10 Posts getaggt mit "announcement"

Usually, we only accept folks who are already registered as a freelancer (or running their own company) to our community. For the foreseeable future, though, due to the ongoing war in Ukraine and the situation of refugees arriving in Germany, we will gladly welcome any Ukrainian citizen working in IT/tech to Uplink!

We are a big, friendly community of over 2.300 Germany-based IT freelancers, and we'd like to offer our support to all Ukrainians looking to register as a freelancer, found a company, or find a permanent IT job in Germany!

To start the new year with a boost, we are launching our first "Double the Coins" campaign - until the end of February, our members can earn twice as much (up to 1.000€) as usual for referring new clients to Uplink!

Usually, when you refer a client, you get a reward of 250€ for the first job post, and an additional 250€ if an Uplink member applies and gets the job. For the months of January and February, 2022, we double each amount, meaning you can earn up to 1.000€ for each referral!

Check out our Knowledge Base article for more info, e.g. how to do the referral and how the payout works.

We started inviting selected recruiters to post their jobs on our platform a bit more than a year ago and, despite our concerns about the response of the community, the feedback was mostly positive! Of course, the descriptions of most recruiter jobs could be improved, and the hourly rate is often close to the minimum of 75€, but over the months, we saw more and more applications and, eventually, successful engagements by our members.

Today, we're launching referral links, which enable our members to easily refer clients and freelancers to Uplink. We're also increasing the reward for referring clients, and introducing a reward for referring freelancers.

One of the features, that many members of our community have asked for over the years, was a way to "bookmark" certain posts from our Slack workspace to make it possible to find them again later.

We are happy to announce that this functionality has finally arrived in the form of our Community Wiki!

With our "Remote Community Meetup" concept we are already entering the 8th round. We came up with the idea, as it was no longer possible for us to meet face-to-face due to the Corona situation. We are very happy that freelancers can network with each other remotely and that we can exchange ideas with you in times of social distancing!

Organizing a webinar on a topic relevant to IT freelancers was something we have had in our backlog for a long time, and now we finally got around to it! 🎉

Our first webinar took place on April 30 and featured Claus Lahner, a lawyer experienced in the fields of IT law and contract law. We collected topic suggestions from the community beforehand and Claus could cover almost all of them during the webinar. We mainly discussed the various challenges in setting up a waterproof freelancer contract and questions regarding bogus self-employment ("Scheinselbständigkeit"). In the last part, the attendees had the chance to ask Claus follow-up questions.

Update June 2020 - #community-jobs is now also open for Uplink members, who started their own startup and are looking for co-founders or a CTO in exchange for shares!

Every now and then, a freelancer from our community approaches us to ask how and where they can share their own job posts. Sometimes it's for a personal project they are pursuing, but for which they don't have the necessary time or skills, but most of the time they are working on a client project and the workload is just too much, so they'd like to find someone to share it with.

Some of the most common questions we have seen over the years in our Slack workspace had to do with recruiter contracts and how hard it is for a freelancer to know whether they are fair or not.

A typical recruiter contract has 12-15 pages (often separated into a framework contract and a project agreement) and is not easy to understand by someone who doesn't see these kinds of documents every day.

A few weeks ago we started experimenting with a mentoring format at Uplink which is very popular in the United States: Mastermind groups.

From Wikipedia:

A mastermind group is a peer-to-peer mentoring concept used to help members solve their problems with input and advice from the other group members.

Sounds simple? Technically yes. The tricky part is to find a group of like-minded individuals who can relate to each others' situations in order to give advice or to ask the right questions. Thankfully, at Uplink we have a large pool of like-minded individuals who can relate to being a freelancer in the IT world. For the kind of mastermind we introduced at Uplink, a group between 4 and 8 people with a similar mission is ideal.