Tutors at Spires have public profiles, which are displayed on both the external and internal pages of Spires. The whole purpose of the profile is to let tutors sell themselves and their skills, and it is only natural that a student would want to see profiles and attempt to speak to a tutor.

A student contacting you directly is really the ideal situation for a tutor. All of our top tutors end up disabling their profile because they become fully booked as students keep contacting them directly. In order this to happen, they had to first write good, detailed profiles, have professional pictures, and also get a good tutor score.

Remember that your profiles have a price attached to them, which is your average bid price. You can set a different one by opening your profile page and editing the price:

If you do not with to be contacted, you can hide your profile from view from your account tab.

Read on to find out about the different ways you can be contacted

In the case where a student has not yet joined Spires, and is searching either the internet or Spires, they may come across your profile and be impressed with it enough that they choose to contact you. When they do, you will be connected with them in the Spires messenger. In this case, your bid price to them will be an average of your past bid prices. Your bid message will be the tag line of your profile.

This does not mean that Spires has bid for you or that you are obligated to tutor them. You can let them know if you are unavailable and disable your public profile if you are not looking to take on more students.

Once a student has posted a request, they are able to search the tutors who have been alerted to their request and send them an invitation to bid on their request. When this happens you will get an email with a short message and two buttons. If you are interested simply click the bid button which will allow you to place your bid through Spires:

Clicking on the decline button will let them know you are unavailable.

If you do not want to be contacted by students, the you can hide it by ticking the box in the settings tab:

However, all active tutors who are wanting students should not hide their profile. If you are getting irrelevant requests, look at cleaning up your profile, making it clearer what you can and cannot help with, and reducing your list of subjects.