Looking for Serious Bidders on Elance? Then Offer a Serious Wage

It never ceases to amaze me when I hear from folks who say they can’t find decent help online.

 When I ask what they are offering in terms of compensation, invariably they will quote some ridiculously low price… a price that no one in North America could live on, not even as a part-time supplement. They go to places like Elance and Guru and other job sites and try to find someone who will work for less than $5 per hour and then lament that “Good help is hard to find.” Excuse me?

I recently put out some feelers on Elance for my own transcription business. I offered what I felt was a decent wage. I had to cut off the bidding at more than 60 candidates, yet I have a feeling that my request could have gone on for days. Why? Because I was offering a decent wage for a newbie. I was offering a good starting wage for someone wanting to break into the general transcription business AND I was attracting the best of the best. As a side note, each of those candidates will be reviewed and responded to by the end of this weekend.

Isn’t the best of the best what you would want for your business at the end of the day? Does scrimping and saving when it comes to subcontractors really make sense in the long run?

It’s the old ‘walk a mile in my shoes’ thing. Would YOU work for you for the rates you are offering? If so, I doubt you would feel very good about yourself or the services you were offering. Are those the types of people you want on your team?

Another irony as I posted my starting subcontractor rates is that I had very few offshore candidates offering to work for me for 50, 40 or 30 cents per hour. I wonder why. Could it be because I also posted my requirements in no uncertain terms and what I absolutely needed to have at a minimum before I could even look at a person as a candidate?

Could it be apparent that I was totally clear about what my business needed and that those unqualified need not apply? Yes, I think so.

I’m putting my feet up this weekend and sifting through the serious bidders, those with real qualifications… I am going to savor them, get to know each of their personalities, and explore more about them. Would I have received the same caliber of candidates if I had offered a ridiculously low price? Of course not!

Just something to think about.

Proofread, proofread, proofread!

Fellow Transcribers,

Did I mention the importance of proofreading your work before you send it off to a client?

No matter how long the transcript is and no matter how careful you have been, even if it’s 50 pages…go back to the beginning and proofread your own work.

Read it objectively from start to finish, no matter how much you think you were so very careful. I know it’s boring and takes an extra five or 10 minutes, but the end product will be worth it. I guarantee that you will find at least one incident of ‘you’re’ when it should have been ‘your’, or ‘who’s’ instead of ‘whose’.

Why is this important?

With information products that are either posted on the web or sold to your customer’s clients, it’s very important. The transcript you have provided may even outlive you in terms of its longevity on the web. We all know that the search engines keep things forever!

Your client may get to the point where they themselves no longer proofread your work if it is always dead on. But what if you miss? You make your client look bad in the eyes of their clients AND you make yourself look bad in the eyes of your own client.

Consistent proofreading separates the amateur transcriptionists from the pros. A professional transcriptionist always, always proofreads their own work, no matter how confident they are that they typed the audio error-free. This includes checking website references for accuracy if you have put a live link in the transcript. Always check those URLs to make sure they work.

Believe me, by the time you have finished Page 50, you will have forgotten what was in Page 1, so you can look at it with fresh eyes when you take that extra five or 10 minutes to go over your transcript once again.

I am swamped with transcription work (I’d like to think) because I always do that final check just as a matter of course.

Because I am expanding my team, recently I posted what I think is a fair proposal on Elance to search for qualified transcriptionists. I can guarantee that the commitment to proofreading one’s work is going to be a huge factor as to whom I seriously consider. 

Just as a side note, I also need an excellent proofreader to edit my own stuff!

Karen

General Transcription: The Finer Points of Getting Rid of Those Ums, Ahs and Other Uglies

Unless you are a legal transcriptionist or a medical transcriptionist, chances are you are expected not to provide verbatim transcripts.

If you are a general transcriptionist, you may be assigned the task of transcribing a teleseminar, webinar or interview, for example, where the actual transcript will be provided as a paid product or offered as part of a package to a specific audience. In other words, it has to be product ready. It has to be ready to either appear in a blog for all the world to see or it has to be product ready, readable and digestible by its general audience.

As part of this, you may also be required to edit the transcript for clarity. What does ’edited for clarity’ mean? My mentor Susie Ward of The Admin Source taught me well. She taught me the following:

• Never lose the speaker’s voice or personality
• It’s okay to correct glaring grammactical errors when they appear as long as you keep the speaker’s voice
•  How to keep paragraphs shorter and how to make sure that the speaker’s points are made in a succinct and professional manner

Okay, so getting rid of those ‘ums, ahs and other uglies’; how do you do that without losing the speaker’s personality?

• Before you start transcribing, listen to the audio for a little while.  Listen to the speaker and get to know him/her a little bit better before you start to actually transcribe what they’re saying. Your ‘ear’ will eventually become attuned to that speaker’s accent and their emphasis on certain repetitive words/phrases  ( i.e. ‘you know’, ‘um ‘, ’so’, etc.)

• Leave in some of those words/phrases but not all of them. If you leave them all in, it can become distracting to the reader. If you leave none of them in, it may become too homogenized to the extent that even the speaker doesn’t recognize himself/herself.

• There is a fine balance when doing general transcription for internet-based businesses. As a top-notch general transcriptionist, your job is to capture the true essence of what that person is saying and allow his/her intelligence to shine through without the distraction of the normal filler words they may use to fill dead airspace.

The best advice I can give to any general transcriptionist who is transcribing an interview or teleseminar that perhaps may be utilized by your client for later publication on the web is first to get to know your speaker as best you can. If he/she references certain websites, author names, etc., take the time to Google those references so that those links are accurate. Never put a hyperlink in a transcript that you already haven’t checked out first to make sure it works and is active.

I am very eager to learn about two things. One, I would love to hear from general transcriptionists and your challenges with regard to editing your transcripts to a certain degree in order to make your speakers’ prose flow in a comprehensive and easily digestible manner. Two, I would love to hear from your clients themselves in terms of what they really want in terms of editing their transcripts.

Thank you!

Karen

Share Your Grammatical Pet Peeves With Me

Are you a grammar expert (or non-expert) who has some grammatical pet peeves they wouldn’t mind sharing with me?

I would truly appreciate your input, comments and suggestions because I am currently writing a transcription guidelines document for my expanding team. I will give credit to each of you in the resources section. You can contact me offline via email as to how much of your personal information you would like displayed.

For example, one of the things I hear often is, “That’s the most important thing is that you…” or “That’s what will get you far in business is doing…”

I’m no grammar wiz, but as a transcriptionist, I find myself automatically correcting those sentences to start, “The most important thing is that you…” or “What will get you far in business is…”

These are not verbatim transcripts. They are edited for grammar and readability.

If you don’t mind, I would also appreciate your feedback on what type of general reading style you have:

• Skimmer (just reads the headlines or bullets)
• Prober (drills down deep and digests every single word) 

Thanks a bunch everyone! I’m looking forward to your comments!

Karen