Congratulations on being invited to an interview! An invitation to interview is a message sent directly from a client asking you to discuss their job — it means something about your profile caught their attention.
PRO TIP:
Our most successful freelancers have found it's best to accept or decline invitations as soon as possible. Learn more about our best practices for interviews here.
Respond to an invitation
- Choose the Find Work tab, and select Proposals
- In the Invitations to Interview section, select the job’s title
- From there, you can either:
- Accept: You can accept the terms as offered or propose new terms. You can also include a cover letter, additional attachments to prove your expertise, and a message for the client
- Decline: Select a reason. You can send a message to the client letting them know why you're passing on the invitation. Do not give the client your contact information when you decline (this is against our Terms of Service)
- Ignore: This moves the invitation into your archived area. While you can accept or decline it later, ignoring an invitation does NOT count as a response
Active proposals
After you accept an invitation and send a proposal, the client may or may not choose to respond. If a client responds, the invitation or proposal becomes an active proposal and a message room is created for you and the client to further discuss the project. If you work in an agency, you'll be placed in a message room with the client and your agency business manager.
Send a message
- Go to Find Work › Proposals
- In the Active Proposals section, choose the job’s title
- Write your message to the client and choose Send
To help our users connect as safely as possible, we require that you do not request or share any contact information and keep all direct communications on Upwork until you start a contract. This means you cannot share your contact information in your profiles, proposals, job postings, invites, or other pre-hire contacts.
All introductions, interviews, and project scoping communications need to use Upwork's collaboration tools.
We provide secure tools for clients and freelancers to communicate directly from the Upwork platform. Once a freelancer accepts a client’s offer, you can choose to share your contact information and use other tools to manage your project, too.
Change proposal rate or bid
You may decide to update your proposal before creating a final contract. You can’t change your cover letter, but you can update your terms.
Update your proposal terms
- Go to Find Work › Proposals
- In the Active Proposals section, select the job’s title
- Use the Propose Different Terms field to change your bid or rate. Remember, the client only sees rates including the Upwork service fee
Note:
To keep things fair, neither clients nor talent can offer the other extra rewards for winning a contract. For example, a client should never request or offer you anything besides the contracted funds to work with them. And you shouldn't request or offer them anything, beyond the contracted services, to win their contract. Clients can, however, pay a bonus on the contract for excellent work, if they'd like.
Frequently Asked Questions
The agency has full control over who works on their contracts. The best practice is to be transparent with your client on who is doing the work, but it’s not usually necessary for every member working for the client to have their own contract.
However, agency members, like all Upwork users, must not share accounts, so on an hourly contract, only the freelancer named on the contract can log time with the Upwork desktop app. Time from other agency members would have to be added to the Work Diary manually or be paid via bonuses. There is no time tracking for fixed-price contracts.
