What's New
Tired of re-negotiating bids every time you change the requirements? No problem. Just switch to hourly.
It’s common for buyers decide to hire a provider on an hourly basis after they perform well on a fixed-price project. Now, it’s easy to do so…
Every provider you hire for a fixed price job will have a link to “Switch to Hourly” in the team room.
You can pay for any work done to date and set the conditions for the new hourly assignment.
That’s it. It’s that easy…
We’ve received a number of support tickets over the past several months requesting changes to feedback scores and/or comments. Most of these requests come as a result of a positive outcome. For example, a buyer may have ended an assignment and left negative feedback because project was not completed to satisfaction, but then the provider resolved any of the outstanding issues and delivered a working product. In these cases, the buyer often offers to go change the feedback and comments that were initially left for the provider.
In order to facilitate feedback resolution, we’ve enabled a way for any buyer or provider to enable a feedback change. When you view any feedback that you have received in the past, you will see a new link.
This feature is intended to be used only after you have worked out all issues and discussed the outcome directly with the buyer or provider that left you the feedback. Once you enable the user to make a change, they will have up to 14 days to modify the feedback. Please note that this operation can only be performed once for each feedback you have received.
We hope everyone finds this to be a fair solution for all users.
Who was the guy with that great profile? Forget already?
Buyers can now save any provider profile to their list of favorites. Now itâs easy to keep a list of providers youâve worked with before, or providers you might like to work with in the future. Just click the âSave to Favoritesâ button next to any profile.
You can also enter Notes on any provider. These notes are private and only visible to you. Use the Notes field to remind yourself what you liked about the profile, to jot down questions you want to ask the provider, or to save your comments from an interview.
You donât need to have a job posted to use this feature so start building your favorites list now!
We will be making a significant change within the next month in order to share more information in the oDesk marketplace and enrich the user experience for everyone. You can see detailed discussion of the upcoming feature here. It will make many more jobs available to view, even if they have been cancelled or filled. The intent of making jobs available after being filled or cancelled is to educate the marketplace; allowing providers to learn how to better acquire jobs and allowing buyers to gain a deeper understanding of a provider’s assignment history. We believe that an open exchange of information is critical to making a marketplace operate efficiently.
In order to prepare for the upcoming feature, we are now enabling privacy controls for buyers for any past job openings. We do our best to balance the marketplace’s need for open information with our individual users’ needs for some privacy control. To that end, any buyer can now go to their My Jobs tab and click on any of their past jobs to edit the visibility settings.
1) Go to My Jobs tab and search for All jobs
2) Click on any Job title
3) Select Change Visibility
Buyers: we recommend going to your My Jobs tab to review the privacy settings for any jobs you’ve posted in the past.
We’ve integrated a small 24-hour activity chart in the main console view of My Team. It is intended to give the user an at-a-glance update on the team’s activity within the past 24 hours.
The 24 hour chart will display by every oDesk provider on the team and a user can click-thru to go to a Work Diary. We hope users find this to be a valuable addition to the oDesk console.
Buyers now have the ability to set weekly limits on the number of hours billed on any hourly jobs. The limits can be set by the buyer upon hiring any provider and they can be changed or added into an assignment at any later date. For buyers, if you’d like to add a weekly limit on hours for any of your existing assignments, please go to your My Assignments tab and select Change Limits.
A few important notes on this feature.
1) Buyers can update limits on hourly assignments at any time, however, changes will not take effect until the following work week.
2) Providers may log hours over the limit on a job, but these hours will not be billed or paid automatically. We suggest that users should discuss any hours over the limit and use bonus payments as necessary.
3) Buyers may always review the hours worked over a limit using the Work Diary.
Any hours over the limit will be designated by the following status indicator. 
For providers working on an hourly job with a weekly limit, you’ll notice a few changes to the oDesk Team client. We launched a new version of the client application that has a weekly limit indicator and notifications upon reaching a weekly limit for a buyer.
We believe this feature is a major enhancement to the hourly-based jobs because it gives buyers a stronger sense of security by giving them a tool to control their budgets and exposure. We feel it benefits providers by enabling a simple way to understand expectations about a workload on a job.
A frequent source of complaints and disputes stems from miscommunication between buyers and providers, often around time estimates and expected workloads. This tool is intended to give users a way to structure their expectations on workload through the oDesk system.
We’ve launched a mini-feature that is designed to help new and old providers alike complete their profiles to the best of their ability. Now, anytime a provider goes to the My Profile tab they will see a meter that shows a percentage ranking for the completeness of their profile. In addition to showing a percentage score, it will give the provider a tip on what step they should complete next. We made an effort to order the operations from easiest to hardest. So, in the beginning, it should be easy for a provider to improve upon their profile, and as they get closer to 100%, it may require a little more work. Providers: check out the My Profile tab to see how your profile stacks up.
We’ve seen that providers with complete profiles have an easier time finding satisfying jobs, so we hope this tool will help providers achieve their goals and acquire more jobs.
We’ve revisited the oDesk Work Diary in an effort to make it easier and more efficient to review detailed work logs. The Work Diary has always allowed a buyer to review work by seeing full size screenshots taken at a random interval within each 10 minute block of work, but now you can view screenshots faster and with less clicks. Read more about how the Work Diary can be used.
The changes that we’ve made allow a viewer to open a full size screenshot and have a navigation and information pane available.
This new pane allows the viewer to do the following:
1) Navigate forward and backward by 10 minute increments. Note that navigating this way will skip idle and offline time.
2) Information will be displayed in the top pane including the username of the provider, the active window, the work memo, activity level, and the time and date of the screenshot.
3) View a slideshow of all of the work by pressing the Start Slideshow link.
We are happy to announce the launch of a new and improved help and FAQ system.
As our user base has grown almost 10X over the past year, our customer support department has also evolved along with the growth. We have focused on becoming more and more scalable in our service to our users in an effort to keep oDesk fees as low as possible. The improvements in scalability are reflected in the two pricing drops that we have been able to pass on to our users in this same period.
We have compiled all of the FAQs that we are now aware of in an easy to use and navigate help center. The top questions will be dynamically updated and kept at the top of lists. Links to related questions will be included in each specific question and answer. With this new help center, you now have 3 main ways to get support:
1) Browse the help center
2) Post questions in the Community Help Desk
3) Contact Us through the same ticket form
We plan to continue to optimize this help content and appreciate your continued input.
Providers, it’s a small change, but we have added a few important My Account items to the top of the My Profile tab in a My Account Summary pane. The goal is to make it easier to upload portraits, manage your email preferences, change your pay rate, and notice your contract status. Each is linked to the appropriate edit screen. As always, you can access much of the same information via the My Account shortcut.
