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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Just a thought...would it be an idea to change from SKILLS bidding to CATEGORY bidding.
I am an illustrator and want to bid in 3 categories, Design + Creative arts + Extraordinary.
If bidding were based on CATEGORIES of interest, rather than on 10 skills, PPH would have more open bidding and presumably offer a more liberal bidding system.
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Hmm.
PPH really introduced skills matching to stop errant sellers from bidding on jobs they couldn't do (Ie didn't have skills for). It's an almost impossible task.
If that proposition is widened we have the same problem. Who will decide what job goes in which category?
You want to have a design category. Is that industrial design? Will you be designing websites? Will you be designing apps?
Of course as an illustrator none or several of those need apply.
The DESIGN category would be so wide as to be of little value. Can all illustrators design too?
The whole thing is so problematic at a skills level and at a category level.
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We're in this position because PPH doesn't trust sellers to look at seller feedback to make their choice. They obfuscated seller feedback by adding a penalty for sellers that don't make money for PPH (it's called CERT), so buyers now look at cert like some kind of quality measure, when in reality it's as much a sales performance indicator than anything else. To make things worse sellers routinely manipulate their cert rating through endorsements that encourage sellers to abuse the system because PPH can't police that either and lets anyone endorse anyone.
Cert rating dropping? fix it be getting strangers to endorse you. Endorse a stranger and they'll endorse you back. It's a win-win all round. Don't like the sound of that? Make up a few email accounts and use those to endorse yourself.
You too can get a great CERT rating and not do any jobs on PPH.
Never mind, skills matching will sort the mess out.. ;-)
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Sometimes it takes a Yank to cut to the chase. I just saw this comment on one of the review websites and you can see why a newcomer would think this, in fact it pretty much says it all
"This company seems to have little to do with helping you find good people or assisting people looking for work. The website is setup more to confuse you than offer solutions. Once they get your email, they spam you."
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I hope someone can answer this one for me. ( I'm probably being rather thick :( )
I've just received yet another email from 'Chloe Evans' noreply@pph.me.
The title of the email says "How to get 20 hours out of an 8 hour day". Right, ok.
I looked at the contents of the email.....
"Up to 30% off - only 24hrs left"
Just seems to be a load of promotions for products.
Can anyone explain how the title relates to the contents????? please..... thank you x
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Just a guess but is the idea that you take on more jobs than you can do, ie 20 hours worth of work to do before tomorrow, then you subcontract the rest out to cheap hourlies? PPH seem to think that this is a smart business model (probably because that way, they collect their fee twice over).
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I had an email with the same subject, but from peopleperhour. I think our discussion of whether these are real people may be having some effect (Pilar, you are noticeably absent from that discussion).
I thought the title was rather good!
They don't explain the concept very well, but I got it.
The idea is that by using PPH and perhaps these hourlies, you can vastly boost the amount of work you can get done in the day by using other people to do it. So, in your 8 hour day, you can get 20 hours of work done by using other people via PPH to help you out.
Paul
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My gem of the day is an 'update my profile' email. It lists several areas that it claims I have done work in recently and tells me to add them to my profile 'to let buyers know I am capable of this kind of work and to allow me to get notified for new relevant job opportunities'. So I presume I now go to my profile, remove the skills I actually have and replace them with the ones PPH say I have to then clog up my inbox even more with useless alerts; Genius!
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@Paul, you're right of course but I fear there is a fate worse than Room 101; my oh so precious CERT being adversely affected :O Perish the thought I should be demoted as this is why I get all my work and they may even remove all my endorsements from total strangers who claim I am a 'he'. I fear I'm doomed......
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@Paul - you made me smile with that comment to Deb.
@Pie - thanks, I didn't see that, but understand now.
@David - I would just like to say that I rather admire your long post above, in particular regarding refusing to bid on things you can't deliver or jobs that exploit you etc. One of my pet hates, but I'm getting used to it, is people who give one description for a job, which then turns out to be very inaccurate, and not the complete picture.
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It makes me laugh when PPH talk about linking to LinkedIn to enhance your credibility.
Maybe it would make PPH look more credible but I think most professionals know that the merest whiff on their LinkedIn profile that they're associated with PPH, would do severe damage to their credibility. It would be like trying to sell your Christmas decorations to Harrods and saying proudly 'Poundstretcher stock them'.
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Pie, I was quietly nodding my head about your post. I certainly don't publicise my association with PPH because of it's lowballing reputation.
But you did make me think because for some people PPH has been brilliant, allowing them to grow a business. I can't quite put a finger on it as to what makes PPH an asset or a liability.
If you're from the east, it's much more likely that because of a lower cost base, PPH is a really appealing prospect and one you don't mind being associated with. If you're in the UK and used to the rates described by David, it could be the kiss of death.
I think David has another account and does all-day shoots for £6.. ..;-)
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Why are you being so nasty towards PPH? PPH is trying to get things right for everyone. If you don't like the way things are why not try and be constructive and make suggestion you think will be useful. BUT if you really do feel so negative, like the rest of us, you aren't tied in to a contract and you can leave PPH. We are all free agents.
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Jan, quite a few of us have used PPH over a long period. A lot of the negativity here is down to frustration.Many of us think a lot of changes are ill-conceived.
PPH may be trying to get things right for everyone, but more often than not they are trying to get things right for themselves and impacting everyone in the process.
Of course, it's not all bad and we are still here. It's easier to moan about the bad things than the good, if only because there's plenty that could be better. WIth PPH less would certainly be more, on all fronts.
PPH are in quite a sweet position - mature business, well known, established. It should be running a well-oiled system by now, but they invest money in making everything more difficult.
They should really have a slick low-overhead, low impact system by now and they don't.
You're quite right, we can all walk.
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@JWOC It is not a case of us being 'nasty' about PPH it is the fact that many of us long term PPH'ers have been promised so much so many times and been let down. Depending on the services we offer we all have different experiences of PPH and how they have helped us, or not helped us, as the case may be. This is a forum for us to air our grievances and compare notes, constructive suggestions have got us nowhere in the past. Private complaints via customer services seem to fall on very deaf ears and Michael has responded to more things I have complained about on here in a few weeks that customer service has is many months. If you are earning a good living on PPH then well done you, unfortunately others are struggling through no fault of our own due to the parameters PPH have in place.
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@ David
You are right that we have received multiple feedback from many of our users who are getting spammed from us or the unsubscribe option is not working. One of our next features that our developers are working on is the email management option. This will give full control to all our customers on what emails they want to receive. I will be making an announcement about this as soon as the feature is ready.
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Hi All,
Re newsletters, can anyone wanting to get off the mailing list email me on community@peopleperhour.com and i'll get back to you by end of the week about getting of the mailing list.
However please note that you come off the list you may be missing key info that could potentially be helpful for you.
Pilar x
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@David - I may be wrong of course, but......
As we've just heard from Pilar..........
I really don't think that Michael or Pilar, or any of the team at pph are openly going to admit that they are fake (if they are, that is). They'll probably just stay quiet on the subject, and not directly answer the questions being plainly put to them, hoping that after a little while, we'll all of forgotten about the subject. One small problem with that, we'll keep getting emails from these 'people'.
On a separate note, I like the sales pitchy type of response Pilar just gave to Paul.
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Can't we cut Pilar some slack here?
Pilar isn't the one making the changes, he's just signalling they are coming.
We know from past experience the options are probably not going to do what everyone wants.
PPH aren't going to be discussing fictitious people, so we don't need to embarrass these guys further, do we?
Generally when I get messages about anything from PPH, particularly involving skills, I won't tell PPH what's wrong (because I don't trust them to just cut off one thing they think I can do - if I say I can't program using python, they'll probably interpret that as being unable to program at all).
If I have options for receiving or not receiving emails, it had better be absolutely clear what that option is.
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Does it really matter to anything or anyone if Lucy Clarke and Sophie are real or not? I mean, who cares?
If anything it'll make it easier for an option in the profile area to control which emails we get - "turn off emails from Lucy Clarke" leave on from "newsletter" and "Sophie" etc.I get emails from all sorts of businesses, small and large/brand names, from someone called "no-reply". I ask them if "no-reply" is real, and ask how this "no-reply" works at so many companies, but I never get a response....
Do I care who this mysterious "no-reply" is? Of course not. I only care that I can log in and shut him up, or use the emails if they are useful!PPH (probably) use "Lucy Clarke" and "Sophie" as it's a little more personal than "no-reply" or "the team" or whatever.
So great, it's just another business idea which sounds good from the inside, but does nothing for the real world or end user. I know it's a non-existent person, it does no harm nor makes any difference if they emailed from "This is not a real person" - who gives a giant-fluffy-turd either way?
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