I was reading the oDesk community forum when I came across post I didn’t agree with. According the post author, the biggest problem on oDesk is that there are too many providers. You can read his argument here, where he explains there are “too many fish in the pond.”
I disagree.
It doesn’t matter how many of the wrong fish there are in the pond.
Not everyone on oDesk is going to do well at every job. Programmers, designers, and writers are all going to be looking for different jobs. That takes out the majority of the “competition” (other providers) right there. All it leaves are members of your own category: In my case other writers.
I’m not in competition with all of them either.
Some of them are going to be looking for completely different jobs than I am. They’re looking for things that I wouldn’t want to do, so there’s no competition there.
But what about the people directly competing for the jobs I want?
No, they don’t count either.
Before you think I’ve lost my head, let me explain where I’m coming from.
When I apply for a job my goal is to prove to the buyer that I am the one person best suited to meet their needs. I want to show that what they need is what I bring to the table, that I have the exact mix of skills and experience to do their job the way that they want it done. I want to show them that I understand their needs better than any other applicant.
By doing just that much I’ve already taken myself past a good half the applicants: I’ve applied to the specific job. That automatically puts me past everyone who just dumped a cut and paste cover letter and application into the form.
Let me tell you a bit of a story:
Some time ago, I was on another freelancing site and saw a job posting for a writer to ghostwrite a novel. The buyer stated that they needed a new ghostwriter as they weren’t satisfied with the quality of a previous freelancer.
When I applied for the job I made sure to focus on two things: First that I understood that they needed quality, and also that I had already written more than one novel. By doing that I started turning a number of the other applicants into the “wrong fish.”
I did that by raising the quality bar. By setting my focus on the customer’s concern for quality I was able to make the point that he wouldn’t get that quality from someone who did not already know how to complete a novel. Two thirds or more of the applicants didn’t say they had ever written a novel so that took them out of competition.
I got that job because I proved to the buyer that I was the right fish, and all the other fish in the pond were the wrong ones.
You need to do the same thing.
Next time you apply to a job on oDesk, look at the other candidates. Look at their feedback, their test scores, and their profiles. I went to one job and looked at three candidates at random. One had no feedback, and had only taken one test and done very poorly on it, coming in below the 40th percentile. More than 60% of the people on oDesk had done better on this test than this individual, and it was their only test and directly related to the job. They’re a wrong fish. The next was a wrong fish too– they had no feedback and were under the 60th percentile in both tests they had taken.
Only the third was possible competition. This person had taken multiple tests, dropping down to the top 20% for only one of them. They also had good feedback and a history on oDesk. Still that’s one out of three and if we can shave the “odds” that much that quickly then there really isn’t as much to worry about as one might think.
The reason numbers don’t matter is because it’s not based on chance. Buyers aren’t rolling dice to select providers. They read the applications and look at people’s profiles and work history. It all adds up. Convince the buyer that you alone are exactly the right person for the job and it doesn’t matter how many apply.
The wrong fish don’t matter.
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