Before reading about the dangers of hiring an oDesk freelancer, check out my new guide for starting your blog to learn how to go about properly creating your own blog.
Some of you may have noticed that it’s been a little while since I posted any blogging tips. Basically it’s a combination of running out of topics to cover and wanting to actually transition this into a real personal finance blog.
Going forward this will likely be one of the last post for this series, but if anything ever comes up than warrants a post I’ll probably write about it.
If you’re new to this series, check out some of the previous blogging tips posts:
- Choosing the Best Blog Web Hosting Sites
- 9 Ways You Can Make Money From Blogging
- Importance of Link Anchor Text Variation
- Top 10 Common Mistakes I See New Bloggers Making
- 10 Recommended WordPress Plugins For Your Blog
- Google PageRank, Not Just About Links
- Blog Link Building – Not All Links Are Created Equal
- Importance of Blog Networking
- Effectively Using Keywords On Your Blog
- Optimal Blog Keyword Research for SEO
This particular topic came to me both from my daytime work and while outsourcing some help on my own blog. While freelance outsourcing sites like oDesk can be quite useful, they are open to all kinds of abuse.
What to Watch Out For When Hiring Via oDesk
Over the years I’ve contracted out a lot of work online. When you do website marketing for a living, it’s inevitable that you need to pass on some kind of work. So I figured I should pass on some of that experience to all of you.
Here are some specific things to watch out for when hiring contractors on oDesk. While this post is focused on oDesk, a lot of it probably applies to other freelancer hiring websites too.
Contractor Feedback Ratings
When you find people to hire on oDesk, it’s only natural to pay a lot of attention to the applicants’ feedback ratings. It’s like contacting a job applicant’s references without all the phone calls. In theory it’s a great system. Unfortunately oDesk developers have setup their system in such a way to limit their customer service requirements.
In a system where all project feedback is public, there is bound to be a ton of people contacting website support to whine about removing ‘unfair’ feedback. I could see that turning into a big customer service headache as they could rarely determine who was really at fault for negative feedback. While that is understandable that oDesk would want to reduce man hours, it ends up screwing over employers. When a contractor receives feedback that they don’t want to display on their profile, they actually have a button to hide feedback. I guess it’s along the same lines as leaving a job off your resume when you had a bad falling out.
The only good part of this system is that it does show that the contractor has made the feedback private. So you can just assume there were some pretty negative things said in that feedback. If a contractor has any hidden feedback, that’s a big red flag for me. I’ll usually skip right over that contractor unless they happen to have a rather impressive portfolio. Even then, I’d want to hear their side of the story about that feedback…not that they’d really tell you the truth if they were at fault. The best strategy is to completely avoid contractors who hide any feedback.
Contractors Faking Hours
This has got to be my biggest pet peeve about hiring on oDesk. If you hire someone on an hourly basis, the system actually saves screenshots of all logged work and measures the mouse/keyboard activity. Again it sounds like a great system. That is until you realize how easy it is to abuse.
The dishonest contractors simply load up a page that is relevant to the project and turn on some of kind of keyboard or mouse faking plugin. At a glance it looks like they are quite busy and putting in a lot of hours. Looking a little closer shows that it isn’t necessarily the case. I’ve had programmers with a lot of screenshots showing coding. Somehow the screenshots never happened to catch him in the middle of typing a line of code. It was all just screenshots of completed code. Then factor in how far behind schedule is and you’ve found a scammer. You’d think you could take that evidence to oDesk support and get a refund. Not the case though.
oDesk support claims to not handle disputes involving work quality. To me that just sounds like an easy out to allow contractors to log excessive time and line the pockets of oDesk. Any time I’ve disputed this kind of thing, they never care about the employer. So one of your only bit of leverage is threatening negative feedback, which they can just hide.
Undeserved Good Feedback Ratings
Since oDesk support doesn’t care about protecting employers, it is in your hands to try to get a refund if someone does try to rip you off. This can be easier said than done. Never will they actually admit to doing anything wrong. Instead they will try to offer a lowball refund for 10-15% of the faked hours they logged. In exchange they want good feedback. Yes, they want to keep a big chunk of the money they stole from you and get rewarded with good feedback.
If they do offer any kind of partial refund, that is essentially an admission of guilt. That is when you have to push harder to get most of your money refunded. Once that happens, you could give in to their demands and give them good feedback. There’s no chance of that happening with me though. If they’re going to steal from me, I’m going to lie about giving good feedback and then give them the feedback they deserve after getting a refund. The downside of warning people like this is getting negative feedback as an employer which can’t be disputed either. Luckily I suspect contractors tend to overlook employer ratings.
In short, don’t trust feedback ratings too much as they can be manipulated. I’m sure some employers give good feedback just to protect their own ratings.
Users with Multiple Profiles
Now what do you think a scammer does when they know they are risking having bad feedback on their account (or at least signs of hiding feedback)? They diversify to limit their risk. If they have backup accounts they can turn to, it doesn’t matter as much if their account is suspicious. That contractor you are considering hiring could very well have a few other accounts full of hidden feedback.
To combat this I generally avoid hiring anyone with too small an amount of history on their account. If you’re hiring from a risky source, you have no choice but to be extremely careful. If you’re going to take a chance on a risky contractor, be prepared to lose some money that you might not get refunded. Personally I’d rather protect myself, especially after learning the hard way.
Language Barriers
The thing that sets oDesk apart is that the majority of the contractors are outside of North America. For anyone looking for inexpensive help, that’s awesome. The wages those contractors charge is a fraction of what you’d pay otherwise. Some people may feel guilty about paying such low wages, but with the currency conversion they’re actually making relatively good money.
The downside of these contractor demographics is that English is not often not their first language. Sometimes this is not an issue as their English is quite good. Other times though, this can cause all kinds of problems.
First of all, if their work involves any writing or communication, weak English skills could end up producing low quality work. It’s not necessarily what you want representing you or your company. That low quality work may affect the end results of your project.
Secondly, if their English skills are lacking, there can be misunderstandings about the actual requirements. You might think they completely understand what you have explained, only to get a report of their work showing that they completely ignored some instructions. Usually when this happens, there was just some details lost in translation.
Excessive Applicants
Simply posting your job on a site like oDesk can be overwhelming. Last week I posted a job for my employer and in just 5 days I’ve had nearly 200 applicants for this project. Weeding through that many job applications is a massive chore. Making it worse is the fact that the majority of the applications are saying basically the same thing.
To the contractors, applying for freelance jobs is all a numbers game. Apply to enough projects and someone will hire you. With that in mind, they try to spend minimal time applying for each job. You’ll be lucky if the applicants even skim through your job description. More likely, they will see one of the keywords in your listing and apply without even reading the full job title. So don’t expect a long description or lots of listed skills to weed out people at all. This will only lead to even more applicants.
I would give you advice on how to properly screen applicants but I’m still figuring this out myself. Lately I focus on the ones with the most work history hours and highest ratings. Then I dig into their profiles for any red flags. If it all looks good I do a quick interview on skype. That will give me a good idea about their communication skills and actual competency. With live chat they can’t just quickly google the answers to your questions.
Summary
As you can probably tell, oDesk is the site I love to hate. As useful as the site is, it’s far too easy to run into problems. Even after using the site for years I manage to still have difficulties. I might be better at getting my money back when issues arise but it’s still frustrating. Hopefully this post will help you avoid some of those complications with odesk freelancers.
Have you used oDesk for any outsourcing? Or are there other sites you prefer to use?
Note: oDesk is now UpWork.
In the past, I’ve used oDesk for two projects. I give oDesk an A+ on one and an F on the other. I got burned by a contractor, I complained to oDesk, it took forever to get them to look into it, and in the end they did nothing.
Sounds about right as far as success rate. When it goes well it’s great, but when it doesn’t, it’s a pretty lousy experience. It would be a lot better if odesk was more willing to help employers in bad situations.
” it took forever to get them to look into it, and in the end they did nothing.”
Thats the whole point. What is the 10% for? Its for false sense of security. What is the scammning useless Work Diary for? Well, the way they present it to Clients in the Help pages it is again, a false-sense of security.
All filled up on a false-sense of security you are more easy to scam. And in comes the 100,000 PHP/Java Indian scam gangs who are Odesk’s best members, desroying projects, running them to bankruptcy, making projects take 3 times long than necessary…
Odesk board of directors need a massive class-action on their asses and criminal indictments. It is SYSTEMIC FRAUD. And it is too easy to prove in a court of law. In fact the most exciting part in such a court case would be waiting to see what Odesk’s lawyer come up with in their defence/denial of guilt.
And Richard, you got an A for the first one because you had an honest freelancer. For the second one you had the dishonest freelancer. Odesk’s platform does nothing to deter dishonest freelancers, rather it is futile territory for scammers.
I’ve used oDesk for both of my VAs and have been just fine so far. That said, you’re spot on Jeremy that there are quite a number of things you need to watch out for to make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for. I know when I posted my job I had quite a number apply where it was obvious they were just applying because it was a numbers game and had little background in what I was wanting.
My suggestion is to dig as deep as the system allows you and try to interview them if you can. For the weeding out aspect, I actually put in my description that I wanted them to type a certain word at the very start of their response. About 1/3 or so of them did not and I automatically denied them because it told me they weren’t reading.
I guess you’ve been lucky so far. Hopefully that keeps up. It is a bit of luck of the draw of who gets the lousy employees. As for making sure they read the job description, I tend to overlook that as such a large percentage does ignore the description. I don’t want to limit options too much, but I could see the ones that read the description as being more reliable.
Great tips Jeremy I follow a lot of the same ones over at Elance when I looking for skills people to do stuff for me.
I thing I do is read a lot of the review that others have left and I make sure that it’s not the same person leaving the reviews. I know a few people who got burned when someone or a small group of people posted fake reviews to make themselves look good.
When it comes to hiring people on these site it definitely pays to do your research.
I find that I have far less problems on elance, but then you have to pay much higher wages. So it’s got its pros and cons. With elance at least people can’t hide reviews and there is a proper arbitration system.
This is something I’m considering as the number of things I’m trying to do increases. I like the point about using filters to weed the applicants down before using Skype to get a final impression. I think most hiring managers use a similar process, which is why a resume needs to have a clear message.
There are some parallels to hiring an actual in-house employee but in other ways it is quite different. At least with actual resumes you can judge a bit of character.
I’ve never hired anybody from oDesk. I’ve considered setting up my own profile, but I’m not sure how much work anybody actually gets if 200+ people are applying to jobs.
For finding work I’d suggest going with the higher end sites such as elance and the ones focused on writers. oDesk competition is bound to be pretty tough with that many people. Then again, perhaps native English speakers have the inside track on writing gigs on there…that is if people can overlook the price difference.
The indians will undersell you with their dummy accounts. They have 5 star feedbacks for about 10 jobs, and they will work for $6-$8 for complex jobs, because in fact they are going to scam it and stetch the clock out three times longer. So although you were honest and applied for $20 and would have done honest work worth that weight, they will get the job and then scam the client by stretching it out, ending up effectively having made $24/hr.
Odesk know about, in fact Odesk designed it to be this way.
If after studying closely the system they have setup, you can see Odesk has no sincerity in creating a productive platform for any community. They are running a scam machine. The more money you lose the more money Odesk make with their 10% of your lost money.
The more scammers who stretch the clock and make projects take 3 times longer, the more money Odesk makes.
Why would Odesk want to write 10 minyutes of code that would chase away 100,000 scamming freelancers and make Odesk a productive platform? They would lose 70% of their profits.
I’m not quite at the point where I would start farming off tasks on my site. Of course, I don’t know how far I really want to push my site as a money venture to begin with. If I ever do need to shuttle of some services, this advice will come in handy when looking at potential applicants.
For sure, this kind of thing is more for when you want to make more serious money from your blog. To get to that level and keep growing takes a lot of work. So it does help a lot to have some assistance.
Great summary! I’ve used oDesk a few times and noticed a few of these things. The part about scamming the feedback system isn’t just an oDesk thing. I’ve noticed on Fiverr it’s the same way. The worker tells me not to leave negative feedback and that they will do anything to produce the product to my satisfaction.
I have no problem with people trying to right their wrongs to get positive feedback. It’s better than being blackmailed into giving positive feedback. Plus if someone rips you off on odesk, when you give them negative feedback they will give negative feedback right back to the employer every time.
I have had success on Odesk before. I usually do test projects to find people that I am interested in and then hire them for the bigger project. That has worked well for me.
I agree that test projects are a good idea, but it is not always practical. Sometimes you just need the project started on right away and finished. When you do find a contractor that is reliable it’s best to keep their contact details for future work.
I’ve gotten writing work from oDesk and from the contractor’s side much of what you say is true. As a contractor in North America, paying North American costs to live, I have to compete with people willing to work for $1 an hour. Finding work requires you to filter though thousands of listings to find the employer who is serious and wants quality work. They are out there but it takes time to find them. But it sure opened my eyes – do you know how many product reviews are bought and paid for on oDesk?
Yes I would think it would be very difficult to land work on odesk. I’ve never been on that side of things, but I could see it taking a lot of time applying for projects to find someone to give you a chance.
That’s crazy about the scamming thing! You should find a way to leave this review on oDesk somehow… very useful. It’s sad when the intermediaries like this don’t care about making the paying people happy so long as the company is getting paid.
Oh trust me, I’ve tried to leave a review everytime this happens, but I doubt a single one is not hidden by the contractor.
I haven’t used oDesk yet, but I really should for a few things that I don’t have time for. I think the hiring process does scare me a bit, and that’s what is holding me back.
I do really dislike the hiring process on odesk. The good news is you get free help from odesk on that first hire.
I use Elance most of the time, to get business and also hire. I don’t hire based on hours worked, it’s irrelevant to me how much someone is working on my project, what I want is a FINISHED product and to know EXACTLY how much it costs me.
I’m a web designer and have never used the hourly system. I charge based on your project. You know exactly how much it will cost you and then it’s my job to make it happen. I don’t have to ‘fake’ anything or waste your time (you can surely do better and more lucrative things than watch me work), I get the job done and get my money.
You do need to be careful with the freelancers though, I was pretty displeased with the lack of quality of the work received from odesk. I’d rather hire from Elance (even if the freelancers charge more), since there are way better professionals to deal with.
I do try to hire on fixed price contracts when possible. Something like web design is definitely one of those things that is easy to do on a fixed price. The problem is when you have work that is ongoing or is something that is tough to judge the amount of time required. In those cases you do end up having to do hourly contracts and face the risks. As for odesk vs elance, I’d definitely go with elance, but the price does vary a lot between the 2 sites. So when it’s work for my own blog or websites, I do usually try to turn to odesk first just because of the price. I probably should factor in the wasted time more though.
I’ve had relatively good luck with Odesk, but then I’m also almost always doing fixed price contracts. But I’ve had my fair share of crapy work or missed deadlines. I try and diversify any work that I need done into a number of different modules or articles, but that does give them a slightly different “voice” than a single author.
Fixed price contracts do seem to be the way to go. Even with those I’ve had some bad luck lately though. Working with temporary employees that you cannot properly monitor does have its challenges.
Interesting. Thanks for the tips on Odesk!
I haven’t used them yet, but I can see how at some point having a virtual assistant will be necessary. Based on your experiences with Odesk, I may take a look at Elance to see if they have the same issues.
In the end, you get what you pay for, so I’m ok paying more for someone once I know they’re producing quality work.
Forgive me, It’s late and I didn’t read all the comments. Maybe.. You get what you pay for! If you aren’t willing to pay more than $2 what do you expect? I have done a lot of great editing as testers, I have sent completed projects in my application and still no hire! I have reduced my wages to less than minimum wage, way less than minimum wage, and even told you I would work for free. Still no reply, still no odesk email. Well maybe this will get your attention. Hey!! Yoohoo! Hardworking lady over here! Or do I have to move to Indonesia? Mecheles – odesk
I do agree your point with some rip off freelancers who just wants some easy cash while probably working full time in an office. BUT there is also another side to it. If you want a good worker then you need to be ready to pay good rate. Just because they are freelancers from Asia doesn’t mean you can get quality work done by paying under $2/hr. I find it funny when I see ads like “Lowest bid wins and long term opportunity”. Who on earth would want to work at the lowest rate for long term? Only someone who was not capable of doing the work at the first place. So if you hire a clown don’t complain if you find yourself in a circus.
Do your research, screen out the scammers during the interview and be prepared to pay a reasonable rate.
I can’t agree with a lot of this. As an honest freelancer, newish to working on oDesk (two completed contracts with legit 5* ratings), I’m struggling to generate more work from the site, especially as the maximum amount of applications you can make is 25 (which may sound a lot, but they don’t refresh while the clients mull it over, so I can go days without any chance of applying for new work, or having existing work).
Your article basically tells clients new to oDesk not to hire me. That’s pretty harsh. Fair enough it’s your opinion, don’t hire me, but going online and asking other people not to hire me? That’s bad form. Fine, you think the system’s flawed, but don’t try and screw over us freelancers, who already have enough to deal with contracting online ($3.50 hourly rates? God help us).
How you can say, “Since oDesk support doesn’t care about protecting employers” ???
it doesn’t make any sense to me, the unprotected ones are freelancers. odesk has stupid money back guarantee feature for hourly contract so any client can rip off freelancer easily anytime.
and fixed price job, always freelancers has to do more work then agreed and not get paid sometimes, we lost hundreds of dollars because of clients.
You should edit this post, put reality and don’t write your own things without researching stuff.
This was a well written article but the comment last raised yet another aspect of contract work sites like Odesk. I hope people practice caution on these websites as there are not many effective safeguards to prevent abuse.
Please do your reading about employers and contract jobs on these sites before committing either to work for someone online or to hiring.
If you are treated unfairly then do your best to remain a kind, calm and fair person. You will work out an order or solution to the problems that you are facing today and you will look back on them. Don’t by people who appear to escape red handed. It will catch up to them.
Contractors Faking Hours
Most employers dont even realise that the freelancer can delete screenshots that catch them cheating.
So what is the bloody point of Work Diary if the freelancer can delete the ones that catch them out?
And Odesk can fix this simply so that the Work Diary is useful and they neglect to fix it. So I actually say that Odesk is the fraud, they have created a system that invites scammers.
Odesk does not even mention in the Employer help pages that the freelancer can actually delete screenshots.
its literally 10 minutes of code modification for Odesk to solve this and make the Work Diary useful and deterrant to scammers.
They either have to change the rate of screen shots to 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes.
And/or remove the permisability of the freelancer to delete screenshots.
@Jake: Deleting screen shots not only delete the image but also deduct the time for 10 minutes. I think you should properly before sharing something.
“Jake deleting screens the freelancer also loses the 10 minutes of paid time”.
hmmm. You dont get it do you? That is what I find very intriguing how clever the foolery is that I have spoken to honest freelancers even they dont get it.
The most amazing discovery I made last week is that it is even worse than I first imagined. Not only can freelancers delete screenshots but there is a popup window immediately when a screenshot is taken (it is once every ten minutes so you KNOW when it is going to happen) the popup window gives you 5-10 seconds to look at the screen-shot that was taken and decide whether to delete it.
What unscupulous freelancers do (and because it is so tempting most of them become unscrupulous) is play games or work on another contract for 9 minutes and then switch over to a working screen for your job so that the screenshot makes it look like they are working on your job. The Activity counter looks normal because you were playing a game or working on something unrelated.
it is so easy to work 5-9 minutes on somethiung unrelated and then switch over to work-related screen for the screenshot.
You say that the freelancer loses the paid time if they delete the screenshot? Yes, but they only delete screenshots where they were caught out. Say for example they are in middle of frantic angry facebook chat with girlfriend and they know that the screenshot is coming up but that if they stop and ignore the girl for one second they will lose her, well they just let the screenshot catch them and then they click delete on it.
But 99% of the time its too easy to fake it.
And now what has happened in India there are programmers getting their entire families and friends who are not programmers to sign up for Odesk accounts and then this programmer is using Virtual Machines or extra laptops, and the easiest work to scam is PHP/Java…and they are running 2-5 jobs at the same time, making a fortune.
You might say that they will get caught out eventually by unsatisfied customers giving them One Star rating but actually they deliberately fish for Clients who are green to web development, who are like small business owner who needs a website to take his business to the next level and knows NOTHING about how long things should take.
What has happened over last 3 years is these indian programmers have changed their professions – Whereas they were once professional programmers they have ow become Professional Odesk Scammers. They become very very adept and tellng the clients, “Dont worry, I just need another few days…., this is very difficult”
I have screen captured all of the Help pages of Odesk that are for Work Diary. There is a section for Freelancers about Work Diary and a section for Clients about Work Diary. In neither of them do they mention the Easy-Delete widget, they know that the freelancers will discover that as soon as they start using the Widget Clock. And they dont want Clients to know about it. They have also used very carefully contructed wording to mislead the Client into thinking that Screenshots can not be deleted, but if you know they can and read it from a legal point of view Odesk have tried to construct the sentences in such a way to give plausible deniability.
Sir, if you think that I really should understand something before posting it I have just slapped you across the face and you sit down little boy because if you dont grow up in this world and stay so bloody naive in your life to have not realised what is going on then you deserve every slap down you get.
Odesk triples their profits by making projects fail or take 3 times longer. Odesk was designed to make projects take longer than necessary.
How apt is their new merger name, “UpWork” – Upping the time it takes to get work done.
I dont use Odesk anymore. I seek out angencies on google and negotiate fixed-price with them – Why pay 10% to a bunch of frauds who call themselves Odesk. There should be criminal indictments.
And dont forget, it is so easy for the freelancer simply press PAUSE if they are working on something else or need take a little break, then why the hell would you make it that they can also delete screenshot and not only that give them an Easy-Delete popup window showing them the screen captured so they can decide whether the screen looks “workish” enough?????
Are you joking???????????????
its SYSTEMIC FRAUD. It is felony and a class-action law suit against Odesk could see criminal indictments and these corporate thieves sent to prison.
And let me just finish it off.
Do you know how simple the solution is to stop this massive fraud gang problem happening?
You stop allowing freelancers to be able to delete screen shots AND you make screenshots every 30 seconds not 10 minutes.
That only means 10 iminutes of code to make those changes.
It is 20 times more storage they need, scalable cloud servers are no problem. 100Gb on Google Drive today costs $2/month, 20 times more storage is NOTHING.
The every 30 seconds instead of every 600 seconds is literally changing “600” to “30” in the code.
And they remove entirely the popup Easy-Delete window.
if a freelancer is caught out by screenshot doing unrelated work then the Client should and will see it and since it is so easy to simply press PAUSE if you wanted to do unrelated activities, there is NO EXCUSE and you would FIRE that cheating idiotic freelancer.
YOU should bloody think before you write not ME you idiot.
And they just rolled out a massive new merged platform with Elance and they still have EXACTLY the same Work Diary functionality as before. 1000s of hours on the merger and could not find 10 minutes of code to chase away 100,000 scamming Indian gang members?
Why would Odesk want to chase away their most profitable members?????
My God there should be criminal indictments for the board of directors of Odesk.
its high tide now, and its damn shame they murdered Arron Swartz because he is the kind of guy who could have led this. But we the working class of the world need an Open Source platform to replace these scamming corporations Freelancer/Elance/Odesk…..
I am a contractor on ODesk, now Upwork, and to be fair you need to address the other side of the coin. First, not a contractors are scammers, and not all clients are honest. I had a hard-won 5 star rating. My portfolio is complete, I have scored in the top 10% on over 15 tests of professional skills, and one of my clients likes to say I am A.E.E. or “always exceeding expectations.” I am grateful for ODesk. But they have a terrible policy that if some jerk decided to screw over your perfect feedback all you have to do is pay him and you will get it erased! Well, that is extortion, and they do not protect contractors and we are the ones paying them 10% of our earnings! I had one of these jerks and I had physical evidence to show is rating was completely erroneous (by the way, he only left “star” rating with zero explanation like a coward scam artist “seminar” scheme passive income jerk that he is) and ODesk still did not protect me. This is my livelihood. Do you think I’m going to jeopardize my 5-star rating by doing something stupid? So while clients want to get cheap labor from Indis and complain about quality there are just as many bad scam artist clients as there are scam artist contractors, and I am NOT one of them.
Ive had good experiences and a couple shockers. I have little faith in their rating system it is so easily faked. I had one developer was listed as expert with Magento certification etc, top feed back and charging top dollar. He couldn’t even follow basic beginner bootstrap protocols. It was so bad a failure he didn’t even charge me for fear of feedback though I would have paid the $300 something dollars to warn others. Bad side he caused a $1000+ worth of damage, he was Russian. The worst was an Indian agency that basical ran a scam. Where they had (fake) accounts, the work was poor and slow but the worst part was they were lying about there hours and work rate. How I caught them out was I was looking at the profile of one of the workers and saw he had been working for two other people at the same time as me, but booking 70+ hrs with me I checked my other works and same deal. Then I checked server logs and work done…almost no activity. Net effect cost me $14000 which is in dispute, my clients were pissed because the jobs were not done and what little was need to be redone. I had to keep make my local and myself work 24/7 to catchup which cost a lot and physically costly. I have had a few good workers…cost, location and rating all varied it seems its a lucky draw who you get…with more scammers than good ones. All the scammers use proxys so they pretend to be from different countries etc, they use fake photos. so there is no one country that is safe to hire, if that’s what you are thinking. Just reverse look up some of the pictures its shocking.
Watch Out ! Extortion at Upwork
Fascinating reading all these comments. Im a big employer at Upwork with many many thousands of hours paid out.
You CAN get very very high quality work done with the freelancers, but you really have to know how to hire, interview and supervise people. I have 25 years experience doing it.
Basically, most of the freelancers, especially from India-Pakistan-Bangladesh are not worth it. Avoid them.
The top freelancers are in Russia, Ukraine (everything Internet) and the USA (everything else)
Of course, you can find an outstanding worker in any country, but the odds are against you. You need to dig deep and really find out who they are. Demand proof of their identity and qualifications, you can not depend on feedback, a total joke. If they have over 500 hours and 4.5 stars feedback, they are probably good. Never hire people new to the system, they never work out. It takes 100 hours for them to just learn how to work remotely.
Extortion.
Sad story. We hired this guy in Kenya. Name was Walusimbi. He was a true whiz. He could do anything or find out how to do it. We hired him as an assistant then our team manager. We paid him well, gave him several raises and bonuses and gave him “the keys to the office” i.e. admin passwords to our websites and other things. We paid him a wage that an American could live on. In Kenya thats a lot of money.
Then one day he went berserk. Said he was in the hospital and demanded we “pay his medical expenses¨” or he would release our private and sensitive information to our competitors and enemies. Biggest betrayal of my entire life. He stole $2000 from our expense account already under his control and demanded much more, thinking that he had us by the balls. We had to play it cool and basically fool him long enough to get our site admin passwords changed, etc. It took us about 5 weeks to wind him down.
But the nightmare would not go away. he tried and tried and tried again, made threat after threat. We had to get Odesk involved and they made our blood boil. F””””’ retards. Hours and hours and hours of arguing, it was unreal just how stupid Odesk behaved. But in the end they had to help us only because we were worth too much to them.
Then after Odesk warned this guy to stop it, he came after us again months later. This guy was furious that his extortion scam had failed, except for the $2000. We told Odesk to hit him with one star feedback or we close our account and they did it. That killed him.
Now he works under the name of his wife, Azmera.
Bottom line is this: Odesk Upwork Elance etc is a big jungle. Anything goes. Watch your ass.
Think very carefully before heading down a road with Upwork.. they are shockingly arbitrary and void of integrity.
Since 2008 I have been an active member (as both a client and a freelancer) of Elance and then Upwork (when my account was moved over)
As a client, I have continued to hire freelancers over that period, the most recent being in August this year. I have received 5 star reviews on all of the projects I have been involved with
As a freelancer, I have chosen not to work for since my account was moved to upwork, but on Elance I performed many projects. Of those employers who left reviews all were very positive and almost all were 5 stars – but the work history has now mysteriously disappeared from upwork despite being there yesterday
A few days ago I decided I would try working as a freelancer again. I applied for several projects in a day. Hours later my account was suspended without explanation.
After banging my head against the wall with support I was eventually told that I was not qualified to be applying for these jobs because the number of jobs that I was applying for was too great given my work history – exactly how this is related to my qualifications for the job I have no idea!
When I appealed I was then asked to provide evidence of my qualifications. I sent them evidence of my three applicable degrees which were received from top ranked universities in Australia. Shortly after I was simply sent an email stating that the review had been completed and my account was permenantly closed!
I have an established work history with freelancers – my CLIENT account is also suspended – and now I am unable to engage them again? The ENTIRE purpose of upwork is to provide a fair and safe marketplace. After a business starts hiring people on upwork they are counting on them to maiintain that fairness. Our company has invested in developing relationships and a shared body of knowledge with our freelancers. Suddenly, and only because I decided to start applying for jobs on a single day, I find myself permenantly banned? How??
After repeatedly asking them to refer me to the section of their terms and conditions which I have supposedly violated, I have received no response. Upwork seems to have a grossly warped sense of what it means to have commercial integrity.. VERY disappointed.