Getting better quality on Upwork

If you’ve tried posting a job for just about anything on Upwork, you know that it can guessing on who you’re going to get to apply for your job.

Sometimes you end up with the perfect person for the job. Other times it’s between candidates that, well, maybe aren’t so good for the job. It’s frustrating.

But there are some things that you can do to try and better those odds. You can’t force quality applicants to apply for your job. But you can try to make it more appetizing for them to apply.

So today let’s go through what you might be able to do to get the applicants you want for your job (from a web developer’s perspective).

Be as descriptive as you can with your description

The first thing you can do to get better quality applicants on Upwork is to be as descriptive as possible with the job description.

We developers like to know what we’re getting into when we apply for these various jobs. Just saying, “I need a website built,” doesn’t help me at all. There’s so much ambiguity in that statement. Instead, you can say “I need an ecommerce website built for a small business”. That’s much more specific and can help give us a better idea of what’s being asked of us … and if it’s worth it.

Now, I know that sometimes you can’t be too descriptive for various reasons. And that’s fine; we get it. But try to be as descriptive as you can with it. The better of an idea we have about the project before hand, the better we can guess if it’s going to be worth our time bidding and building.

Ask pertinent questions

Also, be sure to ask questions in the screening process.

Upwork allows you to ask questions to applicants when they apply for your job. These can be anything you want them to be, and you can add as many as you like. So take advantage of that.

Trust me, they aren’t really a turn off for prospective applicants. Honestly, I’ve found them to be pretty useful in figuring out what a project is going to be like without asking the hiring person. And at this point I kind of expect it from any project I’m looking to bid on.

Plus, you can use them to weed out developers who won’t be a good fit for you. You can see if they’ve worked on something similar before, what they would do in a certain situation and their experience with code — all without having to spend extra time interviewing them.

So take the opportunity to ask about four to five questions on your job posting. It’ll show that you’re serious and it will help you filter out applicants you don’t want.

Set a high-ish budget for the project

Finally, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. And if you’re not paying a lot for a project on Upwork, you’re not going to end up with what you want in a timely manner.

If I had a quarter for every website build that had a budget of $200 or less, well, I wouldn’t have any student loans anymore. Seriously, it’s a problem, and to be honest, it’s really kind of sad. Because in the end, I know that they’re likely not going to end up with a quality developer to build the product that they need.

Now, I’m not saying you should a super high, five-digit budget … unless the scope of your website build warrants that amount. But the run-of-the-mill website should have an hourly budget of no less than $50 (I charge $60 just to give you an idea) or around $2,000. These aren’t set in stone numbers; feel free to play around with them and see who you can get based off of them.

But the idea is that if you set yourself up with a decent-to-high budget, you will attract more developers, like myself, who have the experience and quality to get your website built right the first time. And yeah, it might technically cost you more now, but if that thing doesn’t have to be constantly rebuilt because it’s built right, then you’ll save more in the long run.

So for your next job posting on Upwork, try some of these out. Make the posting as appetizing for quality applicants as you possibly can. And then see what happens.

I’ll bet you’ll like who you get.