Congratulations on joining over 5 million clients worldwide who use Upwork to connect with skilled professionals! As the world’s work marketplace, we want to be your home for innovative collaboration and success.
Getting started on Upwork is simple and the average time to fill a job post on Upwork is only two to three days. The easiest way to complete your project is to break the process into three phases:
1. Before you hire
- Fill out your company name, tagline, description, and website URL (no email addresses, phone numbers, or chat IDs, please), then upload your company logo.
- Add and verify your billing method, plus your phone number and email address if prompted. (To prevent scams, you can't hire without this)hire without this.)
- Post a job and choose between an hourly or fixed-price contract, or browse freelancers’ pre-designed projects in our Project Catalog.
- If you are posting a job, clearly describe your project, skills needed, and expectations –– that way you’ll attract the best matches.
2. Hiring
From a Job Post
- Evaluate your proposals and shortlist those you like.
- You can also search for qualified freelancers and invite them to submit proposals.
- Message the freelancers that you think might be the best match for your project.
- If you have several applicants, consider performing a round of email interviews to help you narrow down your proposals even further.
- After your email interview, you can perform a phone, chat, or video interview — we offer Zoom in Upwork Messages to make this easy for you!
From Project Catalog
- Browse Project Catalog to find the project that matches your needs.
- If you have questions before buying, you can message the freelancer.
- Once you find a project, you’ll select the package, pricing, and add-ons you’d prefer.
- Then you’ll submit your requirements. Your project cannot start until you describe what work is needed.
- Learn more about hiring through Project Catalog here.
Pro Tip:
Consider hiring for a test drive (a small, paid trial contract) to assess the freelancer or agency and get more familiar with the process. Note: You cannot request free work, it’s against our Terms of Service.
3. Doing the work
- Have a kick-off meeting to establish ground rules on communication, expectations, availability, submitting deliverables, reviewing progress, and anything else you need to discuss. Introduce your new freelancer or agency to members of your online work team they will work with, and make sure they have contact information for everyone they'll work with.
- Communicate with your freelancer or agency as needed.
- Review work in progress regularly by checking the Work Diary (for hourly contracts), and project deliverables.
- Manage your project using Reports.
- Ensure that billing and payments occur on time, according to your contract.
- We automatically invoice you for work on hourly contracts based on your agreement with the freelancer.
- For fixed-price contracts, payments are made once each milestone that you and your freelancer set is completed, or for the entire contract at once if you don’t use milestones.
- You’ll fund each milestone in escrow before the work for that milestone begins, and we’ll release payment to the freelancer once the work for that milestone is completed.
- You’ll also pay the one-time Contract Initiation Fee when you fund the first milestone, or the total contract if there are no milestones.
