Starting on PeoplePerHour (PPH)
So, you’re considering joining People Per Hour, congrats!
(Well, if that’s something you want to do of course)
PPH is one of the major online freelancing platforms. It helps to connect freelancers, or those with skills to offer, with a qualified buyer (those with projects for completion).
When you first visit the site’s homepage (prior to signing up) you are greeted with a landing page that boasts their social standings and gives you a sense of what to find inside. The goal of this post is to give you, a fellow freelancer, some insight into what the signup process entails.
Let’s get to it.
Signing Up as a Freelancer
When you click the signup button in the top right corner of the homepage, a popup appears and asks you whether you want to “hire a freelancer” or “work as a freelancer”
It then prompts you for your name, email and password. All standard signup information.
After filling out that brief information, a confirmation notice appears and asks you to go and verify your email. Again, no surprises here..all very standard.
Post-verification, you are asked to fill out an application form. The PPH application form is essentially what info and skills will go on your profile where employers can view your past work and learn more about you.
Freelancer Profile Tips
After verifying your email, you are directed to the profile section of your new People Per Hour account. You’ll see along the right side of their dashboard a popup that is labelled “Freelancer Tips” – screenshot of it is included here for your reference.
These are all helpful tips to help you appear more appealing to a perspective employer. The PPH team goes over what you should and should not include on your bio.
Here are a few sections within the profile that you will get to choose when getting started:
- Profile Picture
- Language
- Past Work
- Industry Expertise
- Portfolio
- Location
Profile Picture
As you’re filling out the application here, you’ll have options of filling out your rate, and adding a profile picture. I recommend adding a profile picture as this will help you to connect on a personal level with future employers and give proof to the fact that you are a person.
Now that I’m looking it over further, I see it’s mandatory to insert a profile picture…my advice? Smile!
Hourly Rate
Now, what do you put for an hourly rate? Great question. I’ll get further in-depth on this in another writeup about the bidding process but for now I would recommend putting something that is both fair to you to a future employer who can see that you do not yet have past experiences on the platform. For starters I put $20/hour but this is certainly higher of a rate than when I initially started Freelancing over on Upwork.
There’s a bit of a paradox at the beginning, employers want to see work history, reviews, and know that you will indeed bring value to their project. The problem stems from the fact that since you are to the platform at hand, in this case PeoplePerHour, you have no reviews on the platform yet. This is where bidding low or leveraging past works in your user-generated profile can expedite this process.
The first time I “won” a job on Upwork, it was for a fixed $10. After fees from Upwork I was left with measly $8 but we all have to start somewhere and if you think that by jumping in you are entitled to jobs I would say you are terribly mistaken.
I knew from the start that freelancing is about selling, feeling a bit uncomfortable and then feeling the reward of knowing that you are skilled at what you do. Remember, employers are on these freelancing platforms to hire people to do tasks, work creatively, and build remotely, because they can not actually do these themselves. It also might be too costly for them to do this in house (meaning finding someone within their own company to do these tasks) so they outsource. This is an important fact to remember down the road when you are raising your rates.
More on rates, strategy-sessions, and leveraging past work later. If you’re unsure what to put as a rate at this point in time, put something arbitrary in as a placeholder (who knows, maybe you’ll get an invite!).
(PPH will actually give you a notification as to whether your fixed price bid for a project is too low)
Bio Section
I created a bio that is short and to the point.
It’s not lengthy because hiring managers do not (and more importantly, do not want) to read through pages and pages – they want to get to the point…and fast! Over on Upwork I am listed as doing a few main tasks within the marketing realm, pay-per-click ad analysis and video animations. These two skills help balance out the analytical and creative sides of my brain and I’m still figuring out a good balance between the two as too much of one thing boggs me down.
Before I finished writing this post and getting it onto the web, I received an invitation to apply for a fixed price job, based on my skills listed and my profile bio.
Now, the particular job mentioned here had to do with 3D animation, which I do not create, but somewhere behind the scenes PPH pulled up my profile and served it as an option to a qualified buyer.
Here is the email I received from PPH but I also received a notification in the top bar.
I created a bio that is short and to the point.
It’s not lengthy because hiring managers do not (and more importantly, do not want) to read through pages and pages – they want to get to the point…and fast! Over on Upwork I am listed as doing a few main tasks within the marketing realm, pay-per-click ad analysis and video animations. These two skills help balance out the analytical and creative sides of my brain and I’m still figuring out a good balance between the two as too much of one thing boggs me down.
Post Signup - Welcome Email
Now, the “application” process is just a few questions to make sure you are a real human and to begin sorting you into categories, based on the skills you input. For myself, I am looking to create mainly 2D motion graphics, animations and explainer videos.
After filling out the skills section, bio, profile picture (see sections below), you are prompted to submit the information to their database of Freelancers.
Upon submitting your application you are notified that your application may take up to a week to process. They do for a fee ask if you want to expedite the application behind the scenes, I’ll leave this up for you but I don’t think it’s worth the money.
Update: My application was received within 24 hours and approved.
Credit System
When it comes to the bidding process for PPH, you are given a set amount of credits to begin, 15 to be exact as of November 16th, 2019. You can use these to bid on jobs and postings once you signup. You can (and are encouraged to do so by PPH) buy more credits for a set fee. You are allotted 15 free credits every month and each job that you “bid” on (use a credit for) typically costs only 1 credit.
Moving on in the about section of your profile bio, you are encouraged to write about your past experience, your strengths and reasons to invite you to a job.
Remember, at this point your job is to either start a conversation and get noticed. If you don’t have people noticing you and initiating a conversation, you aren’t receiving any leads. Leads are, of course, the precursor to being hired for said work. All the in-between is just a dance that both parties partake in.
Receiving Invites From PPH
Before I finished writing this post and getting it onto the web, I received an invitation to apply for a fixed price job, based on my skills listed and my profile bio.
Now, the particular job mentioned here had to do with 3D animation, which I do not create, but somewhere behind the scenes PPH pulled up my profile and served it as an option to a qualified buyer.
Here is the email I received from PPH but I also received a notification in the top bar.
I had mentioned the credit system above, the interesting thing here to note is that when PPH invites you to submit a proposal to the job they do not take any credits out of your monthly allowance of 15. This is where filling out the skill section properly helps align with your ideal client.
PeoplePerHour Readiness Test Questions and My Answers
PeoplePerHour provides a “readiness test” for all freelancers interested.
What this does is help to boost your visibility by enabling a ‘PPH Ready’ badge on your profile. I’m sure you are great at what you do but we need to show all future hiring managers that and sometimes doing just a little extra can go a long way.
As much as I don’t like playing by other’s rules, when it comes to limiting creativity and wanting to hop right in, I do believe that there is a time and place to ‘play their game.’ By this I mean who knows if this test will actually do what they say but what we do know is that it gives us a shiny little icon on our profile and ANYTHING that we can do within our control to stand out from the herd will be beneficial.
I jumped into this test thinking “eh this will be easy…” and while it is relatively straightforward, there is a whole slew of math that I was not expecting. My advice – get a calculator ready!
If you do not pass with a score of 70% or greater you can always retake the test but the caveat here is that you will have to wait a month to do so. The test is timed so also be wary of this factor but they give us 20 minutes which (when your calculator is ready) is more than enough time. The questions might vary from person to person but here are the questions that I received (in order).
Questions #1 and #8 I got wrong but correct answers are at the bottom there.
The first two questions are highly subjective (in my opinion). Coming from the Upwork platform I decided to use my best judgement and got the answer wrong here. I must have missed it (or just simply didn’t want to read their documentation) but it’s hidden somewhere in the best practices section of their knowledgebase. The answer they were looking for was actually A – “a day.” pfff.
I’ll leave you be now to read on the answers that I had put but please be wary of the fact that I got question #1 and question #8 wrong, they tell you at the end of the test.
Congrats, I passed!
Now what?
Well I highly recommend browsing job postings that employers are actively putting on the site and exploring around. Being new and under a week to the site I am still exploring but I’ll have more updates on this in the future.
What I can tell you is best practices when applying to a job (based on my Top Rated status on Upwork). I’ll link this in shortly as I’m finalizing up the post.
Cheers,
Jon
