UPDATE: vWorker has been acquired by Freelancer.com. See our full review of Freelancer.com here.
vWorker.com is a company designed to bring employers and virtual workers together so that everyone can find the work and workers they need. Based in Tampa, Florida, vWorker has been in business since 2003.
The company was formerly known as RentACoder.com, however they have expanded their services beyond freelance software coding and web development projects.
Under the new vWorker name, they now offer a way for businesses to contract freelancers for a huge variety of jobs, including virtual assistance, copywriting, data entry, search engine optimization, transcription, and much more.
The company boasts that they have over 350,000 workers on the site ready to bid on whatever job you post. This makes vWorker a notably smaller community than Elance with 550,000 workers or oDesk with 1.4 million workers.
vWorker aims to separate themselves from the competition with a number of innovations. First, they offer a free money-back guarantee on every project. Hiring a virtual worker can be intimidating so that’s a nice protection to have. Second, they offer crowsourcing and “trialsourcing” services – something the other freelance sites haven’t touched yet. This means if you have a short project, several workers attack the job for you and you simply pick the winner.
For hourly jobs (like most virtual assistant gigs), vWorker utilizes an AccuBilling system where people are able to log the time that they worked on a particular project, similar to punching a time clock. The system also includes screen captures of your VA’s computer so you can verify they’re really working when they say they are.
If you’re struggling with where to post your virtual assistant job, vWorker has put together a very detailed comparison chart highlighting the differences between their company and their competitors.
vWorker.com claims their virtual workers are more affordable, accountable and capable than traditional workers. It’s free to sign-up and post a job, so you might as well check it out and see for yourself.
Each contractor will have their own feedback history as well, so I would pay close attention to that.
Have you worked with anyone from vWorker? If so, we’d love to hear about your experience below.
@Nick
Nick,
I’m very sorry to hear you were not happy with your experience.
So you understand: quality designers take a risk when they participate in a contest: they may do all the work and still not get paid. So the prize has to be high enough to incentivize them to participate. We recommend $150 of prize for every 1 hour of work.
Yes, we do let you price it whatever you want in the end. But if you choose to go substantially under, we show you a warning that you are not going to get high quality submissions nor alot of them. By making your banner $15 prize, you were basically saying “please spend 6 minutes on this”. That is not alot of time for the creation of two banners. It would not have been surprising if you hadn’t gotten any bidders, to be honest.
If you ever would like to try again, we’d be happy to help you with pricing it so you get the response you’re expecting.
Also, I’m also sorry to hear you found the interface confusing. If you try again and need help, we are available 7 days a week to assist. And if you have any suggestions we’d love to hear them so we can make things better for you. But to answer your question: You can find all you submissions in the summary section. There are no duplicates unless someone submits a duplicate. But often what appears to be a duplicate is actually a refinement….and perhaps that is what you were seeing.
If you have any other questions, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
Ian Ippolito
vWorker.com
I recently tested out vWorker’s crowdsourcing platform for a new header banner for this site. Given that the previous two banners were designed on Fiverr, I put my price at $15 and thought that was a reasonable rate.
I only got submissions from 2 workers, and they were both pretty terrible. I asked for something clean and professional, and didn’t get it. One of the submissions even had spelling mistakes, which is super-embarrassing given how the correct spelling was provided in the project spec.
On top of that, I found the vWorker interface really confusing to navigate. It was hard to tell where my project submissions were and why there were multiple duplicate entries from each candidate. In the future I think I’ll stick with Fiverr for these small projects, and Elance and oDesk for bigger contracts.
Thanks for the review.
Just to let you know: our on-the-job trial feature actually works on all sized projects (not just small ones). On small projects, the entire job is done as a trial and on larger projects, a key portion is done as a trial. You can think of the latter like an audition. This allows the employer to quickly figure out which worker is the best. This is much easier and accurate than the hit-or-miss interview process, which doesn’t work well becuase it’s too difficult to predit in advance who will do well, and who won’t.
Links to more info is here.
Ian Ippolito
vWorker.com