If you are going to a job interview, what is the one question you dread the most? Narrowing it down to one is tough! In general, I wish we could avoid any “Tell me about yourself” queries, and there are dozens that could fall under this category.

One of my least favorite topics is myself – despite blogular evidence to the contrary. Of course, every site on which a Voice over Worker registers has the same request, and for good reason I am sure. Potential clients want to minimize their risk, and they feel one way to do that is to have background information about the person the may hire.

Several months ago, I recorded a title for Maria Kuroshchepova, and after it went to retail, she graciously sent a testimonial about our working together. It was at that point I realized that rather than me talking about myself, it would be better if I could get other people to talk about me – if that talk was positive in nature!

I dabbled with the idea of using the Audible ratings as a metric. For each title on Audible, reviewers can rate from 1-5 stars the story, performance and overall rating for an audiobook. Pretty quickly, I realized that these ratings are very promo driven – that is, people will use promo codes or other incentives to get others to rate their products. The same thing is very prevalent on Amazon and probably many other places. Without placing judgment on the veracity of these ratings, let’s just say I didn’t think they were representative of the work.

Press reviews are often suggested as a source for Voice over Workers to reference clients to. However, it seems that press reviews are only done for books of higher visibility, and once again we are in the “get experience to get work to get experience” paradox.

After enough stumbling around and wondering what to do, I came to the conclusion that thousands of other people have reached before this – ask for it! Duh. Now, asking you how great I am is just short of me telling you how great I am, but as my career is in the balance, I did a little Duck, Duck, Go-ing a came up with this:

I hope all is well. Because I value you as a client, I would appreciate your feedback. I am asking a few of my favorite authors/publishers, especially those with multiple titles or Royalty Share projects, to consider providing a testimonial regarding our work together.

Your story will help inform my potential clients why it’s good to work with me and how they can benefit. With your permission, I would like to use your comments as a testimonial to help convince future clients that they can benefit from working with me.  Your comments will most likely be used on my webpage at https://russellericnewton.com/testimonials and perhaps other sites related to Voice over Work.

Please feel free to write whatever you like. Even a brief endorsement would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time and kind support. I value your business and look forward to working with you again in the future. Please let me know if there is anything further I can do for you.

These response, which have been very gracious, I then used in my web site profiles and on my testimonial page on my own site.

Along these lines, you will find on many Voice over Working websites, such as Voices.com and Upwork, that customer ratings are quite important. There are many blog posts about the value of such on Voices.com, and on Upwork job posters can actually filter applicants based on their reviews.

He that tooteth his not own horn, the same shall not be tooted. Hezekiah 4:44 

Categories: Voice over Work