How To Get Your First Upwork Review

 How to get your First
Upwork Review

A high job success score and good reviews are key to being successful on Upwork. Your Upwork clients will be able to leave you feedback which will affect an overall success score. This feedback will show up on your public profile for other potential clients to read, so it’s very important to maintain good feedback and a high score. Upwork also allows clients to prioritize their search for freelancers with success scores over 80 and 90%, so keeping your score over 80 is essential.  

Craft a great portfolio.

Make sure you have a portfolio with photos or screenshots and details about past work. If you don’t have any history freelancing, that’s ok. Use examples from school or past jobs and anything else that could be relevant. This will show them that even though you are new to Upwork, you do have relevant experience.

Tell them you’re new to Upwork.

Reviews are one of the top ways that clients choose who to work with. If you don’t have any reviews they are likely to decline your proposal, especially if you don’t explain why. Just telling clients that you’re new to Upwork, but not the industry can go a long way in being considered. You can also take things a step further by showing them examples of past work directly in your proposal, in addition to testimonials or recommendation letters from past jobs or internships.

Don’t accept any less than five stars.

Once you finally get your first job, you will want to make sure you get excellent feedback when the job is complete. When you’re ready to submit your work, tell your client you want to make any changes they need until they are 100% happy with the results. This will help ensure that the client will not close the contract until they are completely satisfied with the work.

Ask for feedback.

Sometimes a client will close a contract and forget to leave you a review. A gentle reminder can go a long way in making sure they leave you great feedback. Here’s an example of what you can say.  

“If there’s no further work to be done, I’d appreciate it if you could leave me a review! It would help me secure further work. I want to guarantee the satisfaction of my clients and hold myself to a high standard, so if you don’t feel the work I submitted meets a 5-star rating, please let me know and I’ll do everything I can to fix that.”

Give a refund.

This should be a last resort, but sometimes you will just end up with a client who was a bad fit, and occasionally bad reviews can happen. If you have a bad review that causes your job success score to drop below 80%, I would recommend giving the client a refund. This won’t change your success score but it allows you to remove their remarks from your profile.

Make sure the client has good reviews.

There are good and bad clients in Upwork. Luckily, Upwork allows freelancers to review clients and bad client reviews can be a good sign that someone is difficult to work with. Make sure you work with high-quality clients to avoid those who are impossible to please, and you will be more likely to have a happy client who will leave a nice review for you.

Look for small, short term jobs.

You will not be able to collect reviews until your work is complete, so the sooner the job is finished, the sooner you can get a review. If you prefer to work on long-term projects, ask your clients to start with a 1 week or 1 month trial. That way you can close the contract, collect your review, and then re-start a longer contract with the same client.

Work for someone you know.

See if a friend, a neighbor or employer has any work you can help them with, and get them to hire you through the Upwork platform by creating a private job and inviting you to it. Only do this authentically and treat it just like any other job.

Offer a discount.

I don’t generally recommend lowering your prices, but if you’re struggling to get reviews you may want to make an exception. Tell them that since you are new to Upwork, you are offering your services at a discounted rate for a limited amount of time.

Close the contract.

Make sure you close the contract. Open or paused contracts cannot receive reviews.