How is TranscribeMe Different From Other Freelance Job Sites?

On a prior blog post, we talked about how TranscribeMe represents a work platform for the future and in describing our vision, we often get asked how we differ from websites such as oDesk.

Although at first glance, our mission and layout appears to be the same, we actually differ in many ways.

Firstly, oDesk workers sign up and list their work experience, as well as their rates for different projects. Individual companies can seek them out or they can apply for jobs. By comparison, TranscribeMe‘s crowd is recruited based on their existing skills or knowledge, but they also have the ability to train for specific projects and to demonstrate their competencies through the proficiency test. TranscribeMe pays their workers based on the amount of work they do and rewards their workers with bonuses and other incentives. Crowd members don’t have to advertise or sell themselves to individual companies, which gives them the job stability and steady income of a full-time employee while still maintaining the flexibility of an independent contractor.

In terms of customer benefits, in order to increase the work load exponentially or to do larger scale work, a company would need to hire various independent contractors within a job site such as oDesk, negotiate a price with each of them, monitor their individual work, and replace them should something go wrong. By hiring TranscribeMe’s crowd, a company can rest assured that TranscribeMe’s crowd members are trained to handle that particular type of work, they only need to negotiate a rate with TranscribeMe and not with the individual crowd, and the work is done quickly due to the higher volume of workers.

Because companies only negotiate with TranscribeMe, payments are easier and done to one company versus hundreds of freelancers who charge different rates and deadlines can be more easily managed because TranscribeMe’s work is guaranteed through the contract’s terms.

If there are issues with quality or the type of work, they will go directly to TranscribeMe versus to the workers, this benefits both customers and the crowd. It benefits customers because workers can be replaced with other workers quickly and easily and it benefits the crowd, because there are always lots of projects available for them to work on and so if they are not right for one particular project then they can submit work for other projects and/ or train for a longer term project or specialized team.