Sample Rejection System
I think this whole business of rejecting samples is a really terrible idea. I can't see how this accomplishes anything more than to further demoralize workers who already have a lot of rejection to deal with on a daily basis. Also, it was the VoiceBunny system which chose to include most of those samples in the first place, so it makes very little sense for the system to penalize a VO for inclusion of a sample which the VO never had any say in choosing to include it in the first place. If one of the managers has determined that, for some subjective reason, it is so bad that a sample a manager previously thought was good enough to be included now needs to be removed, thus inching that VO closer and closer to being deactivated from the system, well then remove it yourself! Don't put the poor, demoralized VO through the "walk of shame" of having to seek out the sample and go through the motions of removing it. I find this whole thing very disappointing, and it sends me deeper into a downward spiral every time I see those email notifications. VOs have all we can do to try to keep our spirits up enough to keep on going each day as it is. Anybody want to chime in? Agree? Disagree? Please, be my guest.
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Hi Geena,
Thanks for your feedback! We're working on ways to improve the way samples are handled and added to the platform. We've undertaken this (manual) effort in order to improve the samples that are shown on the search as some of them no longer meet our standards. Through this effort we've realized that certain samples shouldn't automatically be added to Pro's profiles and so we're designing ways in which this can be automated.
Have in mind that this process won't affect your stats and it's not intended to penalize Pros. It will only affect you in case more than 50% of your samples are rejected. The email notification is just a way of letting you know it should be removed. We're hoping it also helps us in displaying only the best of your work so we'll attract even more clients.
Thanks again for letting us know about your experience,
-Seb
Ah, well, thank you for your explanation, Sebastian. Now, I'm feeling I may have overreacted a little, but it is good to get this information so that, in the future when I see the notifications, maybe I won't panic so much, knowing that the purpose of it is not so much to cull VOs, but more-so just to keep the samples fresh. I assumed so, but then I saw that some of my rejected samples were really new ones that clients seemed to site as a preferred sample quite often, and of course, whenever anything is left up to the imagination, we tend to assume the worst. Sure the system could be improved, but the same is true of anyone or anything. I'll try to think more objectively about it in the future. Thank you for chiming in!
I've noticed that when I have samples that are favorited by a ton of clients, those are the ones that seem to get pulled down by managers. Usually it's because they're from previous jobs that were less than 15 seconds long. But my counterpoint is, if the clients are favoriting them, the samples in question should not be able to be removed from search results, because they are clearly effective enough for people to save them to their favorites for potential hiring purposes.
Hi Alaina
I'm sorry for my delay in replying to you here.
I agree with you that there are some samples of this duration that could be helpful. We started rejecting the samples that are 15 seconds or less because while some of them are useful, we found through an analysis that the majority of them are not. We are running this analysis again to make sure this is still the case and to determine if we need to adjust the minimum time of the samples that are accepted.
We appreciate you reaching out about this topic!
I don't think there should be a minimum time for a sample if a client has favorited a sample already. That hurts the client who might be trying to find that voiceover artist, and it hurts the voiceover artist who might not get the job because the client can't find them. I understand that shorter samples are not deemed as effective, and I don't add them myself. The ones I'm talking about are automatically posted by VoiceBunny. Thank you!