete inability to do the job. They work at very low rates and I suspect they form the main source of discontentment by buyers with PPH. Some clients have told me of their bad experiences.
Of course, you might say that poor quality sellers can just as well exist in the UK and I'd agree with you.
The problem is that the low-quality offshore sellers set the price expectations as a whole and consequently many competent UK/Western sellers won't bid at low price levels. This means that the PPH market is dominated by low-cost providers of very variable quality. Some great, many awful. This is the problem PPH are trying to address with this ridiculous scheme.
While PPH supports very low pricing, their margins are small and their reputation sinks. It is a problem of their own making.
There are buyers who do provide good budgets here on PPH but they aren't the norm. While budgets are low PPH will always struggle to establish quality and this scheme just can't do it.
It reminds me of the call-centre situation - so many companies use offshore providers because of the cost saving, but so often while people can speak English they often struggle with accents and they have their own accents and rhythms and cultural norm that many people find challenging and result in a degraded experience.
It's not just about cost, it's the correlation between cost and quality. Not all low cost providers are bad but many are and it's about where PPH wants to sit - either as the online 'six pound land' of the freelance market or as a supplier of quality people.
It's easy to see this argument as some kind of prejudice against offshore competitors. It's not. I just don't want to compete in a market dominated by low-cost low quality providers where buyers expectations are set by the proposals they receive from them.
If you come to PPH as a buyer looking for quality at a fair price you are going to be stunned at some of the proposals and their poor quality. This is what PPH is seeking to redress.
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@PPH
Why don't you convene a Content Strategy Group of Sellers and Buyers - say 5 or 6 AND PAY THEM
to create a strategy to solve the problems PPH is facing. Then communicate the results to us, the users to see if there are issues the group has missed (an Open Source Strategy) then test the results in a sandbox as one of the posters above suggested.
This would be an investment of time and money but it would be a lot better than flinging something at us and finding out it is catastrophic? How much money have you lost these last few weeks, and how many users alienated?
In my view Paul and Vanessa would be good people to have in this group, judging by their postings above.
How about it PPH? Or are you going to continue on your Top-down autocratic trajectory? If so, I'm not sure you are going to be around in say three years, I'm sorry to say, because I don't want you to fail.
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Hi guys i read all your comments and this is what i have to say:
Its not that people working in countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh etc. don't have the necessary skills to get the job done. I am based in India and i get the job done i am a developer and designer and i constantly try to upgrade and add more things to my skill set. I buy services too and people living in English speaking countries don't always offer the right services but then again i am not blaming anyone. The matter of quality is pressing issue with PPH but at the same time we need to ensure that we give every freelancer a fair chance.
Also i have an idea if we are having quality issues we can do one thing we can limit the no. of bids to people without any previous jobs or basically newcomers, i am not sure how to perfect this but i sure think this is a good start. i have worked hard to gain a good cert but suddenly i see i cant apply for half of the jobs i can do i mean i am a php developer and i have worked on all major cms there are successfully plus i am good with designing and seo too but the current system allows 10 skills now if i add web development and i don't add WordPress then according to PPH i am not able to apply for WordPress jobs when in past i have delivered several WordPress projects.
Please Fix this as PPH is my only source of income and i need to start my business i was under the impression that PPH will be enough for me but with the current state of affairs i don't think i will be able to sustain a steady income also. -
I agree with a lot of what you say Paul. On the other hand, a lot of work can quite reasonably be done at well below UK rates (or even the minimum wage). The people who are causing the problem are bidding for skilled work at will below the minimum wage ANYWHERE.
A lot of the problems would be solved if PPH actually enforced existing rules: for example, we get a limited number of free proposals a month to stop sellers spamming buyers large numbers of low quality proposals. The low quality sellers work around that by spamming the clarification questions instead - MOST of the jobs I see have some "questions" like "please contact us on Skype to discuss this further".
There is also a problem with low quality buyers. One that particularly annoyed me posted a job with a £300 budget for thousands (or tens of thousands if the spec was extensive) or pounds worth of work. Questions asking about the flexibility of the budget made it quite clear what the problem was. How did he respond? BY posting the job again and again every few days.
Have the buyers who you have come across who have had bad experiences paid the low quality sellers? If they need someone they can communicate with why do they choose proposals written in bad English? What do they expect to get when they pay very little?
In fact, the comparison with call centres is more apt than you probably realise. Many off-shore call centres could get fairly good people at well below UK wages, but what they do is offer wages that are lower still.
I did, like you, like PHP to start with (and I have been using it for less than an year) because it looked like a "supplier of quality people", and I am disappointed with the turn downmarket. Other freelancing sites have the same problem and many of them have also adpoted solutions that do not work - for example some have online tests that sellers can take to prove competence, but those invariably test memory rather than skill or experience.
I think PPH needs to:
1) rethink its rating scheme
2) rate companies and teams differencently - notice how many of those with high ratings are not individual freelancers, but businesses that bill lots of work because they are bill the work of a lot of people through one PPH account?
3) warn buyers that, while off shore work may be cheaper, not to expect too much - if an Indian is willing to work for a half or a quarter of the equivalent UK rate, that is reasonable, but if its a tenth or a twentieth there is something wrong.
£2 an hours for unskilled work is fine, but not for skilled work.
4) limit the number of proposals AND clarifications questions that can be asked - it could easily be linked to track record so those with high ratings and earnings get high limits, but those who get a lot of rejections and low ratings have to live with low limits.
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