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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@deb, I completely agree. In my industry those advertising the work have a legal duty to ensure that those who advertise are licensed and certified in that year to practice. Someone in the Indian sub-continent as an example physically could not live, work and advise in the UK on the same basis as a UK SRA Solicitor. Yet they can still pitch for work.
I use the site for juniors who work through what are sometimes quite demanding documentation written from scratch using drafting notes to frame the document, not a template. For example the last job ended with the client having an eighty page document, with twenty pages of advisory notes giving the client paragraph by paragraph advice on what each section means to them. Had they walked through the door, we would have charged £1400. The client did not pay 90% of that cost. The training tool works.
However, the client tells me several "lawyers" based outside the UK put in bid at less than half ours and even contacted the client direct through Facebook, email and Twitter.
PPH introducing the flood of Freelancers from outside the UK into what primarily was a UK orientated site has backfired as many are looking to cut them out.
The new system has, after checking our analytic software, seen a drop in Hourlies of 68%. This does not reinforce the business as a great tool in our mind. We want something predictable, not schizophrenic. We also want something that fits our profile, not invitations to "write software".
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@Consultopia Law its called globalisation and you are just going to have to learn to live with it. Why should lawyers be protected from cheap competition when no one else is - certainly no one in manufacturing is.
Skrill is better and cheaper than Paypal, its British and is no on the whole particularly popular in the Indian sub-continent.
The ID require look very similar to what is standard for financial services business (banks, brokers, payment processors) in the UK require from customers, so I am guessing that it is simply a matter of following the law. Does anyone know if they require all three - I have a problem with utility bills.
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I also have issue with utility bill... I have to go to my bank today to get a statement as i do online banking... I have asked them of passport and bank is ok... The annoying thing is i have a hourly i need to invoice and if its not done today i will get my ranking put down.. This is not my fault. Pph never tell us.. If i knew i would not of taken the job on
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Hi
I too am getting job requests for skills I simply don't have on my profile - I never have and I never would, yet seem to be getting much less than I used to for the skills I *DO* have!
The latter might be because *AGAIN* PPH has changed my location to something it is not, but this time states I am based in America as I logged in while I was over there for a few days - yet it's now been like that for a number of weeks despite me logging in regularly from my 'normal' location. Very frustrating as UK prospects will unlikely choose me, and also it's not possible to change.
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I got yet another email this morning about my skills in video. I am a copy editor and have never pretended to have skills in video, yet all of the "perfect fit" emails I have received in the last few weeks have been for video editing or even video shooting. I have cut my skills list right down to the bone (3 skills only) as they are the only somewhat relevant skills PPH will let me have, and yet I *still* get these damn invites! It is this which annoyed me sufficiently to go looking for answers on the PPH forum and brought me here - a dangerous situation for PPH, since it is driving its annoyed freelancers to the forums for answers where they find other annoyed freelancers and for want of a better word get "radicalised". There has always been strength in numbers.
I find it utterly ridiculous that there is not better tagging for copy editing skills. Like TEFL it is traditionally freelance and there is a large freelance community of copy editors. We none of us have anything to do with video, so I am not alone in my frustration that the two - print editing and video editing - both appear to PPH to be one and the same generic term "editing".
I have noticed that the freelancers who seem to do best on PPH are those with computer programming skills, yet this wasn't always the case and actually when I used this site as a buyer I was impressed at the variety and skill of the copy *writers* I encountered. I wonder if success is directly proportionate to how well PPH understands your field of work and can be bothered to properly tag it.
@graeme @Rob - I agree that recent changes have created a gap in the market. PPH is not what it once was.
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PPH strikes again...requiring the re-entry of payment details BUT without any prior warning except for that provided by you, the kind people who post on this forum. Is PPH totally devoid of any kind of customer service ethic? Yes. So, PPH, a quick word of advice, before making any major changes to the way the system works send out a warning email to all those who will be affected.
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So far today I've been selected to bid on quite a few jobs. I've been perfect for the job of developing a website because if my non existent skills in 'custom website'. I've also been a perfect match for the job if a personal injury solicitor because of my non existent skills in 'legal'.
I'm now just waiting for my daily foreign language job for which I also have no skills :) -
It's really hard to ascertain exactly what their agenda is, if they have one at all. Either they have an agenda, or they're trashing their own business and are completely clueless.
I cut my teeth on here and it's been good in the past for the odd "filler" job, but this is going to be a thing of the past for me soon. My Cert is also going down, but when I challenged them on this they refused to accept that they'd played any part in it.
I too am bombarded daily with jobs for skills i do not have and have no listed on my profile. I've even been offered jobs on translation of European languages, the only language i speak other than English, is Welsh, and this is clearly stated in my profile.
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The issue of payments hasn't affected me yet, but if they've lost our details, then that would be a clear breach of Data Protection laws in this country. They should make it clear to us what the changes are and why we have to re enter our details without us having to work it out for ourselves.
If they have lost our details then we would have every right to go to the Information Commissioner about this. I know what I'm talking about, I worked in this area for many years.
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@Gillian I meant lost as in "accidentally deleted or made inaccessible to the system" not lost as in "accidentally disclosed" so there should be to data protection problem should there? It could just be that their developers decided it was too much effort to migrate data to the new system.
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that's not the point Graham, if they're messing about with our data, then we still have a right to know what they're doing with it, and how do you know it's not lost? Do you have absolute certainty, that in it's migration to a new system, some of it hasn't been leaked to a third party by accident? They should email all of us to offer us their reassurances. I don't know how anyone can be certain of anything when we've not been told ourselves what's going on, unless of course you have privy to information the rest of us don't?
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I have no reason to think anything has been leaked. Anyone with my data MAY have leaked it and I have no reason to think PPH has actually done so.PPH has lost my confidence and I am currently in the middle of signing up with two new freelance sites that seem to offer high quality work.
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I am pretty sure this change was made for regulatory reasons - the requirements and process are very similar to Skrills - except that Skrill's system is much clearer, tells you about it on the login screen, only required to let you go over regulatory limits (like total transfers over 2,500 euros) for unverified customers and, most of all, when I had a problem with their switch to a new system I was able to phone them and get it sorted out in five minutes.Verification requires looking at a LOT of people (especially those overseas) as individuals and applying the rules intelligently, which is very time consuming. Do PPH have enough people to do it?
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I would love to share, but its against PPH forum rules to mention competitor sites.
Also, some of the alternatives are focused (on types of work, on local people etc.) so you probably want different ones from me. I need access to the forums as long as i have PPH clients (and, to be fair, I have found several good clients through PPH).
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Xenios has made some updates in his blog. It looks like skills matching is hanging in there.
Worth a look - the update is towards the end of the posts.
http://blog.peopleperhour.com/memo-from-our-founder-recent-and-upcoming-changes
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ANOTHER CRAZY NEW FEATURE TO BENEFIT NEW COMERS!
Why have PPH made it so that when clicking on hourlie section from the main page that it shows only the 'PPH Mix' and not 'Featured' hourlies like it used to just over 1 week ago?
When clicking on hourlie section from homepage, it displays 'PPH Mix' first and no longer the 'Featured' Hourlies. The featured page is no full of hourlies with no profiles, no experience, total new comers with rubbish hourlie offers that actually bring no value or quality.
I used to advertise 3 times per week at consistent time and on days and was selling roughly 5 hourlies per week. Since the new system has been introduced, and when featuring an hourlie, it drops down to page 3 in a matter of 1 day because all the featured hourlie are now from new comer freelancers. Before it was mainly long-term freelancers with valuable hourlies and excellent rating that were selling.
I have lost around £800 per month because this change and now considering leaving PPH if things don't change for the better and to not only favour the new comers. Most recent changers have been for the benefit of new comers and PPH profits. All you are trying to do is increase your profits with quick fixes which have proven to not really work. It's widely known that building any type of productive community requires long term relationships to be developed and not thrown away with silly ideas.
Just think, if you have punished long standing freelancers with crazy changes, just think what the new comers will think of when starting out? That's right, they will treat your system with no respect as they can't rely on you for long term income, as PPH have proven already clearly enough.
What features are you now putting in that will actually help long standing freelancers that have worked so hard and developed your system. If it wasn't for us, you wouldn't have a system and be in the position to gain $3.2 million of investment for future development. We helped you grow, so now return the favour...
A very annoyed and angry freelancer,
Andrew
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I'm also frustrated here. I am new to PPH and there are a number of jobs in the travel writing industry which I have experience in but I can't bid for them. How am I supposed to move up the ranks if I can't bid for jobs in my area of expertise? This site was recommended to me but now I feel somewhat disillusioned.
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I have asked one of the accounts people to check the work from PPH over the past few months. Even though we are a CERT 4, we have seen our work drop 68% since changes made by PPH. We have now registered on three other sites, all have provided more work in the past month than PPH in the past three.
A great pity, PPH was the only Freelance site we were registered on as a decent flow of work.
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