Explaining the Leapforce Qualification Exam

Updated Information on the Leapforce Qualification Exam

I’ve been working for Leapforce for 3 years now, but recently I was unable to work for a couple of months.  Leapforce really is serious about the requirement that agents work at least 200 tasks per month or they may remove your authorization to work.  

That is what happened to me; however, they did give me the opportunity to re-qualify and get back to work.  This is great for my blog readers because now I can give an update on the way the current qualification exam is conducted.

The exam is given in 3 separate parts; you must pass each part in order before you are allowed to go on to the next part.  You will receive an email outlining basic information about each part, however I can tell you some things that the email doesn’t.

Note: As needs change, Leapforce changes the methods of evaluation and when that happens the Qualification Exam will also change.  So the information in this post is only true of the exam that exists at the time of this writing.  It will change some day in the future. The exam today is VERY different from what it was like when I originally took it three years ago. 

The main thing that has changed in the last year is that you must begin rating pages from a mobile device user's perspective by rating pages on your own smartphone.  If you don't have a smartphone and don't want to get one, you can't work for Leapforce.

Part 1 Theoretical

The email you receive says that the Theoretical part consists of (one email says 32 but its really) 33 questions.  This is misleading, each question has 4 parts and you must answer each part so it is in effect 132 questions. 

They aren’t trick questions, but some can be tricky, so take your time and read them carefully.  You are allowed to refer to the guidelines while taking the exam and I recommend that you do.  

You should plan on taking at least an hour to complete this portion of the exam. Once you have submitted the last page of questions the evaluation platform will display the following message:

No tasks are currently available. Please try again later.

In my case, within about 10 minutes of submitting the last page of questions I received email notice that I passed Part 1 of the exam.  The next batch of tasks will take a few hours to show up on your evaluation platform, so take a break while you are waiting.

Part 2 Page Quality

In this section you will evaluate a webpage, fill out the online form that is only mentioned in the guidelines, and give your rating of the page. 

As with Part 1, you are allowed to refer to the Guidelines while doing the evaluation.  It is advisable that you use this resource.  Take your time and think about what you are doing.  How well does this page achieve its purpose?

Note: the email about Part 2 that you receive says: Comments within the tasks are not required for the exam and will not be read. However, if you don’t put anything in the comments box when you submit the task you may get an error asking you to comment. So if this happens just put something in the comments box and hit Submit again.

You do not have to complete this part of the exam all in one sitting.  You can take a break by hitting the "Submit and Stop Rating" button when you are ready to submit your rating.  The rest of the tasks will be there when you sign in again.

When I took the exam there were fewer than 10 pages that I was required to evaluate.  After submitting my last rating, I received an email within about 10 minutes stating that I had passed Part 2.

Part 3 Send to Device  

This is a relatively new way of evaluating pages for Leapforce.  When Google decided that webpages should be mobile friendly if they want to be ranked highly on search engine results, Leapforce began evaluating webpages based on how mobile users see them.  The most recent change has been that agents are now evaluating pages directly on their smartphones.  So now in order to be a Leapforce agent you must have an internet enabled smartphone.

To complete this part of the exam you must follow the instructions carefully, there will be a link to a video in your email notice that you passed part 2.  Watch it, do what it says and you should have no technical problems with the tasks.

Note: Here’s a trick if the User Location map doesn’t display properly on the task page (this is a glitch that has always been there and hasn’t been fixed).  If you have a blank map at the top of the task page, hit the back arrow button at the top next to the page address:

This will pop you out of the task, but you will still be on the Evaluation Platform.  There it will say: "Incomplete Tasks" and next to that will be a Continue button.  Click on Continue and your task will come back along with a usable user location map.

Again, you don’t have to complete all of Part 3 in one sitting.  You can use the "Submit and Stop Rating" button to take a break and complete the other tasks later.

You can also refer to the Guidelines while completing Part 3, and you would be wise to do so.

When you have submitted the last task on your exam the only notice you will have is the message:

No tasks are currently available. Please try again later.

This time you will have to wait longer to learn whether you have passed the exam depending on when you finish the last task. For some reason Leapforce waits until after the due date and time before they will let you know whether you have passed.  I got my notice on the morning after the due date.  You won’t be able to start work immediately, once they have all your paperwork and permissions in order you will receive another email letting you know when you can start working.

Much of what is in my older post Leapforce Qualification Exam Advice is still valid, so take a look at it too. You may also like my original post on Leapforce and my 2nd Year Update. Also my latest post on the mental qualities that Leapforce is looking for may help you when taking the exam.

Good luck on your exam!

53 million Americans are working as freelancers!

Join the club, a new report from the Freelancer’sUnion states that approximately 53 million Americans are working as freelancers.  That’s 1/3 of the American workforce and 10 million more than were doing freelance work when the last study was done 10 years ago.  For the purposes of the study a freelancer could be either full-time or part-time and with or without another job or other source of income.

Most freelancers reported that they started freelancing to make additional income.  For some they began freelancing because they lost their jobs in the recent recession and couldn’t find another job.  Some people freelance for more freedom and flexibility.  Millennials (those under 35 years old) were more likely to be freelancing than older individuals.

The internet has made it easier for people to find freelance work.  There are online marketplaces offering jobs ranging from large scale, like Elance and oDesk, to tiny task-based jobs like fiverr, mturk and Clickworker.  Although these jobs are low paying at first many freelancers found clients who contracted their services repeatedly and thus found consistent work and the ability to demand more for their services.  Others just found that small contract jobs were easier to find than a traditional job which  required sending out dozens of resumes and going through the interview process.

Whatever the reason, the statistics show that the way we work is changing. Change brings with it new opportunities and new challenges.  Those who want to be successful must learn how to navigate this new landscape.

How to improve your rating performance with Leapforce tools

Leapforce has several new tools to help agents improve their rating performance.  Every month the agent’s work is evaluated and a score ranging from unacceptable to perfect is assigned.  If the agent has too many unacceptable ratings they may be restricted from performing those tasks they are doing poorly on or their contract may be terminated.  It is in the company’s benefit to retain trained workers so they provide detailed feedback and tools to help raters improve their performance.  It is always in the raters best interest to go over the monthly feedback of their performance and make note of the kinds of tasks or categories they are getting wrong, and alter their future ratings accordingly.

On the agent’s Rater Home Page are visual tools that provide a quick way to monitor performance.  A rater can easily see which categories he might be misunderstanding.  With that knowledge the agent can review the guidelines for just the problem categories.  Another chart also shows whether the rater has a tendency to either over-rate or under-rate the webpage’s quality, so the rater can make adjustments accordingly.

Leapforce hosts a weekly webchat, giving agents the opportunity to ask questions about specific issues.  I haven’t been able to attend one of these sessions as they are held on weekday mornings when I am at my full-time job, but they do make transcripts available and allow agents to ask questions or suggest topics in advance of the chat session.

These relatively new tools that augment the quizzes and examples available on the rater’s home page and the detailed feedback provided as part of the monthly evaluation.  Using these tools, agents should have no problem keeping their performance in acceptable ranges.

How to be a successful Leapforce Agent

That’s great, you’ve been given a 6 month contract to begin working as a Leapforce Agent, now what happens?   After all your online “paperwork” is completed you can start working and earning money.

Much of the work you will do will be just like the applied part of the qualification exam.  Occasionally when there isn’t much work available, you will see some odd tasks in your Evaluation platform.  These tasks will have their own instructions to follow.  If the task is not very complicated the instructions will appear above the task itself.  If it is a complex task there will be a link to a pdf document that you can read to learn how to complete the task.  I recommend leaving the pdf open on your computer while you do the task, that way you can quickly refer to it when needed.

How to get good review scores

Leapforce reviews its agents’ performance monthly.  Most novice agents worry about getting good reviews.  There is a good chance that your first reviews won’t be very good.  Leapforce is aware of this and they will give you time to improve, but they do expect to see improvement in the first few months.  Leapforce will provide detailed explanations of their reviews of your evaluations.  When you get your review read the explanations carefully and learn from them.  There are also simulations on your rater home page that you can do to improve your skills.

You may occasionally disagree with the reviewer on how they interpreted the intent of the query, but you can’t argue about it so just learn from it and move on.  To be successful you have to learn how to think the way Leapforce thinks.  In order to get consistent ratings from all their workers they need us to all be thinking the same way, they aren’t looking for individuality.

How to monitor your speed

Another issue of concern to new workers is how to be sure that you are working fast enough.  Leapforce will have you change the time on your invoice if you work slower than their average time estimate.  But they don’t measure the time spent on each task individually, rather it is an average of all the tasks you’ve done in a month divided by the estimated time that should have been spent on all of those tasks.  So if you go too slow on some tasks it will even out as long as you work fast on others. 

It is difficult to keep track of your time while also trying to research and rate the webpages in your task. So it is best to not try to keep track of your time, but just be sure you are working efficiently. 

Some tips for working efficiently

•   Have everything you need nearby before you login to start work
•  Minimize distractions, turn off the phone, make sure everyone else in the house knows you are not to be disturbed when you are working
• If you find a fascinating website or video that you must spend more time on – bookmark it and come back later when you are not working
•  If something happens and you have to stop working for more than a few minutes, log out and log back in later
• If a particular type of task takes you consistently longer to do than their estimate, don’t do that type of task unless there is no other choice, or at least don’t do those very often

What to do if there isn’t enough work for you on Leapforce

Leapforce does have slow periods when there isn’t much work available.  We agents have no control over that, but there are things you can do to maximize the amount of work you are offered.

• Keep your review scores above average
•  Always try to qualify for any new project they announce.  Leapforce will often give agents the opportunity to qualify for new projects.  Qualifying means learning new instructions and guidelines and doing some tasks that are evaluated to see if you can follow the guidelines.  Although this can result in time spent reading the guidelines without pay, if you qualify you will have more work available to you than if you didn’t try to qualify.  The more tasks you are qualified to do, the more work will be offered to you.
•  Have a back-up plan like Mechanical Turk, Clickworker or freelancing to supplement your income when Leapforce work is not available.

Keeping in mind that I can’t discuss the specifics of how to complete particular tasks, is there anything that you would like me to discuss on the blog?

Thanks for reading Leaving Low Wages!

Passive Income!

What are Niche Sites?

There are people making money online through (relatively) passive income websites. These sites are often called Niche Sites because they focus on a narrow market and have a focused customer base.  They do it by setting up a website that is primarily focused on selling a product or specific product type; the site earns money when people buy the product.  Affiliate marketing is another way to sell a product by linking to a commercial site where the customer buys the product.  An affiliate marketer will have advertising and product information on the page with links to the product page of the seller.  When the user clicks on the link on the affiliate site and buys the product on the seller’s site, the affiliate earns a commission. Until the affiliate site begins showing up on the first or second page of search engine results it probably won’t make much money, so most of the work early on is getting traffic to the site.  Once the site is getting a good share of traffic it will earn income without a lot of additional work.

What is required to start an affiliate marketing or commercial site?

Website and Domain name

Although you could build an affiliate or commercial site from a free blog there are restrictions on how you can organize and monetize that blog site which will limit your ability to compete with other commercial sites.  A free blog format limits how you can organize the site; the blog format may not be appropriate or as user friendly as you want if you are selling products.

When choosing a domain name you want to include the main keywords that will direct people in the market you are targeting to your site.  Having the keywords in the domain name will also help your site show up on the first page of search engine results.  It is important to have your site on the first page of search results because as you probably know users rarely search past the first page and almost never go past the second page.

Keyword Research

The choice of keywords is important in getting users to your site.  You ideally want keywords that are searched fairly often, but you also don’t want keywords that have a lot of high-ranking competing sites.  A beginner shouldn’t start out trying to compete for keywords like “quick weight loss” or “cheap Viagra” there is just too much competition.  So you need to research your keywords to find just the right balance between a highly searched topic and low competition from other sites.

Content

Once you have chosen your topic and keywords you have to be able to write (or have someone else write) a substantial amount of content for your site.  This content should include useful information, product reviews, comparisons, product options, how to choose the best product, etc.  If your site is too thin on content it will eventually be downgraded by Google and other search engines and will show up lower on search engine results.

Creating Backlinks

Backlinks are links to your site from other related websites.  Backlinks are needed to provide users with another way to find your site, and backlinks are used by Google to determine the quality of your site.  Google uses both the number and of the backlinks to rate the quality of your site.  The higher the quality of your site, the higher Google will place it in the list of search results.

On-site SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Not as important, but also not to be ignored, is the process of optimizing your titles, headings, tags and content for the keywords you want to focus on to bring people to your site.

On-Site Ads and Affiliate Links

Google Adsense provides ads that are geared to the searcher and the site.  It is easy to sign up and get started https://www.google.com/adsense/signup.

Amazon has an affiliate program that allows you to link to any product sold on Amazon.com, and they sell almost anything.  You can get more information or sign up for the Amazon affiliates program here:  https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

Commission Junction also lists other commercial sites that have affiliate programs or that want to place banner ads on appropriate websites.  For more information go to: http://www.cj.com/

Niche Site Duel

I haven’t started a niche site yet, I’m still studying and learning the process, but one blogger that I follow, Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome.com, has started what he calls the Niche Site Duel.  He has challenged his readers to follow along with him as he starts a niche site and goes through the process step-by-step.  I’ve committed to joining in the Duel.  I don’t know what niche I’m going to target yet, I’m still in the keyword research process.  As I get deeper into the process I’ll be posting on each step in more detail.

Leapforce Qualification Exam Advice

Recently several people have asked me about the Leapforce qualification exam so I thought I’d write a short post to address this kind of question.  I can tell from what people are asking that the exam is very different now from the one I took 2 years ago, so my experience taking the exam probably won’t help any of you taking it now.  When I took the exam I was tested on only one type of evaluation task, and I don’t think they even use that task anymore, at least I haven’t seen it in over a year.  So the best I can do is give you general advice.

What Leapforce is testing is how well you can follow instructions, and how well you can understand and apply the guidelines when evaluating a landing page or website.  Therefore, the best advice I can give is to study the guidelines, go over the examples they provide until you understand what they want.  Do not try to apply your own criteria when making an evaluation—Leapforce wants everyone evaluating the same way so everyone must use the guidelines and not their own opinions.

It may seem like a lot of studying that you aren’t being paid for, but if you enjoy doing this type of work it will pay off in the end.  Leapforce pays the best of the work-at-home opportunities I’ve researched.  It’s good to have a back-up source of income when Leapforce doesn’t have enough work to keep you busy, but I still rely on my Leapforce income a lot.

To everyone taking the qualification exam:  Study hard and good luck!

Updated Information Available!  Read the most current information here: Explaining the Leapforce Qualification Exam

See my initial post on Leapforce and my 2nd year Leapforce Update