From the employer side. We're a platinum employer on UpWork with probably close to $100,000 spent on the platform and maybe 70 completed jobs. Tons of reviews calling us one of the best employers on UpWork.

Right after oDesk merged with eLance to form UpWork, the platform rolled out its new "job success" score and sidelined star ratings (which was how it'd previously determined employer and contractor quality).

We typically hire multiple contractors to small test jobs, and let them know these are test jobs. We then keep the best one or two on, and the rest we thank for their work, give them a good review (assuming they at least tried), and end the project.

In this case, right after UpWork rolled out its "job success rate" score, we had a few trial freelancers we brought on who simply did not even start their projects or respond to communications. So we ended those jobs and marked them "unsuccessful."

Within maybe a week, I received a "letter from the principal"-type email from UpWork letting me know that we had too many unsuccessful jobs and UpWork would be monitoring our account to make sure we were following sound hiring principles.

I assumed this was probably a situation where we had 3 job success ratings and 2 of them were unsuccessful, or something like this, since they'd just rolled this out. Whereas we had something like 70 five star ratings (and a couple of four star ratings) built up over the years.

I wrote to UpWork asking what this was about, pointing out that we have tons of five star reviews and this job success thing was brand new, and we just got a form letter back saying, in effect, "just be more careful."

So, now, we make every job "successful" when it ends, regardless how it ended, and are very careful to end jobs in a cheerful way with freelancers and tell them, "Okay! Job 5-starred and marked 'successful'!" in hopes they'll be inclined to do the same. It's not about accurate information. It's about not losing access to the platform.

We do hiring on other platforms as well. Guru, Freelancer, PeoplePerHour. Freelancer and PPH are comparable to UpWork in terms of fees (UpWork's a little bit higher). The PPH interface is pretty good; Freelancer's is not as good, and the quality of contractors on Freelancer leaves something to be desired compared to UpWork (though PPH is pretty good here too). Guru has great contractors and its rates are almost half of UpWork's (12.5% instead of 22.5%), but its interface is something out of 2009 and employers aren't even able to end their contracts with freelancers. It's just a downright byzantine system to use.

So, like it or not, we seem stuck with UpWork for now, and UpWork can run a crummier service than it used to in the oDesk days and charge twice as much for it because, well, they're the only game in town, and that's the market economy. We've moved what work we can off it (e.g., we use 99designs for design stuff now, and have found some terrific contractors we've gone back to repeatedly from them), but UpWork's still the best general place.

Maybe someone else will come along with a better service, cheaper. I kind of hoped PPH would be that, but they charge comparable rates, so maybe that's just what the market rate is for the middle man service between employers and freelancers. Wish they'd plow some of the new capital into better tech though. The new site design is worse than what it was before the upgrade, and often gets stuck loading in the browser. Still better than Guru though.