Starting out
Pick one thing a buyer can picture receiving
A new generalist reads as someone who has not decided, which is the opposite of the signal you need.
Guides on Starting out: A rubric is a production tool before it is a quality claim, The brief is rarely the request, Getting the first booking, in order
The first decision is not your price, it is what a buyer is actually buying. Four formats dominate this trade, they differ by more than an hour of your time each, and you should lead with exactly one of them.
Being narrow while you are unknown is not modesty. Specificity is the only credibility available to someone with no record, and a profile offering everything reads as a profile that has not decided anything.
The four formats, side by side
These are directional rather than absolute, and the time figures assume you are new. Expect every one of them to halve within two months.
| Format | Time per job, new | Price position | Learning curve | Comfort barrier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Written assessment to a fixed structure | 25-45 min | Mid | Steep at first, then flat | Low |
| Scored across defined axes, with justification | 20-35 min | Mid, higher with a published rubric | Gentle | Low |
| Recorded audio or video, stated length | 15-30 min including retakes | Highest per minute of work | Slow, mostly nerve | High |
| Comparison across several submissions | 45-75 min | Highest per job, worst per hour | Moderate | Low |
Two things in that table matter more than the prices.
The comparison format pays the most per job and the least per hour, which is why it looks attractive on a rate card and disappoints in practice. The recorded format has the best hourly economics of the four and the highest number of people who will not do it, which is exactly why it holds its price - the premium a recording carries and where it comes from is worth the read before you rule it out on nerves alone.
Choose on the axis you will hit first
Most people choose on price and then quit the format within a month. Choose on whichever of these is your binding constraint.
If your constraint is time, take scored work with a rubric. It is the only format where your second job is meaningfully faster than your first, because the rubric does the remembering.
If your constraint is nerve, take written. Nobody hears you, nobody sees you, and you can revise before sending. You will earn less per hour than the recorded people and you will actually deliver, which beats a higher rate you never charge.
If your constraint is being unknown, take recorded. Fewer people offer it, so the shortlist you appear on is shorter, and a buyer who wants a voice has three options instead of thirty.
If your constraint is boredom, take comparison work in small doses and price it properly. It is the format most likely to keep you in the trade at month six and the least likely to pay well at month one.
Leading with one, offering others quietly
The top line of your profile has room for one format and a buyer reads it as the answer to "does this person do the thing I came for". Everything else goes below, as secondary options, priced.
This costs you nothing. A buyer who wants a recording and finds a written specialist who also records will still book, because they found the person by the specialism. A buyer who wants a recording and finds a list of four services with no emphasis reads it as a list of four things nobody has done many of.
The mechanics of getting that top line right - the buyer's noun, the turnaround in the same sentence - are covered in the piece on the opening line of a listing, and it is a ten-minute job that changes the conversion of everything below it.
Test the choice before you commit to it
Do one complete job in your chosen format on practice material, timed honestly, including the brief, the work, the delivery and the admin afterwards.
Then do one in your second choice. The gap between what you expected and what the clock said is usually large, and it is the only input that makes your first price something other than a guess. That gap is well documented: in Buehler, Griffin and Ross (1994), students predicted their theses would take 33.9 days and took 55.5, and only 29.7% finished by their own best estimate.
Two months in, the choice becomes revisable in a way it is not now. You will have times per job, a take-home figure per format, and a sense of which one you dread on a Sunday evening. Change the lead format then, on evidence, rather than now on preference.
If the answer is video, recording a first video without dying inside is the practical account of the first attempt.
What the format decision is not
It is not a measurement decision. If your offer involves stated dimensions rather than judgement, the conventions you follow have to be somebody's published conventions rather than your own, and the documented method side of that is where those live.
It is not a scoring-mechanics decision either. How a number gets produced, and how reliable a number of that kind is, belongs to the accuracy work on automated scoring rather than to your rate card. Your decision is only what arrives in the buyer's inbox and how long it takes you to make it.
And it is not the same decision a buyer is making. They are choosing between formats on what they want to feel when it arrives, not on your hourly economics, and the buyer-side account of what a commissioned review is expected to contain is a useful corrective if you are about to design your written structure around your own convenience.
If you want to see which formats are currently listed and at what spread before you pick, the judge listings on Rate Cock show the live mix, and the gaps in it are more informative than the crowded parts.