How Do I Hire a Voiceover Artist?

If you are wondering, “How Do I Hire a Voiceover Artist,” this page will help demystify the process and Blue Wave Voiceover is happy to help! Hiring a voice talent for your commercial, video game, e-learning, narration, telephone system or other project through Blue Wave Voiceover is simple. 

Narrowing down your choices

First, decide who your ad needs to reach and what kind of voice would be the right fit for that target demographic. Beyond gender, consider different age groups and generations:

• Young Adult – Millennial and Gen-Z
• Adult – Generation Z and and Middle Age
• Mature Adult – Baby Boomer and Senior

You can also find a voice talent who authentically represents a specific background:

• Multicultural
• Diverse
• Hispanic
• Mixed Race
• Latino
• African American
• Asian American
• Native American and Indigenous

Finding the right sound

You should also determine the kind of sound or tone you’re looking for in your voiceover project. If you’ve found an existing ad or celebrity voice you want to emulate, tell the voice actor – this can be very helpful direction that speeds up the process. It is also useful to provide tone descriptors. Here are a few options to consider:

• Authoritative
• Firm
• Reassuring
• Calm
• Deep
• Rich
• Trustworthy
• Conversational
• Relatable
• Hip
• Edgy
• Friendly
• Bold
• Youthful
• Mature
• Upbeat
• Rugged
• Urban
• Cool
• Energetic
• Sassy
• Sarcastic

Listen to voiceover demos

The next step in how do I hire a voiceover artist is to browse talent demos. Voice actor demos include examples of national and local commercials, network and cable promos, e-learning and educational videos, radio imaging, character, video game and animation work, telephone menus, IVR, TV and documentary narration, corporate narration and more. 

Hold a Casting

If you’re not sure how to choose the right voice actor, you can hold a voiceover casting. Just send in your casting spec script and then we can arrange for our voice talents to record auditions for you. For more information about how this works, check out our audition guide! 

Also, please make sure your casting spec is an appropriate word count for the length of your spot. Here’s a good rule of thumb: A typical voiceover talent, speaking in a casual, conversational way says about 2.5 words per second — or about 150 words per minute. So, if you’re looking to fill 30 seconds of a commercial, your script should come in right around 75 words (2.5 x 30 = 75), give or take 10 words. That means that for a 60-second spot, you should aim for around 150 words. 

Contact your top choices

Once you’ve picked out your top voice talent candidates, you can contact them directly to talk about availability, rates and deadlines. You should also work out ahead of time whether you’d like a raw audio file that you will then send to a post production studio or if you’d like the voice artist to take care of editing the file. The voice artist can also offer a plan for how many re-recordings will be included in the rate based on your feedback. 

You can direct a live voiceover session with programs such as ipDTL, Skype, Google Hangouts, Zoom, Source Connect, ISDN and phone patch. You can also simply hop on the phone to discuss plans with your voice actor before they record. 

We hope we’ve answered the question of “how do I hire a voiceover artist!”

If there’s something you’re still wondering about, feel free to email us at casting@bluewavevoiceover.com or use the form on our site.