Answering Job Requests: The Craftsman's Guide

On Khdemli you do not have to wait for a client to stumble across your profile: clients post job requests, and you receive them automatically if you are verified, practise the requested trade, and work in that city. You see the job, the city, the photos and the rough budget before deciding anything. If it suits you, you reply; if not, you move on. Here is how the flow works and how to turn it into a steady source of work.

Two ways to get clients

The first is passive — your profile. A client looks for a plumber in their city, you appear in the results, they unlock your contact. That route is covered in the craftsman sign-up guide. The second is active: job requests. The client describes the work and you go to them. The two stack, and the craftsmen who land the most work use both.

Who receives requests

Three conditions, all mandatory: your profile must be verified, the request must be in one of the trades listed on your profile, and it must be posted in your city. Miss any one of them and the request never reaches you. That is another reason a complete, current profile pays directly: honestly listing every trade you actually practise widens the stream of requests that concern you.

What you see in a request

• The title and full description of the job
• The city and, often, the neighbourhood
• Up to 6 photos of the site
• A rough budget, when the client supplied one
• Whether the request is marked urgent
• How long the request has been live

Requests marked urgent sit at the top of your list; the rest are ordered newest first. Requests you have already answered are flagged as such, so you never waste time reading the same one twice.

One reply per request — so make it count

You may answer any given request exactly once. There is no second attempt and no follow-up: your message is your only shot at convincing that client. It is a deliberate constraint. It protects clients from spam, and it forces you to write something useful instead of ten identical "hello, I'm interested" messages.

Writing a reply that wins the job

The client receives several replies and compares them side by side. Your card already shows your rating, your reviews and your badge; your message has to supply what the card cannot.

1. Show that you read it. Pick up a specific detail: "for an 80L heater on the 3rd floor with no lift you need two people". That instantly separates you from the generic replies.
2. Give a price range. Even approximate, even conditional on a visit. Silence about price moves the client to the next reply.
3. Offer a concrete slot. "I can come Thursday morning" beats "I am available".
4. Keep it short. Three or four lines read in full beat a paragraph that gets skimmed.

What happens after you reply

The client is notified immediately. They see your card — photo, trades, city, rating, review count, verified badge — with your name partly masked, plus your message. If they pick you, they unlock your contact and call, and you are notified of that unlock. The unlock charges a small amount on the client side and the craftsman side, as with every introduction: the reasoning is in the article on the Khdemli model. Replying to a request, by contrast, costs nothing.

Filtering well: what not to answer

Answering everything is not a strategy. Each reply commits you to doing the job if the client picks you, and a reply followed by a withdrawal is expensive in reputation. Skip the ones that fall outside your real speciality, where the city is too far to be worth your margin, where the stated budget is plainly unrealistic, or where the description is too vague to price. In that last case a short reply asking one clarifying question is still worthwhile — just do not make a habit of it.

Requests expire after 30 days

A request stays open for 30 days, then drops out of the lists automatically. The client can also close it earlier once they have found someone. In practice this means freshness matters enormously: a request posted two hours ago is worth far more than one from three weeks back, where the client has almost certainly chosen already. Get into the habit of checking once a day — that single reflex is the difference between watching jobs go by and taking them.

Frequently asked questions

To complete the picture: see what a request looks like from the client's side, get the verified badge that gates access to requests, and sharpen the profile these clients land on with the craftsman guide. No profile yet? Create one on the sign-up page.