Upwork Job Posts

Obtaining the best possible engineers for your company an obvious key to your organization's success. Below, we detail specific things to understand and utilize when utilizing Upwork to hire remote engineers.

The main way to attract talent on Upwork is through job posts. Each post should be tailored to the role we're looking to fill.

Open Position Needs & Expectations

It's tempting to think of every quality you want to see in a hire. However, the job post is primarily recruiting. This means that your main objective is to pull candidates towards you. Do not introduce more requirements (barriers) that will turn applicants off, and that are not 100% critical. The most important requirements come from reality: what do you actually need built, fixed, and/or tested in the next 6 months. Any skills required to make that happen are fair game. “Nice to haves” or " Will be important next year” should be let go. When hiring you need to be very clear about what your minimum threshold is. This is not the time to maximize or say "Well, let's see what’s out there." that comes later.

Once we have applicants to choose from we’ll make sure we get the best available.

Use these questions as a guide to help develop the necessary information for your job post:

1. What skills are essential to this role?
2. What software/framework(s) does the position require the candidate to use?
   • What level of proficiency in said framework/software is needed?
3. What candidate characteristics are essential for this role to be successful?
4. How much are you willing to pay for this position?
5. What are the daily responsibilities?
6. Will this position include working on/with a team?
7. Does this position require the candidate to be available during a specific time of day?
8. How many hours per week are expected?

Anatomy of The Job Post

Once the needs and expectations have been fully considered and written down, it is now time to create the job post for your open position. There are multiple things that correlate to the success of a job post.

Title

Either go for something very distinctive and eye-catching or use terms that you know the candidate will be searching for. That being said, a generic "$Technology Developer Wanted to join our $TeamType Team" works well.

Opening Paragraph

Quickly introduce the company and what it does to make its customers happy. Be very concrete and as relatable as possible. For GVNG we recommend focusing on the technology and scope of the work.

Cold Read

Make a guess about your target candidate's values. If you're hiring for CSS and design oriented people, they will care about different things than a back-end dev. For example, here's something that will appeal to someone who will be rigorous about React based applications.

Money

We're not going to win on mission/fit alone. The sooner you make the pay tangible the better.

The Stack

Developers will want to know if they have the right skillset & if you're using anything noteworthy (good or bad). Don’t go crazy with this. Just paint enough of a picture so they can cross it off their list.

Requirements

This is your value statement. Attract the right people while pushing away the opposites. State the required values for this position along with any disqualifiers. In the disqualifiers list the expected working hours.

Threshold Challenge

We'll get to paid challenges later, but the Threshold Challenge here utilized in a Git Challenge will ensure that we only get applicants who have a good chance of being right for our position.

Evaluations to candidate's responses for this test can be found on our Git Challenge Evaluation & Responses page.

Rules

Applicants have a lot of bad habits. These will cut down on the noise.

Screening Questions

This is where you tell them to complete the Threshold Challenge. It will prevent applicants from charging forward without having completed the it.

It will also be where you get confirmation that they:

1. Do not work with an agency
2. Are not in school
3. Do not have a primary job
4. Are able to work within the work hours you have specified

Asking these questions when they apply to the position optimizes the vetting process and requires them to write down their answers. This can be used as reference should any conflicting information be given at a later time.

We have created and provided a sample job post with the screening questions for reference below: Job Post Reference

Job Post Visibility

As you post your job on Upwork, the site will place it at the top of the list as a new posting. This will give it more visibility to the engineers searching on Upwork at that time. However, as the days go by, the relevance of the job post falls therefore so does its visibility. This will result in fewer candidates applying to the position. If you find yourself in this situation with few candidates applying each day, you have a couple of solutions you could use.

• Upwork's Repost Job feature.

This essentially allows you to close your current post and re-upload it to their list. Granting it the same visibility it had when you first posted it.

• Upwork's Featured Job Upgrade feature.

As part of Upwork Plus, each month you can upgrade one job post to a Featured Job for free. If the monthly upgrade has already been used, you will have to pay $29.99 to upgrade your job post. This expands your job post's visibility for significantly longer than the above option.

Geographic Targeting

For the most part, we don't care where the candidate is from as long as they can prove that they can handle the work. That said, if you wanted to avoid a particular country, it is possible. When creating the job post, you can use the advanced settings to select individual countries. If for example, you wanted to avoid Pakistan, select all boxes except that country. This is tedious the first time, but you can clone the job post in the future to avoid this step.

Reviewing Job Proposals

When your job post has been added into Upwork's system, you will likely see a few proposals to the position you have posted for. These proposals contain a link to their repository containing their solution to the Threshold Challenge, a cover letter should you decide to require one, and the candidate's Upwork profile.

With this information, you can move on to our Vetting portion of our guide.