Seeking out something and finding it with minimal effort is one of the most satisfying online experiences out there. So much so that Google built an entire business out of it. The act of searching for something has been so ingrained in our collective online experience that it’s easy to feel a bit underwhelmed when it doesn’t work as expected.
Knowing how important searching and finding professional talent is to the Voices experience, we’re happy to announce some major improvements, available for you to explore today. These changes will make finding and discovering talent that much easier, without changing how our search algorithm works.
In this article
- A Cleaner Search Experience
- Now Showing: Location and Reviews
- More Powerful Filtering: Find Local or Bilingual Talent
- Looking for Union Talent?
- Want to Learn More?
A Cleaner Search Experience
We’ve made a number of visual improvements across our platform over the last several months, and now it’s time for Search to get a bit of a makeover. Some of these smaller tweaks include:
- a larger Search Bar in the main navigation bar;
- combining Keyword Search and the Search Bar, and;
- changing the visual style of the Refine Results side navigation.
Now Showing: Location and Reviews
When it comes to discovering new talent for a fresh sound or looking for someone local, we know that the two most important factors when narrowing down your options (aside from language, gender, and voice age, of course), are ratings and reviews, and location.
That’s why we are excited to bring those two key pieces of information together and put them at the forefront of search results. Moving forward, all results will prominently display a talent’s rating and reviews (i.e. their star rating and number of reviews received) and their location (i.e. their city and state or country).
More Powerful Filtering: Find Local or Bilingual Talent
If you’re working on a time-sensitive job, sometimes it’s important to work with talent that are nearby, whether that be the same city, state, or province, or time zone. With our improved filtering, you can now select the state or province (if searching within the U.S. or Canada), as well as type in the specific city you’re trying to search in. You no longer have to worry about whether or not your search results are in New York City or New York state, or in Springfield, Missouri or Springfield, Massachusetts.
You may notice that as filters are applied, the search results are updated in real-time automatically. This is first for our search tool, and we’re pretty excited about it. Not only do you no longer have to wait for the page to reload with your new results after applying a filter, you can see if you’ve narrowed things down too far, and can remove filters one at a time to get a pool of talent that you’re happy with.
Now that you’ve locked down a location, what if you’re looking for someone who speaks more than one language? Well, with improved filtering, you can now select up to two different languages. For example, let’s say you’re doing a radio spot that needs to be in both English and French. Instead of working with one English-speaking talent and a different French-speaking talent, you can search for talent that speak both English and French. The same filtering works when looking for talent who speak both English and Spanish.
Looking for Union Talent?
If you’re on the hunt for talent who is a working member of SAG-AFTRA, ACTRA, Equity, or another talent union, you can search for them by turning on the Union Talent search filter. To do so, head to your Account Settings, then click the box under the ‘Access Union Talent Agencies’ section. Once you’ve saved your changes, you can head back to Search to filter whether or not you want to see union talent only, and from which specific union.
If you’ve posted a Union Job previously, this filter will automatically be available to you to use.
Want to Learn More?
If you’ve got questions about Search, you can review our detailed FAQ article on Finding Talent. Or you can contact a member of our Customer Support Team at any time via our support page.
We hope these updates to Search make discovering new talent that much easier. If you’ve got any feedback regarding this, or any other feature on Voices, please send it to [email protected].
Happy hunting!
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