Five Little Rules for Voiceover Hiring

Five Little Rules for Voiceover Hiring

For safe, smooth and reliable recording

By Chas Rowe | British male voiceover artist

Helping hands. Photo by Muhammad Rayhan Haripriatna via Pexels.

When working in voiceover, everything evolves from empathy.

For the voiceover artist, this comes naturally.

The VO has a whole view of the project, taken from multiple information points, which when gathered together, helps guide their performance.

The artist is the emotional, empathic conduit, powering the production – from the first to the final word.

Of course, empathy also extends to everyone else in the production chain, too.

Each has to respond to information, understand one another’s contributions, and work well together to get the desired result for the end client.

With universal understanding, producing great work that everyone can be happy with should naturally follow.

But group projects can be a little tricky sometimes – and as humans, we’re not all mind readers (yet) – so these Five Little Rules for Voiceover Hiring are here to help you tune in to a VO’s way of thinking.

Now, allow yourself to be one with these thoughts…

Elevate your being and your doing. Photo by Cottonbro via Pexels

1. Be authentic 

Authenticity. It’s a word that’s grown in popularity in recent years.

And for good reason.

Because being authentic, honest, open, transparent and truthful in voiceover hiring are vital to ensuring a project starts right and ends right for all concerned.

We’ve already hinted that a good VO already knows how to bring the truth out of a script – that’s a given.

But in your overall dealings, a good hirer should also match this energy.

So be open, clear and unambiguous in everything you say and do. Clear communication and co-operation build confidence, trust and rapport.

As empaths, VOs are emotionally-attuned.

We can read rooms, detect subtle shifts in tone of voice and behaviour, and decipher the subtext of emails. We know by instinct, and experience, when things aren’t clear and need to be clarified.

Please. Don’t leave your words and actions open to doubt and inquiry.

Be truthful and authentic in all of your voiceover dealings. Always.

Everything neatly in its place. Photo by Pixabay via Pexels

2. Be organised

Once you’re in control of the facts of a voiceover project, then you’re a good way to getting organised.

But the project also needs room for everything outside of the recording to be devised, negotiated, agreed, and finalised.

So be organised. And early. Know the details.

If you’re hurrying, pressuring, and pointing to unachievable deadlines, you aren’t, and weren’t, organised.

For example, if the brief and terms weren’t clear.

If the script was submitted once. Twice. Three times. Or more.

If the contract was (true story) non-negotiable, contradictory, legally questionable, and potentially unenforceable.

If you’re calling up at 5.30pm on a Friday, asking for a voiceover and all the associated intellectual property rights (another true story) without even stating the fee.

All of these things are telegraphing a lack of control, organisation, understanding, flexibility, and empathy.

So don’t be an organ of noise. Be organised.

Silver bullet precision writing. Photo by Soumojit Basu via Pexels

3. Be a good writer

As part of overall good project communication, you should also watch your language.

When scriptwriting for voiceover, avoid oral obstacles, as these can naturally interrupt, and disrupt, the flow of communication.

Make sure your copy is eye, ear and mouth-friendly. Easy to read. Easy to say. Easy to listen to. Easy to understand.

Pick phrases you would actually speak – and not the ones you wouldn’t – like:

‘We have 20 years of sector-specific experience’.

It might sound like neat and tidy corporate language, but it’s unnecessarily sibilant, clicky, and conceptually vague.

Equally, don’t say things like: ‘We ensure to put the client front and centre of everything we do’.

Say: ‘Our clients are at the heart of everything we do’.

Tight. Committed. Personal. Meaningful. Empathetic.

Say what you mean and mean what you say. Get to the point. Imagine your audience. Write for them and you’ll make it right for them.

Could you maybe just…? Photo by Cup of Couple via Pexels

4. Be reasonable 

A voiceover artist provides the voiceover. We can all agree on that.

But sometimes the voiceover is asked to be the proofreader, the subeditor, the copywriter, and the cultural attaché.

Consider this example from a hirer who once wrote:

‘This text is straight from the animator, who is a non-native speaker, so if there’s some straight-up errors and you, dear voice actor, have the energy to correct them, that would be awesome. [smiley face emoji] We are not expecting you to proof-read and correct all the mistakes in the text by no means, just if something obviously catches your eye’. 

It appears to ask only a little, when it’s really asking a lot.

Although there should be some sympathy for non-native English speakers producing scripts on their own, the copy does still need to be correct and final for an English-speaking audience.

If you’re producing a script that refers to “all the mistakes” in it, then it’s not recording-ready.

And it’s not empathetic to duck responsibility for it, either.

So be reasonable: a voiceover can only provide so much free help before a skim read becomes a separate, chargeable job.

A lofty goal. Photo by Beyzahzah via Pexels

5. Be a higher-values hirer 

We said at the beginning that in voiceover production, everything evolves out of empathy.

Starts with empathy. Ends with empathy.

A good hirer therefore says thank you, pays on time, respects usage terms, gives a credit or leaves a tag in a social media post, is happy to provide a testimonial, and responds to requests for recordings to be released for the voiceover’s portfolio.

These are all things that spread awareness and recognition of not only everyone’s work on the production side, but also help celebrate the brand, and spotlight the importance of the message being delivered on the client side.

A note of thanks, timely payment, credits, tags, testimonials, and portfolio releases can transform a single piece of work for one audience (the end client’s) into something with multiple benefits for multiple other audiences (the contributors’).

Everyone earns additional exposure. That’s more than a win-win – and probably a win cubed.

So be a higher-values hirer, whose little efforts at the end of the project help lift everyone up.

It will turn you into the empathic, creative partner that the voiceover artist feels seen and heard by, and the one they’ll want to work with again and again.

And hopefully you’ll feel the same.

All agreed. Photo by Moe Magners via Pexels

Thanks for reading. If this helped you, and you think it will help others, please share and credit via the social media buttons below.

Further reading

Five Ways to Write Voiceover Copy Like a Jedi – Chas Rowe

How To Hire A UK Voiceover Artist – Chas Rowe