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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@Paul
We have added live chat to our support options. Its not available for the entire community as we are rolling it out in stages but should be showing to more than 50% of users. We have also added a crowd based support option. These are regular users who who are helping to answer the easier questions of the community.
Also a new support page is being redesigned that will be much more user friendly to navigate and to contact all support options. That will probably be ready by mid February.
Ill be updating all users with blog post, announcements, etc. once we have it all rolling properly.
thanks
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I just wanted to address a couple of issues from this thread. I read all of the first and last pages (1 & 19) and some of 18.
I'm a buyer, not a seller, so while I'm not sure of the 2 hour algorithm, I can say that I've given up completely on posting jobs and looking at bids. The system just doesn't seem to produce the best qualified. It's like russian roulette bouncing around from seller to seller...your odds of landing a bad seller goes up.
What I've been forced to do is search hourlies for something very close and look for a good seller. Unfortunately, the system forces me to post a job and waist everyone's time just so I can award a job that was negotiated already. I should be able to contact any seller, agree on a price and initiate a job directly.
I don't mind the 1.9% CC fee and sometimes I even pay the sellers fees...however, I find the whole "bid, bid, bid" structure to be annoying. Just a few days ago I created a job just to invite and award 1 guy....and it wouldn't even let me invite him.
The whole site is rather unintuitive if you ask me...they need to hire some of the member sellers to fix a few things. They could start with a reply & quote feature for discussion forums.
TimetrackerIf this is anything like the screenshots on Odesk, and PPH implements this...I'm done here.
I am only here because Odesk is a huge security risk. That is not an opinion, it's a fact. I dropped Odesk after they refused to acknowledge the problem in private messages even with proof. One day I looked at the work snapshots from a VA and in the image was a login & PW for some guy's website. I can't remember if it was a text file, email or skype chat screen but I had the URL and login details for some other buyer.
Think about how risky that is...and consider that there is really no way I can ever know if any freelancer, even a PPH freelancer could also be a Odesk seller. I hope someone sues Odesk and forces them to remove their spyware.
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Neal, I'm with you on the time tracker 100%.
You can create a private job on PPH, no sellers can apply for it if you don't invite them.
As for PPH being a bit like Russian Roullette.
You're right in a way and wrong in another. For most jobs you're going to get a list of proposals and candidates of variable quality and proposal value.
The most obvious sign of a good quality seller is the proposal itself and also the seller feedback on PPH.
Cert is a dangerous rating because it can be skewed by a lot of things - it's primarily a flawed sales incentive scheme for PPH masked as quality signpost.
Buyer budgets and the quality of the job description will affect the quality of the sellers responding.
I routinely avoid projects with low budgets, no budget and sparse to no job description. These are the same projects that low-grade sellers will still flock to.
Occasionally, if there's something about a job description that looks intriguing I will engage with the buyer to check it out.
If you are paying sellers fees it sounds as though your budgets may be small. If so, that may be why it looks like Russian Roullette.
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@Neal, what you can do is to search from buy > find freelancers, . You should be able to set up a private job and invite a few sellers that have the right skills.
I think you can do it from a seller's profile page (contact > new job)
@David, if you look carefully at PPH's wording it implies that everything other than earnings and feedback is only of indirect benefit - e.g. sharing your profile helps because it will get you more work. My experience has been that the only thing that significantly affects my CERT is earnings ( admittedly I have not yet got low ratings in feedback so I do not know what effect that has).
Personally I would prefer PPH to give up on starring and endorsements as they are mostly spam - but they are easy to ignore so I do not really care.
There is one advantage to sharing your profile: it makes it convenient for potential customers to sign up with PPH and hire you. It used to be the case that you paid0% service fee on such clients work, but I cannot find anything to confirm that is still the case. Can Michael or Pilar point us to the current policy?
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There is one advantage to sharing your profile: it makes it convenient for potential customers to sign up with PPH and hire you.
How can anything be more convenient than hiring directly with no third party in the middle? If I have a potential client why on earth would I point them to PPH?
** It used to be the case that you paid 0% service fee on such clients work**
It still is.
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Michael, the chatbox.
Nice feature, but with a big face with two eyes, it looks like big brother's alien sidekick is watching me.
It would be a nice idea to be able to minimise that box to a small button without the face.
I haven't used the chat. I have a feeling that I'd probably know more about PPH than whoever was at the other end.
I'll give it a go when I have a specific problem.
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What I meant was that it is more convenient that sending them an invitation link through PPH.
The reason you may point a potential client to PPH is that it gives you escrow, the ability to take credit card payments, and a dispute resolution mechanism and it pushes up your CERT. If you do lots of small jobs for clients in different countries collecting money in a PPH wallet and transferring larger amounts may be cheaper than other means of payment for sellers in some locations.
It is not particularly useful for you or me, but I think it may be useful for some people. Deb said earlier (a good few pages back by now, I think) that she has introduced clients to PPH without even using invitation links (so she ended up paying a service free for those clients).
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I think Neal's comments have highlighted a problem I have seen before. Buyers can find it hard to find and contact the right sellers. Some buyers search hourlies to find people with the right skills, and (as a result) some sellers have hourlies they are not really interested in selling as ads for their skills. People earlier in the thread have talked about hourlies as ads, and I have been contacted by buyers through hourlies who wanted something else.
I think it shows that the searching seller profiles from "find freelancers" is not working. Something in the work flow?
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Neal's comments have highlighted a few of the many problems regarding the process of the buyer finding the best person for the job and while there are some seriously dodgy buyers out there, as well all know, there are also many sellers who need a good slap.
I have built myself a list of regular clients on PPH who no longer post jobs but contact me directly. At least a dozen of these also come to me to see if I can recommend anyone for a project I'm not qualified to carry out. The reason for this being the deluge of bids they get from people who are not capable of doing the work yet have received emails selecting them to apply, haven't read the remit properly, or both.
Another example of problems in the posting/bidding system occurred when I took time off over Christmas but a client needed work doing urgently. He posted the job and clearly stated Native British writers only. Of the 42 bids he received 23 were from different countries and 9 weren't even writers.
Every complaint I make regarding spam emails results in the stock reply of 'adjust my email settings' and we all know how well that doesn't work! How many aren't even attempting to do this though and are happy to receive this mail and are bidding on every job under the sun in the hope of snaring one? This has the knock on effect of one of us being the veritable needle we hope the buyer will spot in the middle of the haystack.
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@Deb, I get a fair amount of repeat business now as well, and invitations to bid from new customers. It is preferable to spending time bidding! I now think effective use of PPH requires being selective about bidding, because time spent bidding for numerous jobs reduces the time we have to actually do paid work.
There is a serious problem with people who apply without reading the requirements or having anything like the right skills. It is evident with most jobs I bid for. PPH ought to have enough data to be able to pick out suspicious patterns and get a reasonable number of accounts to review manually for closure. This also seems to be the purpose of their stricter policy for admitting new sellers. I agree that they really do need to do something more effective about this. Part of the problem may be that all the real solutions require manual review which is expensive. Can buyers report spammy bids for review?
I am not sure how people can make vast numbers of bids - we have to pay if we want to make more than a certain number of bids per month. Are people paying up, or using multiple accounts or what?
IN the specific example you give I assume that the 23 from different countries did not include anyone who was in the 10% or so British citizens who live abroad - or even others who can write British English despite not being in the UK?
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@ Graeme. Sadly not. There was 2 from America whose bids were littered with 'Americanisms' and when he asked if they could write in 'British English' they claimed they already did :/ He did actually hire a British man living in Italy to do the work, the rest were from everywhere from Pakistan to Poland. As he sets pretty stiff remits to try and sort out the wheat from the chaff, including several interview questions, it was clear from the way the initial bids were written that they were incapable of writing a 1000 word piece on Banner Ads. Unfortunately you have to go through these to discover this making it even frustrating.
Regarding multiple bidding I don't know how they are working it. I myself receive a pile of extra bids every month which I never use, whether they are getting extra as an incentive for doing something else I have no idea. I rarely bid now and tend to get my work from repeat clients and sales of hourlies. The only jobs I bid on are invitations and am beginning to think these are being auto generated as well now as why would somebody wanting a logo invite a writer to bid?
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Today for the first time I took a look at the videos of some new sellers on PPH - just curious to see what the sellers would say and the production values.
One was OKish, but if it was my video I would have done it over with a bit more practice and perhaps a script to avoid those moments of hesitation and uncertainty.
The other was awful. On half the video the webcam wasn't even turned on and for the last few seconds there were a few hastily mumbled words from someone who looked like they just got out of bed. No way would I ever imagine using that in any circumstance.
Great quality control PPH (and I don't mean it's your fault one video was awful, but why feature it?).
There's a reason I haven't done a video - quality control and public request..
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Paul, what were the skills they were trying to promote through these videos? I have seen a couple for writers and they were horrendous. This is a road I have never, and will never, go down. Despite being constantly told that I will win more work by creating a video I know it will actually have the opposite effect for 3 reasons;
A I have an incredibly strong local accent which has cost me a job previously when I had a phone interview
B I am incredibly uncomfortable in front of a camera and even with hours of practice I would still come across as a numpty
C However professional a video I could produce it would have no bearing at all on my skill as a writer and wordsmith
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@Deb, could not agree more. A video immediately focuses attention on all the irrelevant things that bias people (sex, race, accent.....) instead of how good their work is. In addition producing professional looking video is *very* difficult so it also means sellers will be judged by how good they are at video production. As far as I know PPH's system forces you to record from webcam to the site, with no opportunity to edit, which makes it even harder to look professional.
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