After getting paid, the most important thing for many freelance providers is their reputation.  It’s essential to maintain a good reputation if you want to keep working at decent rates.

oDesk indicates your reputation in a few ways.  Everyone should know how the feedback system works, and if you don’t just drop me a line or put in a comment and I’ll be happy to expand on it here.  The other aspect of your reputation is how well you rank when buyers do a search.

The basic system works pretty well, it sorts by whatever criteria you specify, and uses the number of oDesk as a weighting factor.  So if you are searching for providers with a perfect feedback rating, you’ll see all the 5.00 rated providers with the one with the most hours listed first.

I like that as someone with a very large amount of hours has demonstrated their reliability.

If you need to you can also filter providers by anything from pay rates to hours worked or even whether they’re affiliated with a provider company.   In all cases your results will show up based on your primary search criteria weighted by oDesk hours.

It’s a good system, but it does have flaws:

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

I recently raised my rates and so I wanted to see where I was sitting among the writers working on oDesk.   I think I’m one of the better writers in the system and wanted to make sure my rates were in the same range as my peers.  So I went to the provider search, set my filters to exclude anyone with zero hours and did a search for writers based on hourly rate, highest first.

The first four pages were all programmers.

That’s right, none of the top forty providers that come up when you do a search for writers by pay rate are actually writers.

If you search by feedback it appears to get a little better, the fourth ranked candidate has writer listed in their job description.  However, this person is primarily a programmer and has not taken any writing tests or done any writing work on oDesk.  Going over their feedback you can see that the person is a very good communicator with excellent English skills, however that does not matter if someone is looking for a candidate for a writing job since this person doesn’t do those kind of jobs.

It’s not until number eight that we see anyone who has actually done writing work, and even then it’s only a fraction of their work history, which is mostly administrative support.

The next two entries in my search are people who are primarily working jobs from oDesk’s writing category.  One’s primarily a transcriptionist and the other’s doing editing work.  At least they’re on the first page.

The sad thing is that this is the best result I’ve ever seen for writers when searching the writing category.

If you search by portfolio items there is only one writer who comes up on the first page, and that’s only because the person in question spent an entire afternoon doing nothing but add items to her portfolio.  That got her 78 items, and second place.  It also gives her the distinction of being the only one on the first page with any writing samples in her portfolio.

I don’t know what the other categories are like, but from my perspective, and that of many other writers this is a serious problem.  If a buyer is searching for a writer, they should be able to find them without wading through dozens of providers in other categories.

The problem is that complaining alone doesn’t do any good, we need to find a way to fix the problem.

I think part of the problem may lie in the fact that many providers may list multiple job categories on their profile and primarily only work in one of them.   One possibility could be to get providers to list one category as their primary, and others as secondary and then provide the ability to filter providers by primary or all categories.

That way if you filter by primary category only you should be able to get providers who focus in that field, whereas if you don’t filter at all you could get the present results.

It’s a tough question, but that’s the best idea I’ve been able to come up with.

It’s not really changing the basic algorithm, which appears to work fairly well, just allowing for better filtering for relevant providers.  Having said that I have no idea how hard this would be to implement, but I think it might go a long way toward resolving this issue.

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