I was on the oDesk forums recently and came across a comment from a new provider who was worried by the ratio of working to registered providers.
She couldn’t find the page, which was probably the main oConomy page here which currently shows 248 providers working and 95,545 registered int the system. I admit that those numbers weren’t calculated to put a new provider in her happy place, but they don’t tell the whole story either.
It isn’t showing how many providers on the network have jobs, but how many people were actively logging time on the oDesk client at the time the numbers were generated. Given that oDesk is a 24 hour global marketplace those numbers will fluctuate throughout the day and really aren’t anything to worry about. They certainly don’t reflect the number of providers who are currently employed. (I expect they’re short by at least one or two orders of magnitude).
Now let’s look at some other numbers from the same page. There are almost 100,000 providers, and together they’ve earned just under 40 million dollars, which works out to an average of almost U$400/per provider to date. Since not every provider on oDesk has worked, and that some profiles are so incomplete that the providers are never going to work, the numbers have nowhere to go but up.
When it comes to getting a job, none of those numbers matter.
As I said in the headline: Chance only matters when it’s random. oDesk buyers do not select providers by rolling dice. (Well Nelson might, but he’s a special case.)
Buyers select the provider they think is at the intersection of highest quality and lowest price. They go for the most value for money within their budget.
It’s not random at all. Never has been, never will be. This is business, not gambling and buyers don’t want to throw their money away.
The end result is that you’re not competing with all 95,544 other providers on the network for any given job. In fact you’re rarely competing against as many as 10 serious competitors for any given position. Those still don’t sound like good odds, but that’s just chopped four orders of magnitude off the ratio.
It gets better because they aren’t odds.
It’s not random.
It’s deterministic, and some of the factors are ones you know about and can control and the others are unknowable and uncontrollable. However even the ones you don’t know and can’t control aren’t random chance.
If you write a great cover letter and your skills fit the job you are very likely to get it. If you can demonstrate that your skills match your rates you’re even closer.
I’ll go so far as to say that any competent provider with a decent profile (including a picture) and portfolio is guaranteed to be able to find work at or slightly above their category average if they put the time in. The work is there, and the buyers want it done more than they want their money.
Let me leave you with one other thought about statistics:
While statistics may say only one in ten people can succeed at something, they never tell you whether you’re the one or one of the nine.
- Integrity Matters
- Are You Interested In the Project or the Payment?
- Ambition: Confidence and Ego
- Too Many Fish in the Pond? I don’t think so!
- Fixed-Price Money Matters
There’s another thing influencing the statistics- I’m registered at oDesk and I take jobs here, but I also take jobs elsewhere. In any one week, I may have no current hours at oDesk at all, and I may not even be looking for work.
Another thing that happens is that repeat clients sometimes want to pay me directly. The work gets done, but it never shows up as me clocking hours.
Dave is right, but everyone starts out with that same anxiety. It only lasts until you start picking up work
“Well Nelson might, but he’s a special case.”
Well, it depends on their saving throw and whether or not they have a +1 flaming sword of…
Scratch that. Going back to my cage now.