New Trends in Freelancing
Even as the unemployment rate is almost all time high in US, the freelancing and freelancing jobs are on rise. Freelancing provides a good opportunity to many people who are out of job or who want to make extra money by offering expert advice or knowledge.
There are many freelancing websites that can be used to offer your freelancing services. This includes odesk, elance,guru,getafreelancer, ifreelance. All of these platforms have more or less similar common concept. Freelancers create a login and add a profile on these websites. Some of these websites require a membership fee while most of them are free. Those that do not require fee has large member base. But the number of non serious freelancers in high on the websites that are free. Those that require membership fee are better in terms of the quality of the freelancers. If you do not do any work you loose membership fee.
All the freelancing websites work on more or less the similar way. Anyone who wants to get his work done, posts the project. The freelancers bid on the project. There is a private or sometimes open message board area where freelancers can communicate with project posters. Project poster chooses one of the freelancers to get his work done. The project poster chooses freelancer based upon bid amount, the rating and the credentials of freelancer.
Problem with Existing Freelancer Websites
All existing freelancing platforms suffer from common inherent problem. From project poster point of view these inherent problems become serious issue and many of them stop using using them at some point of time. There is no way for the project poster to know if the freelancer bidding for the project has the required expertise in the required area. While the rating of the freelancer give some idea about the credential pf the freelancer, it does not tell about the expertise of the expert in the field in which expertise is needed.
For example, assume that someone needs an expert advice in the area of regular expression in PHP programming. A freelancer having a good rating will bid on the project even though he may not have the required expertise in that area. The project poster chooses the bidder based upon the bid amount only to discover later, that the freelancer took much more time than anticipated to implemment the regular expression project.
All these freelancing websites make any it difficult for new freelancers to get new projects eben though he may posses better skills and knowledge – as he is devoid of rating.
The freelancing websites strangle the free flow of information by not allowing real time chat messaging between the project poster and the freelancer. This reduces the efficiency og the communication between the project poster and the freelancer.
The freelancer need to keep following the projects and need to keep bidding upon them. In many cases they do not get the project allotted. An average freelancer has to bid on 20 projects before he wins a project. A careful reply to a project poster can take two hours of a freelancer time. A quick reply does not serve the purpose, as, the project poster will assume that the bidder is not serious
enough and will therefore not alott the project to him. This implies that the system is inherently inefficient. It wastes too much of freelancers time. The result is that the system is deterrant to high quality experts, whose time is too valuable to bid on each project with high rejection ratio.
eZdia – A new platform
eZdia promises to change the way the work on freelancing is being executed. A project poster can check the expertise of the expert using expert’s extended resume and expert’s knowledge bucket to check the relevancy of his expertise to his requirement. The expert adds urls of the articles in the areas in which he possess the expertise. This helps project poster to evaluate the credentials of the freelancer before he allotts him project.
eZdia believes is real time free flow of information exchange between project poster and the freelancer. It provides a chat option where project poster poster and the feelancer can communicate. It even provides a skype plugin – all this even before the project poster decides to allott the project to any particular freelancer. None of the existing platforms has that kind of capability as of today.
eZdia provides ability for expert search. If a project poster needs a freelancer with a particular expertise, he simply searches for the required expert using relevant keywords, checks his credentials, and starts communicating with him. This enhances the efficiency of the process. The high qaulity experts do not have to waste time on bidding on individualt projects. Instead they try to make themselves available to by indicating their expertise by way of the their profile and knowledge bucket.Off course, eZdia also promises to bring traditional project posting as in other freelancing websites. eZdia calls it acctivities.
With all these new features, this new platform shows a promising new way , online freelancing is being done. It is yet not clear if the freelancing community will embrace it. Since the idea and the concept of the knowledge bucket in eZdia is new, it is not easily understood by novice. Anothe unanswered question is whether whether project poster will start using the expert search option of eZdia in a big way to find the right expert for them.
You can make your own guess about the possible answers by joining eZdia and after exploring it.