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
-
I wish someone would come up with the answer because its driving me crazy. I'm reduced to working for peanuts just to get some work and feedback. A few times buyers have messages me after I've made a proposal stating that they are impressed with my proposal, profile, feedback, and understanding of the job but that they've had much lower fees offered and then asking if I can reduce mine to match! And I certainly don't try to charge a fortune in the first place. Usually I end up working for what works out to be about £2 an hour!!
I've also had a few buyers contact me with work that they initially awarded to (in one buyers words) 'a low cost Indian worker' who then didn't have a good grasp of the work or didn't have the skills and either produced something of poor quality or failed to deliver anything at all. -
Rebecca,
A few times buyers have messages me after I've made a proposal stating that they are impressed with my proposal, profile, feedback, and understanding of the job but that they've had much lower fees offered and then asking if I can reduce mine to match!
In this situation I say that I don't try and compete with bargain basement bids but price my services so clients receive the quality and attention they deserve.
I've also had a few buyers contact me with work that they initially awarded to (in one buyers words) 'a low cost Indian worker' who then didn't have a good grasp of the work or didn't have the skills and either produced something of poor quality or failed to deliver anything at all.
You should also point out to buyers that all providers are not the same and that buying services on price alone is gambling with their project, since quality providers will not compete at low price levels.
Usually I end up working for what works out to be about £2 an hour!!
Don't do that. You ruin the market for everyone and reinforce buyers expectations on price.
Better to win one job in four for £8 an hour than do four times the work for no more money and feel devalued.
Part of this low job value problem is of our own making. If we can't communicate to buyers that there is a difference in quality between a UK based provider and the lowest cost overseas provider, can we blame them for taking the lowest quote?
Writing, in particular is tricky. If the buyer doesn't have English as their native tongue, then they can't always judge the differences of quality in a bid by a native speaker and one with a poor grasp of the language. We have to tell them there is a quality difference.
Of course where price trumps quality for the buyer, we can't win.
Don't imagine I'm saying there aren't price problems on PPH - there are. The general downward trend of pricing ( most probably exacerbated by PPH supporting skrill ) does set buyer expectations, making it harder for UK sellers.
-
I agree with Paul, compete on quality, not price.
It is also unfair on good professionals from Asia, who get tarred with the same brush: lots of jobs on all freelance sites say "UK only" or "Europe only".
PPH was trying to fix this problem by allowing people to only apply for jobs relevant to primary skills. Other sites have tried using testing. Testing does not really work so I am glad PPH has not pushed it: I just got almost equal absolute marks for the "UK ENglish Basic Skills Test" and the "UK English Grammar Test (For Writing Professionals)" and was in a higher percentile for the latter! I did better in both than I did in Django or Python, which is what I get paid to do these days! Another site gave me higher marks for C (which I have hardly any experience of) than for Python (which I use heavily)
-
Paul
If a buyer contacts me asking me if I can lower my price I always state that I have proposed a fee that I believe is fair based on the length of time it will take to do the job and the quality that I can provide. I never lower my price.
To be honest I'm not sure how to communicate to buyers regarding low prices overseas bids without sounding like I'm being racist or dismissive of other people (if that makes sense).
When I say I usually end up working for about £2 an hour that's because I work in admin and the majority of jobs on here are for very low paid data sourcing and data entry work. The problem with these jobs is that most f them don't require a person to be particularly skilled to do then and so the buyer can place a low budget and get a ton of proposals. I end up bidding just to get some work in, otherwise I would be earning nothing. In the past 8 weeks I have had a total of 2 decent paid data entry jobs totalling £500! I can't survive on that so I end up working long hours for little money just to get enough money in to pay the bills.
To be honest I'm in the process of looking elsewhere for work. -
Agree again with Paul. The best bit of advice I ever got about freelancing was to keep away from cheap clients as they will keep wanting more without paying more. Clients with a decent budget are also like to understand that they will have to pay more if they want more, or change the specifications half way through a project.
@Rebecca, do you have opportunities to move to either higher skilled work, or to do local work?
-
Not really on these sites as the higher paid jobs tend to be in design and web development etc and I just don't have the skills or knowledge to work in those areas. I was trying to work freelance from home with the hopes of spending more time with my children (age 5 years and age 12 weeks!) but it's just not working out like that. I'm a very experienced Executive PA but jobs like that rarely come up on PPH and when they do quite often the buyer still wants to pay quite low. I'm currently in the process of setting up my own website to offer my PA skills so that I can then obtain clients outside of freelancing sites where the culture is to pay as low as possible and expect the world!!
-
There's nothing 'Executive' about £2 an hour ( or even £6 an hour, or £8 an hour )!
While PPH seems to be on the rate slide, there are still good clients out there ( together with hen's teeth).
I sometimes have projects accepted by bidding above the client budget. As they say on the TV commercial, you just have to convince them that you are worth it.
-
Rebecca there are so many reasons why you should never work for £2 an hour.
undercutting other bidders is the root of the problem and the more people that do it the worse the problem is. The only hope of anybody staying out of the race to the bottom is if a minority keep differentiating between quality and rubbish, and if quality sellers like start doing that then there is no hope left.
it is so bad for your self esteem. Freelancing should be about enjoying what you do and taking a pride in it. How can you enjoy or feel proud of these jobs.
£2 an hour is never going to add up to anything worth spending, so why not decide to save £2 by buying a cheaper bottle of wine, and spend the hour you've saved doing something nice with your kids.
-
Location is one of the reasons we changed our profile name. You have to have a current practising certificate from the Solicitors Regultary Authority to give legal advice in the UK. That includes even the drafting of contracts. We bid for work only to have Indian, Chinese "lawyers" who are experienced in Common Law (well who isn't) and even we developers. In our proposals, we point this out, our insurance in case of incompetent advice, however that appears not to matter to those "looking for a partnership agreement", although it will when it comes to something going wrong!
If everyone in the UK said that they were UK based in their profile and PPH put their energy in producing a ittle vod that proves your location because of your IP, it would make all our jobs easier!
-
Absolutely agree on the sticking to your prices thing. Better to walk away from something that isn't going to bring in a worthwhile fee. After all, the client only sees the fee we're charging - they don't see the PPH fees and the tax on the remainder. We're not supposed to be subsidising the clients in their ventures and we shouldn't, no matter how decent they are as clients, and as the old example goes, it wouldn't work so well if we went into a high street shop and said we couldn't pay full price for what they were selling because we didn't have the budget.
The only time I give discounts is for charities, or I'll swop my skills for someone else's as you might in a LET scheme, but those aren't PPH jobs. Here, we sell what we do and if we lower our prices to compete with lower bids then we are devaluing ourselves. It's the nature of the global market that we will be outbid on many jobs by people whose costs of living are substantially lower than ours, so we have to up our game, that's all. If you can't change something, adapt and grow round it. No point fretting about lower bids - those bids don't necessarily represent poorer quality but the standard rate where that bidder might live. What we have to do is to make our bids attractive enough for the buyer to see that what we're providing is worth paying for.
-
Whilst I do voiceovers, I have just been selected as "ideal" for a French voiceover job. Anyone know where I can find a French voiceover artist? Apply here within 2 hours and then you have an advantage over the competition. In fact - there's an idea!
Why not use THIS thread as an unofficial clearing house for all jobs that get sent, then EVERYONE can benefit? ;)
-
@Consultopia PPH does check location against IP. The problem is that it is not terribly reliable, can easily be faked, and can change your location even if you just go on a reasonably long holiday.
@Rebecca, that is a valuable skill - certainly worth a lot more than £2 an hour! Have you tried virtual assistant type jobs?
Another problem is buyer expectations. The low rates are well below what someone competent would charge even in a low cost country but buyers have the impression that "you can get stuff done for next to nothing in India". Not if you want someone competent. I have worked in software and in the financial sector in Sri Lanka and I think you should expect a competent freelancer, you should budget at least a quarter or a third of UK rates.
-
Thank you for that information Graeme, they could look at verifying via a landline, that's quite hard to spoof.
As for prices, we will not drop ours. After registering the work with the insurers, paying commission to PPH, then set aside the VAT & Tax, you cannot afford to. Therefore we point out to prospective clients the value we put on it.
The issue comes when everyone then participates in the Dutch auction. Sometimes freelancers are their own worst enemies.
-
They already have a better way of verifying location. The documents we need to upload to receive payments include an address. There will be a small number of people who own a property in another country and so have utility bills with another address - but they are not likely to be low end freelancers!
I think that location is not the big problem: buyer education is the problem. From what you say, people are awarding work without looking at profiles. How can you protect someone that sloppy from themselves? A UK buyer may find someone suitably qualified, even in your field, among the six or seven million British expats around the world, as well as people who have studied or worked in the UK. In other fields, that are less country specific, location is even less important.
PPH's skills matching is not helping - I just got selected for an employment law job! In fact I have been selected for several legal jobs despite there being nothing on my profile mentioning law. Maybe that is what is causing the problem - if people are sent an email asking them to bid for an unsuitable job, they give it a shot?
Incidentally, most pages on the Consultopia website are returning an error message instead of the page contents at the moment.
-
with regards to PPH's scripted generic answers to serious questions - If you seriously 'understand my concerns' then you should place a 'freeze' on affected CERT rankings because of an obviously flawed and inefficient feature and return everybodys ranking to what it was before you introduced this system, until live beta testing is finished and it actually works.
-
I am getting relevant jobs but of the standard of this bilge; http://www.peopleperhour.com/job/i-need-monthly-400-well-written-articles-for-website-content-529752#. How the hell can you make a living at these rates, yet look how many have put forward proposals?? To most of them it is a fortune granted and as for the rest I have to presume they have put in proposals way higher than the budget 'for the hell of it'. If anyone needed proof that PPh has dumbed down and lost all interest in its writers this is it, and the other abysmal jobs this client in offering. I know for a fact there have been more than 50 complaints about this jobs offered by this client yet they remain, yet another nail in the coffin of what used to be the best site for British freelancers. RIP PPH.....
-
Yes, I have to agree with you. I saw this one today. The real Solicitors on the site, gave their reaction, the posters response was "this is all I can afford" . I will try his way of thinking next week at the Aston Martin showroom!
http://www.peopleperhour.com/job/sales-affiliate-contract-546459
-
I spoke to soon: I just got selected for a job representing someone at a tribunal disputing a seizure of goods by the UKBA!
@Deb just who is $500 a fortune? If you wrote way 6000 words a day you would still only make $15 a day? That is no way a reasonable income for someone who can write good English anywhere in the world that I know of, let alone a fortune
Prices are being set by a market that exists because Google has got better at spotting automated article spinning, so there is demand for manual replacement (i.e. writing as fast as you can type and never mind the quality) or automated spinning plus editing of the most obvious mistakes) or automated spinning with more skilled setup.
-
@Graeme; that comment was written with tongue planted firmly in cheek as the sheer volume of foreign writers who had made proposals made it seem as if they were offering a fortune :)
My new skill of the day, which I have learnt during the night clearly, is to design and then make jewellery. As interesting as it sounds this skill is slightly out of my remit. I remain hopeful that one of these days I will be selected to bid for a job I can actually do without undergoing further training.....
-
Hi Graeme, I posted on that actual hourlie within a few minutes of his posting, querying his budget. He wants a Solicitor to work on what takes around a day for £50. I can dictate around 210 words for that! Totally unrealistic budget. I found it by surfing through the jobs page.
On that same hourlie, despite having "law", "solicitor", "legal", "Barrister", "court" etc in my skills, I NEVER got picked for it by the system. Go figure.
-
First day on site and your basic site functionality is flawed. How can a web developer not be able bid on a web development project? I've read that this is because of a new feature you are introducing, but again it's flawed. Just because a new seller signs up to your website to find work DOES NOT mean they do not have the skills or experience to bid for all work that matches their skills. Very strange approach, and seems you are getting bad press.
-
Off topic but can anyone help me to understand this cert thing. I thought I'd grasped it but then I've just seen 2 different freelancers that were cert 3 and both have only ever done 1 job. One of them had only been given 4 star feedback and had a rating of 80%. I thought you had to do regular jobs, invoice regular, and get regular good feedback to work your way through the cert levels. Otherwise what is the point in them if new freelancers can get to cert 3 and up without working and proving their skills and reliability.
-
@Rebecca; Most of us have gained our cert rating through sheer hard work but there are many incentives to gain a higher ranking by promoting the site in various ways. This is how a Cert 3 can get there with only one job when the likes of me have to do dozens and get great feedback to get there. It's not fair at all but few things are on here tbh...
-
@Deb, sorry, missed the humour in it. I must have been feeling too grim about the issue at the time I read it. I have been on another freelance sites and had been looking at rates for several different types of work (not just what I do) and was appalled at some bids, and the low quality of some winning bidders.
@Rebecca, Cert also depends on the value of work billed through PPH, so one large job can give you a boost. You can also introduce clients to PPH, and bill them through PPH: you pay no PPH fees, you boost your CERT, and it is a convenient way of accepting credit cards.
Post is closed for further comments because the limit of comments per post has been reached.
Comments
1902 comments