Opportunities Are Not Really Opportunities

STL_Shooter78

When is Thumbtack going to stop hiding the messages that are sent from Pros to job posters via the Opportunities?

The messages are NOT put in the job poster's Thumbtack profile inbox.

They are HIDDEN under a section called "Pros who want to work with you".

See pics attached for a visual of how this works.

For this job example, I was logged into my job poster account. I only contacted Advantage Contracting Services, LLC.

Marshall Contracting saw my post, either from an email or the Opportunities tab. They sent me a message through their Thumbtack profile. (Pic 1) The message did not go to my Thumbtack inbox (Pic 2). I had to click on Marshall Contracting's profile to see their message. (Pic 3).

I can figure this out because I am a Thumbtack Pro and know basically how the platform works. But the average job poster is not going to know there are other Pros sending them messages.

Hiding these messages makes zero sense. And it actually hurts Thumbtack for 2 reasons:

1). Thumbtack is losing money by not having these contacts made and therefore Pros being charged for the contact.

2) It hurts the brand from a job poster perspective. The job poster doesn't connect with a Pro that can do their job, so the job poster walks away from Thumbtack thinking "Well, that website didn't really work. I don't think I'll try that again next time."

Matt

Thank you for posting! I have always been curious what the client sees on their end when they receive an opportunity. The staff have always been cagey about telling us exactly how it is shown.

DustiO

I agree we could do better about making the app more understandable on the customer side — and lots of work is being done to make it better currently. I would suggest dropping this feedback to support@thumbtack.com as well, to be sure it's logged. Thank you!

STL_Shooter78

Dusti, this is not a glitch that needs to be logged. This is the way the platform was built, intentionally.

I did reach out to one job poster in TX when I got an email about his lead. He wanted a music video shot. He responded to me. So I'm not saying that the connection is never made. But 98% of the time, there is no evidence that they even saw my message. And a majority of those people are not hiring anyone on Thumbtack. I can see this from my "Sent Messages' folder. So Thumbtack is losing out on money and failing to make a connection between job poster and qualified Pro.

I've seen job posts for very specific things like adoption plea videos. I've actually made a couple of those before. Will that job poster see my message and respond to me? I don't have hope that they will.

So I don't think this is a matter of someone looking into an issue with the platform. This is a top down thing. Someone like Marco needs to take a hard look at the platform and decide if they want to change it fundamentally.