
Upwork now limiting many jobs to US freelancers - solonagathon
https://community.upwork.com/t5/Announcements/Testing-freelancer-location-for-job-posts/td-p/334213
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nickreese
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.

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solonagathon
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.

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pkaye
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.

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solonagathon
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).

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

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solonagathon
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.

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Nomenestomen
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.

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albertini_89
nice, that's why upwork is better than freelancer.com.. too many indian
companies catfishing sole developers....

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

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thrownunder
Which ones are those?

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

