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

A Bit More on Transcriptionists…

In an earlier post, “Hiring a New Transcriptionist 101″, I talked about the fact that you get what you pay for when it comes to transcription.

If you are looking for a top-notch transcriptionist to capture the essence of your teleseminar, webinar or online interview, you will need to consider the value of what a professional transcriptionist does:

• They research unfamiliar terms on the internet
•  They listen again and again if what you have said is inaudible or simply doesn’t make sense in terms of your overall context
• They will do their best to maintain your style of speaking, but at the same time, they will do their best to make you and your guests sound intelligent and knowledgeable. This may sometimes involve correcting one’s grammar in subtle ways.

When I first started transcribing a few years ago, my mentor was Susie Ward of  The Admin Source . Susie was a harsh mistress in that I would send her my completed transcripts and she would send them back to me with her proofread versions. Her devotion to excellence was always apparent which is why she is so successful today. She never waivered in her standards and she whipped me into shape in no time. While I don’t offer the high degree of editing and polishing that The Admin Source provides, I have everything to thank Susie for in terms of my own success today.

If all you are willing to pay to someone is $5 or $6.25 per hour (I recently saw an ad for a transcript of over 80 audio minutes where the total payment offered was $25 for the entire 80 minutes)  then you will truly get what you pay for. Considering that it takes approximately three to four hours for even the best transcriptionist  to transcribe one hour of audio, that person would be making $5 per hour for five hours of their time.  If  they could transcribe 80 minutes of audio in four hours, they would be paid $6.25 per hour. 

You may save money in the short term, but I also invite you to consider the final product.  How much of your own valuable time will it take you to proofread and amend your raw transcript to ensure that it is ready to publish?

Just something to think about.

Hiring a New Transcriptionist 101

Before you hire a transcriptionist or transcription company, what type of transcription service do you need?

 There are basically three types of transcriptionists:

1. Medical
2. Legal
3. General

In terms of medical and legal transcription, these providers are held to high and stringent standards in terms of understanding medical and legal terms. The majority of these professionals have been accredited with degrees in their respective fields of transcription. Normally, their transcripts are absolutely verbatim for obvious reasons. These professionals also deserve the highest fees due to their specialization and training.

With general transcription, the ballpark is wide open. Making ‘product-ready’ transcripts is totally different from the straight verbatim required by medical and legal transcriptionists.

 If you are looking for a general transcriptionist, it’s not so black-and-white.  Think about: 

• What language format would you like your transcript to be in? (i.e. British or American English)
• How much do you want your final product to be edited in terms of grammar and punctuation?
• How important is it that your transcriptionist understand common internet terms?
•  How much internet research do you expect your transcriptionist to do in order to accurately transcribe your audio files?
• How much time are you willing to invest to bring your transcriptionist up to speed in terms of your goals?

‘General transcription’ is a fuzzy term that envelops pretty much everything not contained in medical or legal transcription. Often, general transcriptionists are requested to do everything from verbatim to highly-edited and proofread transcripts. Of course, the price charged will be based on how much editing and research you require from them.

If you are just looking for general transcription and visit Elance or Guru, you may be presented with prices around the $25 per audio hour mark. This is fine if you are looking for purely verbatim transcripts. At $25 per audio hour, considering it takes an average of three to four hours for even the best transcriptionist to transcribe  one hour of audio, this means the transcriber is actually receiving between $8.30 and $6.25 per hour of his/her time.  If that is okay with you, then I guess that is okay with them. But I know firsthand that  it’s not okay with most  general transcriptionists.

If your budget includes $25 per audio hour for transcription services, then you’ll pretty much get what you pay for. Expect to receive a verbatim, pretty raw transcript that may likely include every ‘um’, ‘ah’ and ‘you know’ spoken. You may also see some fairly apparent grammatical errors. If you can see them, so can your potential clients.

It may be a good idea to think about the time and cost required (if you want this to be a polished, final product) on behalf of yourself or the rest of your team in terms of refurbishing the product that you bought at such a bargain price, but then had to spend hours and hours cleaning up.

More about this topic in later posts…