Best fit

Upwork lets a business manager "submit, edit, or withdraw proposals" on behalf of any agency member, and every proposal draws on the agency's shared Connects. It leaves the choice of member to the agency. On an hourly job the member needs an individual profile and the manager must submit from the agency profile, or the contract is assigned to the manager.

How the ranking works. The job's skills, those the client tagged and those inferred from the post, are matched against each candidate's evidence:

• a skill listed on the profile now is the strongest direct signal;
• past contracts using the skill add proof with diminishing returns and a cap per skill, so one person with many contracts in one language does not win every post that mentions it;
• portfolio items support but do not decide;
• covering more of the job's skills earns a bonus, and covering all of them a larger one, with client-tagged skills weighted above inferred ones.

Relevance decides; seniority only breaks ties.

Who can be picked is a human decision. A member is a candidate only when the owner has said the agency may bid as them; exclusivity and having a login decide nothing, and new members start undecided. When nobody qualifies, an agency campaign falls back to the login holder as an agency member or skips the job, and it never files as an individual by accident.

The pick is frozen once made. When the agency's own system writes the letter in manual mode, the name sent with the job is the name the proposal is filed under, never a fresh ranking.

How Upsight uses it. Best fit is one of three bid identity choices on a campaign, the roster has a column for who it may bid as, and each proposal records the agency member chosen, so reply rate is counted per person.