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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Unfortunately PPH has introduced two separate strategies simultaneously to raise quality.
The keywords matching for skills and the curation of sellers.
Curation is another word for vetting. Of course, there's no way that PPH can vet their full freelancer base. It's interesting that it's vettable at all. I would have thought the number of seller applications would stretch PPH beyond their limit if the vetting process was anything beyond cursory.
Whilst trying to raise quality (by fatally flawed means) PPH is also driving down job values by encouraging low-cost jobs in return for promoting them. PPH also competes with their own sellers through SuperTasker(DeskDonkie) which offers services at low price points also.
I probably do what a lot of people do - I don't compete at very low price points. This leaves those jobs open to sellers from the east (including those pretending to be in the UK), who go straight to the gutter in terms of job values.
If I had to go by impression, I'd say that clarification board comments are improving in terms of the quality of the English language, so maybe PPH's curation is having some effect.
Xenios' blog is quite interesting - particularly in how he sees the mixture of freelancers and buyers from the West and East.
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I know that we've probably all seen funny jobs, but:
http://www.peopleperhour.com/job/6ft-gorillas-required-20th-21st-november-609025
Don't know any gorrillas with sales experience do you? :)
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@Paul
Thank you for that post. I do appreciate it. I will try my very best to bring about some improvement on the communication gap between PPH and our customers. Pilar who is our Social Media Manager of the site will be participating in the forums with me from now on. I have asked that more detailed blogs be provided and that we also have our product and engineering team to post about features and ideas more often.
That being said, Christos, our Product Manager has just included this on the site. Please have a look and leave your comments for him there so that he may discuss about the matching issues more directly.
http://blog.peopleperhour.com/blogroll/bidding-jobs-update/
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Also, here is one in regards to email management. A much asked for and needed improvement!!
http://blog.peopleperhour.com/blogroll/take-control-job-emails/
Generally, keep an eye out for latest blogs. Ill be adding them here as well when we have new ones.
Thanks
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@Michael - with regards to your first blog link, I am more than a little puzzled by something:
1) Keep your Skills updated:
On a Job page when you cannot bid you will be able to add the relevant skills yourself to your profile and then send the Proposal.
Err... I hate to tell you this Michael, but unless you've changed the system since, you can ALREADY do this. I am pretty damn sure I did this once. The only thing I noticed was that sometimes it would work, and other times it wouldn't. I think it had something to do with the keywords BEHIND the profile, the ones WE as freelancers cannot to anything about.
However these skills will be screened by our team and get removed if they are not backed by the profile and application of the Seller.
Absolutely no idea what you mean by this at all.
*Furthermore, abuse of this feature by adding skills to bid on Jobs that the Seller cannot deliver will affect the Seller’s rankings and may lead to suspension of the account. *
Yes, I partially see the sense in this. However, regardless of the actual skills, if the seller cannot deliver, then the seller cannot deliver. Full stop. You then need to look at whether the seller or the buyer was at fault, not just automatically penalise the seller.
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I may be knitpicking a bit
Yes, I would agree.
I'd also say that it's at least a step in the right direction, both in terms of communication and an attempt to repair the damage caused by skills filtering.
Let's appreciate a positive communications move rather than take every opportunity to nitpick the gesture.
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@Paul - yep, ok, I apologise. I just have a habit of noticing the smallest of things. I'd be a good proof reader!
And I overall agree with your response, apart from take every opportunity to nitpick the gesture.
I wasn't 'taking every opportunity', like I've said before, I like what PPH provides, and hope it can turn itself around.
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I received this email today from PPH.
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Update your profile skills
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|Hello Rebecca,
We are constantly enhancing our Job recommendation emails taking into account your feedback, so that you are the first to know about Jobs that match your profile and expertise.
To improve these recommendations you can now pick the skills for which you wish to receive Job notifications. To do this just go to your "Edit Profile" page, examine the list of skills recommended based on your past work experience and select the relevant ones, as well as any other skill of yours that we have missed.
The more carefully curated your skills are, the more chances you have to win a Job as a perfect match. Matched Sellers have 4x more chances to win the Job."
Does this mean I will finally be able to add Copyediting, the skill I have been using to earn my living for the last 14 years? And will I also be able to tell PPH somehow that I do not have any video editing skills whatsoever, and that, in fact, contrary to current PPH opinion the two skills are completely separate?
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Hmmm.... sadly it seems that the answer to that would be NO.
I've been into my profile following the link in the email and no, I still cannot add Copyediting. However I can add a list of highly irrelevant skills that PPH deems to be a good match. I attach a screenshot so you can see. PPH none of the skills you list are relevant to my skillset. I do not even know what PVS is!
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@Malcolm, I don't think you're being nitpicky at all. In fact I would say that is the exact reason this whole thread began.
I have lost count of the number of times I have submitted "Picture Research" as a skill to be added to the list as it is not included anywhere, even under a much broader heading. It is my best-selling hourlie with 7 client purchases and 6 of them have given 5* feedback, so it makes me wonder what more evidence PPH requires before they will consider me competent in that area?
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It's about patching up a flawed system and use some 'crowd sourcing' to make up for lack of PPH knowledge and manpower.
It's an interesting approach but I doubt it will work.
At the core we are being asked to 'correct' the system when we have skills that suit a job, but the system thinks we don't have those skills. PPH sits as policeman if we change skills and screw up.
Compare all that rigmarole to the old system - you apply only for jobs you think(know) you can do. If you mess up the buyer gives you bad feedback and warns off others.
Under the old system, PPH could still act as policeman, could vet sellers on actual performance rather than second guess them.
..and we would have no skills matching hassles.
It adds nothing to try this crude skills filtering.
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Still, this is the best freelance market system operating in UK. At least from the offers point of view. They could had developed a better intelligence system. They have access to freelancers to do it :P
Still, they will get away with it unless a good competitor appears in the market and takes it by storm.
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I would like to know HOW we are supposed to make up skills? Would we add them from the limited skills database? It is hard enough to add skills that we do have, without bothering to invent skills that we don't simply to bid on a job.
A far simpler and more effective method in my view would be to allow us to add our own skills as we used to do, and skills that had been added would appear in the dropdown list. This need not be completely freeform, but rather each entry would build on previous users' entries to generate some form of consensus. So for example if previous users had used "copy editing" as a skills tag then it would appear in the dropdown menu as I type, and I could add that to my profile rather than typing "copyediting" and creating a completely new entry.
The whole system would be self-policing as buyers would only search on terms that are relevant to them anyway, and the skills of the freelancers would be judged based on their portfolio prior to the job and their feedback once completed. (Otherwise what is the point of having a portfolio or feedback anyway?)
Another related point is that giving us freelancers the freedom to create our own skills tags would allow for more freedom in the "Extraordinary" category that PPH is so keen to promote. It's very hard to make an hourlie original and eye-catching when we can only choose from such a constrained list of skills! You're never going to get any unicyclists posting hourlies if you don't list "unicycle riding" or at least "circus skills" in your skills database, and who among the PPH ninjas is going to think to include that? By maintaining such a rigid skills list structure you are creating far more work for yourselves than is necessary.
Trust your freelancers to know what their skills are, and let the feedback system weed out the few incompetents.
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@David I have simply suggested that you leave comments for him to respond to directly right under his post. He can answer directly from there and you can ask him specific questions. He wrote the blog and has asked for people to leave him comments, so it would make sense to contact him there.
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I see ''you cant send a proposal to a job that is not relevant to your skills. browse other jobs'' when tried to apply to the project with the requirement of relevant skills. for some proposals i even updated and tried to propose but faced the same problem. i feel, it didnt work not bcoz of "relevant skills updation" but some technical issue of PPH website which your PPH couldnt solve or not working enough to solve it.
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Good news; sharp drop in emails selecting me for jobs I don't have the skills for. Bad news; Getting loads of emails about my hourlies, this being the latest one;
Congratulations on your Hourlie's success, we see you've sold a few recently!
You have a special opportunity - web design is a popular search with 3586 searches per month, and there are less than 3 Featured Hourlies that match this search. So if you Feature now you'll definitely move to the top - a great chance for you to win sales!
That would be wonderful except my hourlie is for 4 x 500 word articles, not a mention of web or design. You're getting there slowly PPH but these emails are just another annoyance.....
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Hi guys,
I personally, think that we should at least give PPH chance to show that things are improving. I am a newbie on this site and I too had the issue with job matching (even posted to this thread previously) - or rather I could barely even bid on any job offers but it seems to have improved (a little) whether it has anything to do with the introduction of the new system or not. Not being able to bid on any jobs you have skills for is beyond frustrating, especially when you are new and trying to build up your reputation but I still think that it is a huge improvement (after reading this 15 pages loooong thread), that PPH finally decided to do something about this - long overdue btw.
I'll be the first one to criticise (or leave the site completely) if things won't improve and I too have a habit of noticing the smallest of things like Malcom (rather annoying habit to others but I get exactly where you coming from) but experience taught me that sometimes you really just need to give people a space to actually make the improvement. I am not saying it's right that PPH chose to ignore the issue for so long or that the things will improve immediately, as always with these things it can go both ways, but let's give them the chance to actually fix the problem and encourage the change, rather than criticise immediately...just a thought :)
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