Upwork now limiting many jobs to US freelancers | Hacker News Reader

Upwork now limiting many jobs to US freelancers

community.upwork.com

18 pointssolonagathon13 comments

This title is misleading. It is still up to the client to decide.

This is a win for all parties involved. Less time wasted for clients and freelancers when an applicant isn't a fit for the needs of the position.

> Quote:

> Here’s how it’ll work:

> New clients who prefer the flexibility of hiring freelancers in any location will have the option to set their hiring preference accordingly, and it will work for them just like it does today.

> New clients who prefer to hire within their country will have the option of setting their freelancer search and job post visibility to freelancers in the U.S. only, with the ability to refine their search further by time zone or state. And, only freelancers with a U.S. location in their profile settings (verified by bank account or other means) will see these job posts and be able to submit proposals. Keep in mind if a client changes their mind or chooses to invite a freelancer outside of the U.S., they can do so at any time.

This sort of selection was already happening on the platform but as a manual process by the person hiring. UpWork just added support to prevent non-US users from applying to jobs specified as US only.

Edit: formatting is hard.

Upwork is influencing the client's decision to seek only US freelancers in some not very subtle ways, discussed in the thread. They are planting in the client's mind the need which wasn't necessarily already there (and is quite often spurious).

To ignore the psychology of the ux and it effect on the decision making process is naive.

US freelancers may be better off. Non US freelancers will certainly not be.

I'm guessing there was big US client demand for this otherwise what would be the benefit for Upwork for doing this? Perhaps clients getting spammed by those that don't meet their basic requirements.

Clients do get a ton of spam but there are better solutions than resorting to xenophobia.

From my experience as a client, 90% of the spam proposals are copy-pasted so they could simply filter them out.

They could also reduce 'connects' (freelancers have a maximum amount of points they can use to apply for jobs. You can buy more points).

Spam filter seems like it might help. If you are an user of that website you should suggest it.

If you're a US based freelancer this could benefit you. As a non-US person, this has already adversely affected my job feed there. I assume this will not have a big impact on the lower end of the scale but as someone who charges a premium for unique services, US jobs have basically disappeared.

I have been one of those who critisized this new feature and have been banned from the community. Moreover, there are also Upwork Enterprise jobs that exclude freelancers from certain countrys (physical locations) without mentioning a reason why those freelancers/locations are excluded.

nice, that's why upwork is better than freelancer.com.. too many indian companies catfishing sole developers....

Yes, but there are other platforms aside from Upwork and Freelancer that are much better for hiring freelancers and vice versa

Which ones are those?

Like?

The same is happening on UW. Not as much.

Today Upwork announced that this feature will also be applied to some of the existing clients.

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