Upwork's Algorithm Overhaul: Your Old Tricks Won't Cut It! It's All About Work History & Titles Now

I want to start by thank you note to the Dima from Growth Management team of Gigradar who also was helping me to understand the new algorithm with his tests.

Today your read will be about:

1. Intro
2. Previous algorithm
3. Current algorithm
4. A few more news
5. How to survive with all this ****?

Intro

Upwork is a live organism and it's constantly changing. If you'd like to sell more, you need to donate more so Ukraine🇺🇦 will win sooner (and all of us will be working normally) and constantly check what is new on Upwork. People are always asking, how do I do my tests?

1. I am a Product Manager and WP shop owner so I am hiring on Upwork too. I am posting jobs and I see how the algorithm ranges people.
2. I read Upwork news&forum
3. If I don't understand things, I ask support

Previous algorithm

Dates: From November 2023 - the start of February 2024.

So what did you previously know? Skills, skills, skills everywhere. Upwork was boosting you with all those grey clouds and we had a great marathon of pushing you to the first place. You were able to read how to find the right skills on Upwork here

To boost yourself back then you were in need to put your skills everywhere: portfolio, specialized profiles, consulting, and project catalog.

To push yourself up in a talent search you were in need to constantly update those skills.

We all knew Upwork was going somewhere toward skills but we didn't expect that the change would be almost back to the 2021 algorithm

Current algorithm

Upwork is a great platform for lead generation. Let's go to the base. You can generate leads there by:

1. Sending bids
2. Being on top of talent research
3. Project catalog

First, I thought the match goes only by skills in work history but then I noticed that people with less work history skills but with previous work titles matched my job as well.

Regarding Talent Search it works almost the same way. It doesn't highlight skills with the green but it opens skills of each relevant job.

Regarding Project Catalog. Seems there is a totally different development team there 😆. Keywords are working there the best (hello 2015!)

A few more news

I want to discuss 2 more things. I've noticed it's quite hard for the client to change job posts to be more than 30 hours per week. By default, it sets less than 30 and then I need to edit my post to change it. Imagine how many job posts you are losing with such a filter. Especially if you are using Gigradar (btw I have a discount for my clients there).

So maybe your dream client just didn't have time to edit his post?

And one more thing is a Profile Boosting. Finally this feature works. For example, one of my clients set it during our consultation and he appeared in my invites list immediately (screenshot is posted by agreement with him).

This feature appears on a second step for the client job posting process and allows you to stand out from freelancers with the better work history.

However, if the client is setting the availability badge filter, all boosted freelancers disappear (Upwork bug but it means you need the availability badge - on very much).

How to survive with all this ****?

🗄First of all, you need to work on your work history by creating new jobs with needed skills. What are the needed skills? Still, you need this routine . The same way you do with skills you need to overwork your titles.

There are different ways to add more jobs to your work history. For example, ask your loyal clients to open new milestones as new jobs through job posts with needed skills and titles.

💰Work history will help you with for talent search as well. For talent, search keep 3 different rates (different dozens) on your 3 sub-profiles as clients may apply filters with the rate.

👩‍💻If before you were in need to bid from a specialized profile (because it had more skills in the profile itself) then now it's better to bid from the general one because the general profile always has more jobs in a work history (meaning more skills).

👀Pay attention, to job posts with less than 30 hours per week filter.

🚀Boost your profile. Now. While not all noticed this feature is working, the conversion to invites is like 50% on average. My teams are impressed!

🔛Keep your availability badge on.

If my article has been helpful, you can buy me a coffee through Monobank. https://send.monobank.ua/jar/478bieebhB

If you have questions or you want to book a consultancy, please contact me on LinkedIn.

Hugs,

Tamara