Eric Shapiro
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read

Great points Emily. I agree that the IAPWE’s workflow is not optimized or best suited for freelancers seeking to use freelance work from the IAPWE as a main source of income.

We are hoping to grow our team of managing editors and content managers over time to increase turnaround on our end to try and address this.

The one-piece-at-a-time policy is an unfortunate result of a rather small percentage of freelancers letting the quality of their work slip when completing multiple pieces of content for submission. Since the freelancers with these tendencies will often submit great quality content for their first piece, this makes it difficult to distinguish between consistent and less consistent freelancers until it is too late.

I’m not sure if that makes sense, but basically most freelancers will submit a great quality first piece and we wont know if there is a deterioration in quality until we see the second or third piece, etc. This is unfortunate since most freelancers are very consistent and put the same amount of effort into all of the work that they do.

One potential solution that the IAPWE has been considering, is applying the one-piece-at-a-time policy for all new freelancers and then relaxing this policy for freelancers that have been reliably submitting quality work that does not require revisions, etc.

Part of the reason that we moved over to Freelancer as a hiring and payment platform for all IAPWE freelancers is to try and help freelancers grow their own reputations and position themselves to acquire additional clients. I personally don’t see why more clients don’t utilize platforms like Freelancer, since the public ratings and feedback system creates for a more robust and vetted freelancing community for everyone. I really see this as a win-win, although obviously no platform is perfect (many of them charge additional fees but so do most payment processors).

I realize that us doing this is not mutually exclusive with turning the submitted content around faster on our end but thought it was worth mentioning.

Thanks again for sharing.

    Eric Shapiro

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