Clear acceptance criteria for every job

Today we’re rolling out acceptance criteria for jobs in Work — a simple way to define exactly what a freelancer should submit when they complete a task. You can now require a specific type of deliverable for each job: a text response, a link, a photo or video recorded with their phone, or an audio recording. This makes it much easier to validate results at scale, with fewer messages and less guesswork for everyone.

The Bottleneck of Manual Review

On traditional freelance platforms, “delivery” is often vague. Clients post a job, freelancers do the work, and then “Can you send it as a link instead?”, or maybe “I actually needed a video, not photos”, or even “You forgot to upload the file that I request”. Each of these messages seems small. But if you’re hiring dozens or hundreds of people, those tiny clarifications turn into a long, noisy message thread — and a lot of time spent checking whether submissions are even in the right format before you get to quality. For micro-tasking, that doesn’t scale.

Define acceptance criteria in Work

With the new Acceptance Criteria feature, you can now define the exact format of the required deliverable when creating your job post. This acts as a clear, upfront standard for freelancers and a powerful validation filter for you. Instead of a generic text box for submissions, clients can now choose from a range of verifiable output formats, making validation instant and objective:

• Text Copy: Require the freelancer to submit a specific block of text, perfect for quick writing tasks, data entry results, or survey responses.
• A Link (URL): Request a link to a published social media post, an uploaded file, or a specific webpage, which you can check with a single click.
• Mobile Camera (Photo/Video): Ask for direct proof of work by having the freelancer record a short video or take a photo using their mobile phone camera within the app, ensuring authenticity and context.
• Mobile Audio Recording: Ideal for tasks requiring voice data, short testimonials, or audio transcription proof, captured directly via the freelancer’s mobile phone microphone.

What this means for your Workflow

By defining clear Acceptance Criteria, you eliminate ambiguity and radically reduce the need for manual intervention:

• Less Messaging, More Efficiency: The most common reasons for long message threads — “Is this what you wanted?” or “Can you send the link again?” — are removed. The submission must meet the criteria structurally before you even review the quality.

• Faster Validation for Clients: You get the deliverable in the exact, defined format you requested. This saves you the time of opening a message, parsing a reply, and clicking multiple links. You can validate the work against your criteria faster than ever.

• Clearer Expectations for Freelancers: Freelancers immediately know how to submit their work, leading to higher-quality, faster turnarounds, and less frustration from revisions.

• The Path to Full Automation: Acceptance Criteria are a core piece of our vision for fully automated task management. Paired with auto-hiring, you can now set the standards for recruitment and deliverables, allowing Work to handle the heavy lifting for you at an unprecedented scale.

A building block for full automation

Acceptance criteria are also a key part of our broader vision for fully automated flows on Work. To automate hiring and evaluation, the platform needs to know who to hire (screening and filters), what “done” looks like (acceptance criteria), whether the submission meets those expectations (evaluation). Clear, structured deliverables make step two precise — and open the door to smarter, AI-assisted review in the future. When every job has a well-defined output, Work can help you handle more operations automatically, while still relying on real humans to do the work.