Job search sites: SoloGig.com
The website we will talk about in this post is SoloGig.com. It claims to be:
The nation’s leading freelance resource and home to more projects than any other contract website. With an average of 10,000 projects posted daily, you can find your next project today.
CareerBuilder.com is behind of the project, SoloGig.com is a kind of their vertical subsidiary.
To get access to their job bank, you need to sign up for their service and choose a type of membership.
The service is not free and those who pay the subscription fee expect that they will really find a lot of freelance job listings. People realize that no employment service can guarantee you a job, but you expect to get some offers at least.
Here comes the story of a person who signed up for SoloGig services:
I was looking for some solo gigs and therefore thought SoloGig.com would be a great fit. I signed up and paid for the premium service – yes, paid cold, hard cash. While no one can promise you job listings down the street, or even in your own hometown, I expected to find something in the greater Southern Puget Sound region, and was sorely disappointed. Instead, what I noted was that few, if any, of the listings on SoloGig were actually freelance or contract jobs. Most were retreads of online jobs I’d seen elsewhere, and most of these were pretty old to boot. But as I took a look at these listings, and asked the engine to sort them by their posting date, I noted another anomaly: postings were supposedly taking place mere tenths of a second apart. This was true not just of one or two individual postings, but entire web pages full of listings. How was it possible that job listings I’d seen over a week or two ago elsewhere were supposedly fresh leads posted mere moments before on SoloGig? My contention, and one that was never denied in my correspondence with SoloGig.com, was that someone (or more properly a SQL script of some kind) was freshening the listings to make it look like SoloGig had all kinds of new postings.
I found it odd that they would lag so far behind them in re-posting this data if they were simply sharing it. I decided it was time to Google SoloGig and see what complaints were out there (something I should have done in the beginning). Lo and behold, others had noticed similar issues, and most reported problems with billing and refunds. Well, eventually I had had enough of my time with SoloGig and asked for a refund. I was ready to duke it out with the billing department, but, to my great relief, my refund was posted within 24-hours of receiving my cancellation notice.
The morale of the story is that one should not trust the statements of any freelance job site that charges for its services: no matter how good their site looks and what job samples it lists on the home page trying to make you get your credit card and join them.
- Start with checking Google for the feedback of happy/ unhappy past customers.
- Even if you decide to jump into the boat make sure they guarantee you a full refund in case you are not happy with their service.
As the story proves most listed freelance jobs were available from other free sources: it points to the fact that even such ‘big boys’ like CareerBuilder.com have no access to some exclusive database of freelance jobs not available to other market players. I conclude that smaller players of work from home job market offer even worse job listings and charge a fee for their services. It is not a secret that the top place to get freelance and home jobs is CraigsList.org and classified ads. Plus a few other good places that you can spot checking the listings at free freelance sites.
So if you know where freelance job sites get their listings from why would you pay for this?
[source: www.hutchtech.blogspot.com]
[tag]job sites, freelance, job, employment, contractor work, oursource, home based job, work frm home, telecommute[/tag]
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