The Jobs Board and Bidding
This article describes one of the most important parts of Spires: how to find students.
You initiate contact with students through the jobs board.
Initiating this contact is called "Bidding" as you send them a message along with a price per hour for your time.
Our video below is a little out of date but offers a summary of the article. Alternatively, you can read the article and get an in-depth description below.
The Spires Jobs Board Explained
This is where you come to find new students. The students post requests that become "jobs" and these are what the tutors bid on.
Upon logging into Spires you will see the following screen which is the jobs board:
The jobs board consists of:
1. Your scorecard summary
The Tutor scorecard is our proprietary algorithm used to measure how well a tutor is retaining clients and how well they are winning bids. Both of these are key to success on the Spires platform.
We have placed the key metrics from the scorecard on the jobs board, along with the recent bids and hires. The full details about the scorecard can be found in the scorecard tab, along with links to the article explaining each metric.
Tutors can only place a maximum of 15 bids in 7 days and your bids in the last 7 days are tracked there. More details are given in the How Bidding Works section.
2. Filters and settings
By default, you will see the jobs on Spires that match your tutoring subjects.
You can use the filters on the left-hand side to change the subjects and levels displayed, or can 'Show all jobs' to see the entire jobs board.
It is best practice to make sure that you have selected the appropriate subjects on your profile. Tutors are only emailed about new jobs if they have selected the relevant subject and level combination on their profile.
3. The listings of jobs
You can click 'More Info' on any job to get the full job information added by the client or student. This can range from very little (they just clicked the required buttons on our website) up to a lot (they entered detailed information and may have uploaded a file).
This will also open up the bidding window.
Current bids - See more here
Suggested Bid - This is the typical range other tutors have won bids on similar jobs. You can always bid outside of this range but it is unlikely you will be successful if you bid significantly above the higher value. If you want to maximise your chance of winning, you can bid below the lower value but make sure you are willing to commit to the job at the price you bid.
Currencies - Because Spires is global, prices are displayed to clients in their native currencies. At present Spires processes transactions in GBP, USD, EUR, CAD and AUD. Tutors are always paid in GBP, so the earnings are always shown in GBP (Spires is UK-based). More on currencies here.
Client Price - This is the price the client will see and pay in their currency.
You Earn - This is what you will be paid after the platform fee is taken.
Platform fee - 35% is the default for students you get through Spires. More on platform fees here.
Your message - the first message which is sent to the student as part of your bid. Quality matters here, and your response should be positive and tailored to their needs. You can use bidding templates, which are set up in your settings tab.
Current bids
Clicking on the current bids button will allow you to see the existing bids on the job:
You can see how quickly other tutors have bid, what their prices are what their tutor score is. This should all be factored in when you place your bid.
In the example above, we can see the top-ranked tutor has put in a price of $60 whereas a tutor who is relatively new to the platform has put in a bid of $80. This is not wise as the person who has bid $80
See our article on maximising bid success, bid pricing and bid speed for more information.
Once you have bid, your application will be emailed and texted to the client (If they have added their phone number on Spires) and you will be connected to them through the messenger.
There is more information in the Communicating with Students article.
You can also dismiss the job using the red 'x' if you do not wish to bid, or report it if you think it constitutes misconduct.
4. My Jobs
You cannot see what other tutors have bid until the job is closed, either because a tutor was successfully hired, the client closed the request, or it expired after 4 weeks of inactivity from the client.
Information on the status of your bids and jobs can be found in the 'My Jobs' tab Jobs.
See the guide on My Jobs for more information.
How bidding works on Spires
The Spires bidding system is unique and was designed to stop students from having to sort through hundreds of tutor profiles to find a suitable tutor. We also thought of professional tutors as being much more qualified to determine what they can tutor based on their own skill set and their availability.
When a job is posted by a student, this is emailed to all tutors who are signed up to tutor that subject-level combination and have also opted to receive emails from Spires.
At first any tutor may bid on the job, as long as they place sensible bids. The only limit on prices is that they need to be more than £15 and less than £200, or the equivalent in the other currencies on Spires.
After the job has received three bids, it is withdrawn from the jobs board and you will not be able to bid unless your tutor score is better than one of the existing tutors. A further two bids can be placed at this stage, but no more than this.
Tutors can only make a maximum of 15 bids in any 7-day period.
If you reach or exceed 15 bids, then you will not be able to bid until a number of days have passed allowing your bids to be less than 15.
Placing lots of bids that fail may mean that you are not considering them properly. Consistently placing poor quality bids or irrelevant bids will result in a loss of your bidding privileges. This is described in more detail in the article here.