Max Brun discusses how talent marketplaces like Upwork and ShiftGig use ratings to rank workers. New sellers face a catch-22: algorithms favor proven performers, so unproven talent struggles to get hired. Badges and manual onboarding help, but balancing reputation sources across platforms remains unsolved.
Chapters
So what were some of the, maybe the learnings around, you know, ratings and reviews?
I'll generalize my learnings from both ShiftGig and Upwork. And I think this is such a tough topic and the pendulum here swings between where, so what you optimize for. If you are kind of conservative and if you can optimize for and focus on signals of work that happens on your platform, like this is what we've done a Shift gig, we kind of disregarded you as a person. Like if I joined, um, you know, I start from zero and all my reputation would be based on the work I've done on the platform. And then the ranking algorithms would heavily favor, um, people with the proven performance on the platform. I think most labor, uh, like talent marketplaces do the same thing. Uh, the smart ones do give ways for unproven talent to create new signals very quickly so that you can recognize great talent and enable them to earn where they, more than what they can earn elsewhere. And I think that should be the mission of especially like platform, like scaled platforms like Fiverr or Upwork or, you know, They really need to be able to say, if any of us quit what we're doing and rejoin these platforms, it shouldn't take the amount of hustling and, you know, the work that it currently takes to start earning. What can you do to enable that? Like reputation comes up, combining on-platform and off-platform reputation. I think it's a great strategy. Especially for new companies, right? If you wanna, if you wanna be competitive on the supply side, if you wanna like appeal to great supply, you can be, you know, I'm gonna interview you, I'm gonna do something unscalable, and I'm, you're gonna start with a certain reputation and trademark and, you know, badge that's gonna enable you to earn faster. 'Cause that activation, that promise is really, really critical. But then that also creates disincentives on the platform. But I think that question of how much is on-platform reputation work worth? How much is off-platform reputation work? How do you bring the two together? When is one more important than the other? It's so, so important and unsolved today.
