Your Talent Chefs blogging about insider info and guidance, current castings and bookings (only those made public), tips on improving your booking chances and how to use your Webcomp portfolio as a virtual agent to land more work. Get yourself in the Soup!

Talent Motivation - Working for Stardom and Success or Playing the Lottery

Saturday June 26, 2010 by Chef

Our talent are amazing. As we continue to grow, we are reminded of how lucky we are to work with motivated, professional folks that are in it with us for the long haul. We love our jobs because of our great talent.

Having incredible talent across the country is only half of the business equation for TalentSoup, however. Our Clients, the people with the check books, are the other half. We pride ourselves on paying attention to both types of customers but we’ll admit, we pay a lot of attention to serving our Clients. So when they tell us things about our business, about how we can better serve them, we pay close attention. Because acing our service for the Client means we book more talent. That’s a win for our talent and a win for everyone. It’s the proverbial Win-Win-Win. We kinda like that.

With 3 years behind us, serving a ton of great talent to a giant list of projects (from clients like Home Depot, Delta Airlines, Mizuno, Publix, Coca-Cola, Def Jam Records, Philips Medical, Miller Brewing, Aflac, Raymond James...), we’ve built a great talent booking PROCESS. Moving forward, it’s time to invest in building more talent QUALITY into that process.

They know we have high quality talent, that’s not their point. What Clients tell us over and over is they love our selection, speed, technology and service but what they want more of is Quality Talent Profiles. Our Clients want a better idea of talent experience, better images in their Profiles, etc. What we are calling the Talent Brand.

To answer this opportunity, we are developing new ways for our Professional and Developing talent to partner with us to increase their odds of landing more work. It’s an exciting program that does not exist anywhere and we believe it’s the future.

See, we have a range of experience and demographic talent offerings, including every skin tone, ethnicity, age, and even tattoo locations, that you can imagine. But we also have a wide range of motivations within our talent community. We have the casual talent, people with little or no experience (what our industry calls Real People), that signed up on a whim. Like casually playing the lottery, they want to be considered for certain projects but are not interested in investing a lot to make that happen. Thats fine with us, we love having you if that’s your desire, as there are lots of projects that need casual talent. But we also have highly motivated, professional talent who either are in the Soup to grow their careers or they are fully experienced and seasoned talent with lots of commercial work under their belts (and use TalentSoup as a "marketing" service). We have some real superstars in our community that have chosen to make TalentSoup one of their valuable partners in landing some work. It’s these folks that are invested in their career that we are building new offerings for. There is a direct corrollary between talent experience and who lands the most work. It’s time we gave those experienced talent powerful new tools to increase their odds. More to come...