Reviews Of Freelancers

Gagan Murghai from Jalandhar, India
gmurghai@softobiz.com

http://www.softobiz.com/

Also Arjun - arjun.sharma@softobiz.com

And Garv is supposedly their manager.

So here is what happened (there always seems to be problems working with East Indians. One day I’ll learn my lesson.)…

Gagan applied to one of our hiring ads as a graphic web designer back in May of 2008.

There were problems with him signing our NDA. He was freaking out because they are a company & NOT just one person. This is why I say NEVER deal with companies, I have only ever experienced tons of issues in communication, & what I’ve found out, is that they lie saying only one person is dealing with you when really they switch back & forth so you never know who you are talking to, who’s doing the work, etc.

I’ve had that happen with East Indians, Pakistanis & Filipinos.

Anyway, Gagan proceeded to design a header for us & in the end it didn’t look anything like the portfolio I had seen. I mean who in their right mind uses fuchsia to colour a business site that isn’t in the fashion or jewelry industry??? And once again, miscommunication re: him making it seem like he’d do a logo for the header, then he doesn’t.

Here are my notes on what happened…

“First his 2 mockups weren’t good at all. They were just coloured headers with no image, nothing, just the name of the URL.

Then he asked me if I wanted a logo & I said sure, but when he quoted me, he never said that the price was without a logo, nor did he follow up to discuss how much more it would be, that he wasn’t doing it with a logo for the price he quoted me, etc.

Then he redid the plain header & while I thought the image was ok, the image & the rest of the header didn’t flow (the line). He fixed it, but I still wasn’t convinced, so I sent it to Andy.

——————————–

After I spoke to his manager Garv who was very rude for sticking up for Gagan, we parted ways & I received no design. At that point I had no hard feelings against Gagan because I figured he just thought he was good at design when really he wasn’t.

Then all of a sudden in November 2008 Gagan IMs me & tells me that they now have new better graphic web designers.

Stupid me believes him.

He sends me some URLs to view & I liked 1 of them, so I said I wanted to see more just from that one designer. After seeing only 1 or 2 more URLs & confirming that the work would only be done by one person, I told Gagan that I ONLY want that ONE graphic web designer to do the work;  he says fine.

I should have asked to speak to the graphic web designer myself, but I didn’t, I let Gagan manage things.

They started off doing just a header for a blog, something simple.

After 9 days, it turns out my assistant Andy & I wasted our precious time with Gagan & we got NO design out of the deal.

Not only did the header style not even come close to the 2 designs I saw from the the graphic web designer I had requested, I had to walk them through 9 days of changes every step of the way.

Mid way through the work, I had already decided that I didn’t like the design enough to even contemplate giving them future work. At that point I thought I would at least get the one design done for our blog, but nooooo I didn’t even receive that in the end & here’s why.

The design was finally finished on the 8th day after I felt like I did more of the designing then they did since I feel the first mockup design should look close to perfect when I get it & only minor changes should be made. But with these guys, I had to tell them what I didn’t like so they kept changing things trying to get me something I did like. That to me is a terrible designer. They are grasping at straws.

At one point Andy said the way the border was done was amateurish & no real designer designs like that, as it’s like a child using a crayon. I of course didn’t know what he was talking about, but I trust Andy on this.

Anyway, the header is done & passable, so I ask Gagan for the item codes to the pictures from istock & I send them off to Andy to purchase the photos so Gagan can have the designer insert them for us & we could finish up.

Well guess what….

I don’t believe for one minute now that it was this other graphic web designer I liked who was doing the work, or maybe it was someone else, but they didn’t do the web designs I saw that I liked, anyway, without even asking me first, Gagan or whomever was doing the design, decided to use vector images which costs around 10 times more than the price of regular photos.

Andy tells me that it’s common practice to ALWAYS check with the manager or owner first before deciding to use more expensive images & Gagan never even mentioned these were vector images. So that really upset me to realize this after me wasting 8 days working with him.

Also another issue I had, was that I had told Gagan to not IM me unless it was really important. I remember even telling him this last time back in May, but every day when I’d get to my computer there would be an IM from Gagan & one night while I was working late, he kept bothering me while I was in the middle of working.

I find all East Indians are like this, they don’t listen, they just do whatever they want & I had to yell at him last time just to get him to STOP IMing me willy nilly, & to just e-mail me, only IMing me when it was really important.

This all coupled with my experience with Arjun also from Softobiz, I felt like I was used, they lied to me numerous times, & they had been trying to rip me off & here’s why…

Gagan referred me to Arjun saying he was a website coder. We are also hiring a website coder, so I said ok, send me his validated W3C URLs.

He does, & Andy says they are fine, so I proceed to interview Arjun & then give him the preliminary task of upgrading our CMS we use to run all our sites.

Something moved me to ask him how long it would take him to upgrade the CMS. I knew from the last website coder, that it was around 1-2 hours, so when he gives me an estimate of 15-20 hours, I get very upset feeling like he’s trying to rip me off, or he’s just not very smart.

I thought it was just because he doesn’t know this CMS very well even though I specifically told him to familiarize himself with it before he does any work on it & he told me he had.

He even claimed that he’s done this with other CMSs & this is the normal amount of time that it takes, but I couldn’t believe it.

I told him I was going to get Andy to do one upgrade to see how long it takes him & then let him know.

Andy hasn’t completed upgrading it 100%, but so far just to backup the files it only took him 30 minutes.

So all & all both times I wasted my time with this company & their staff, & I will NEVER deal with them again. It was my fault for giving them a second chance, but I live to learn.

Carrie-Ann Brady from Winter Haven, Florida
cabappraisals07@hotmail.com
carrieannbrady@yahoo.com
Yahoo IMing handle: carrieannbrady

Carrie-Ann applied to our Technical & Admin position.

I interviewed her & then asked her to resend me her references, as I was pretty sure she was in our top 3 of potential candidates. She said she would, then she disappeared. I even e-mailed her again to see what was up, & still no response 4 days later.

Carrie-Ann Brady wasted almost 2 hours of my precious time.

khollinsky@hotmail.com

Kevin Hollinsky from Windsor, Ontario responded to my hiring ad for a plumber to do a quick plumbing job installing a water unit. I told him the water unit would be coming on Tuesday & he told me to call him if I was still interested.

On Tuesday at 2:30 am I e-mailed him telling him I had to run out to do grocery shopping & would call him when I was back.

I called him as well & left him a message.

Not only did he not return my e-mail, he didn’t return my call & he left me stranded with no plumber.

Very respectful human being.

Jo Anne Jones
Chesterfield, Michigan
mrsjones295@comcast.net

Jo Anne Jones was hired from oDesk for the position of HR consultant & recruiter.

She claimed she had TONS of experience in this area & that she was currently an online College Professor training people how to use MS products.

“8.5 years experiences working in the online environment including recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training virtual administrative and technical support personnel.”

and

“I am a college professor with a primary responsibility of communicating virtually with adult learners and ensuring clarity, conciseness, and understanding of concepts. In this position, I teach office software applications, professional communications, and management information systems.”

We were excited to bring Jo Ann onboard & she had also been asked if she was skilled in other areas like research, editing, & more.

Unfortunately the excitement was short lived.

Within 7 days I kept noticing that her written English wasn’t the best, so I had to really concentrate on all her e-mails to understand what she was saying. It was clear she never edited her e-mails.

We gave Jo Ann multiple tasks of varying sorts & out of all the tasks given to her only 2-3 were done properly & the rest were never completed or even started.

She was supposed to be a 10 on Excel, but she didn’t edit one of the formulas properly, & I noticed a week or so later than something that was tracking the quantity column was no longer working.

She was supposed to correct something else in the excel file, but she didn’t. She used the excuse that I told her not to do the work on the file. What I had told her, was that she had to do the work on the file before I needed it again, so every night I would e-mail her the file expecting to see the newest file in my inbox when I returned to work.

Unfortunately because she wasn’t doing the work in a prompt manner, it never got done. I had sent her the file 2 nights earlier.

She was supposed to be a 10 in Word, so I gave her a simple table I had created myself & asked her if she could redesign it so it was easier to use. 3-4 tries later & me having to correct her multiple mistakes, I finally got something I could use, but some of the lines were bolded. When I commented on it, I felt she lied & said it wouldn’t print out that way. Of course I printed it out after we terminated her position, & of course it printed out that way. I could have done what she did in less time & with no stress. I feel we paid for nothing.

She was supposed to find a collection agency for us by either researching online, or using the few leads we gave her to screen them. I found out after she was gone that she lied to one of the people she gave us & told them we had hundreds or thousands of debtors to give them. I had never told her how many files we had to give to the collection agency. She never even asked.

She was to edit some pre-screening documents, but in the end I did most of the editing which told me right there she wasn’t even close to being a good editor. The only thing I was pleased with on that task, was that she made one file look nicer & she joined 2 files together.

There were other tasks she was supposed to do like add URLs to an existing file that already had URLs. She was supposed to review the URLs first to make sure they were okay to add to the list. She didn’t do that task. The closest she came was creating a brand new file with 4-5 URLs. I’m not even sure she got them from our list. She could have searched for them because once again she didn’t understand the task given to her.

When I had my assistant review her small list, he said 2-3 out of the 3-4 URLs were no good. They weren’t getting any traffic, & the other site was just selling something, not providing a service. That is part of doing great research.

She being the so called HR person should have been on top of everything as far as company policies go, but she didn’t do anything.

She was supposed to list all her tasks on our online management system, provide dates as to when they would be completed, then check off whether she started on them, etc. She listed only 2 tasks & one was a task that should have been broken down into multiple tasks, so I asked her to separate all the positions she was supposed to be recruiting for. She never did. She also didn’t list the other tasks she never did or even the ones she did do.

She was supposed to send us Daily Updates at the end of her shift, I never received even one.

There were several more tasks she was told to do & she didn’t do any of them. One task she told me she didn’t feel comfortable doing & that was fine by me, but by the time she told me this, I had had it up to here with her already, so I terminated her very quickly when it was clear nothing was getting done.

She wasn’t responding back in a timely manner to my e-mails & her level of skill was so poor, almost every task with the exception of 1 or 2 had to be checked & rechecked by me or my assistant, or redone.

I later found out she was charging me for phone calls where work was never done. I would give her a rundown on what kind of task I wanted done, she would charge me to tell her what I needed done, yet the task was never done.

In the end I didn’t want to argue about it, so I just paid her & said good riddance, but then 2 weeks after I had given her my feedback on oDesk which was clearly not positive, she ran to oDesk & told them our job opening was violating their terms & conditions because while I don’t feel our site is adult in nature, our clients are adult in nature.

She never dealt with our clients, & she had no problems working for our company. She was aware that we are sort of an adult company even before she responded to our hiring ad, but that didn’t stop her from running to tattle on us to oDesk in order to get the job posting removed.

I was concerned that her negative feedback wouldn’t show up, but oDesk has rest assured me this doesn’t affect any feedback left about her.

I feel her actions are devious, & unethical.

She is also an Herbal Life distributor just in case you need to know that information. I now no longer trust Herbal Life, because she sold me a product that she said lasted her daughter 3 months. I got the product & there is no way ever that this would last 3 months, even one month is questionable. Even another Herbal Life distributor was shocked that Jo Anne Jones said that.