Entrepreneurs have a lot of things on their plate, and usually, the mundane daily tasks are taking a lot of their valuable time, overwhelming them and decreasing their productivity. By hiring a virtual assistant to do all the creative, technical, and administrative tasks, you can improve your productivity and focus on the things that will significantly improve your business.
How to hire work from home virtual assistant? Prepare all the tasks that you want to delegate to your virtual assistant, find a proper platform for hiring remote VA, set interview with a few candidates, and pick the best one, train them and manage them until they are really great at doing their job.
Virtual assistant jobs are becoming very popular in the business world. A virtual assistant (VA) is a person who is providing a variety of day-to-day administrative services to their clients while working remotely from their home. Usually, virtual assistants are not working full-time for their client, but a few hours a day/week.
A lot of people think that virtual assistant job is similar to a call center job. Usually, in the call center, people are providing customer care for their clients from home. Where the virtual assistant is doing practically everything from market research, data entry, emails, customer service, maintaining the social media for the client, etc., allowing their client to take leverage of their time, and relieve them from the additional stress.
Not only business tasks, but they can also manage some of your personal tasks, like sending flowers or thank you notes where it needed. They can even schedule a town car or an Uber to help you move freely around the city and do your meetings. Still, there can be some limitations to what they can do, and what working online allows them to do.
Virtual assistants should have some skills and experience to perform certain tasks. Even so, you should provide them the needed training for doing their jobs, and not expect that your new remote employee will be perfect and will handle all the tasks perfectly from the start, despite their experience, since every company is different in its own unique way.
Hiring a virtual assistant means that you are trusting them to do sensitive and important tasks, like maintaining your customer relationships or managing your calendar, so you need to be really careful in the recruiting process.
An effective way of attracting, evaluating and hiring a virtual assistant:
- Define the employment type:
First, you need to define what type of employment you’ll be offering. Is it going to be a full-time job or a part-time job? Then you need to make a cost-effective analysis to define if hiring a virtual assistant will be more financially effective for you. Make a calculation of how many hours you will expect your VA to work for you and how will you pay your new virtual assistant, e.g. paying per project or per hour (for smaller tasks), or offering longer contracts for long-term employees.
At first, you’ll probably need a few hours a week, and as you add new tasks, you might need to add a few more hours on their payroll. Most of the VAs work for several clients at once, so they prefer to know in advance for how many hours you will need them. Since at first, you are doing your tasks by yourself, you will have an idea of the timeframe for doing those tasks.
Another thing that you should think about is if you want to hire a VA from your own country and pay higher rates or outsource the job by picking a candidate from the vast talent pool and save money.
Create a list of tasks that you want your virtual assistant to do
It is really important to pre-define the tasks for your virtual assistant, before hiring them. Evaluate your daily or weekly tasks, and identify which ones you can offload to your assistant. Most of those daily or weekly tasks include common things like:
- Market research. Virtual assistants can do all of the market research for your business and brand, and save you countless hours of time, money and energy. All this research can contain gathering market information, identifying competitors and potential investors, and creating a presentation for you, your team and your clients;
- Managing finances. Virtual assistants can’t do your taxes, but they can keep track of all purchases and expenses, maintain your budget and make life easier for your accountant;
- Managing social media accounts. Virtual assistants can help you set up and maintain your social media accounts by taking care of all the posts. Gather information on statistics, trends, and creating reports with the purpose of growing the presence on social media;
- Creating content. Even though content creating is mainly a job for dedicated ghostwriters of content creators, virtual assistant occasionally can help in creating or editing content for having a constant flow of content on the website and thus growing the presence of the business;
- Email management. Virtual assistants can manage and organize your email inbox, and answer different kinds of general questions and job inquiries, but note that they can’t provide full customer support;
- Organizational activities. Virtual assistants can do all the scheduling activities, such as scheduling meetings, calendar organizing, flights booking, hotel bookings, cars reserving and pickup. They can even do tasks from your personal life such as scheduling doctor appointments, sending gifts etc.
Write the personality traits you expect your assistant to have.
Depending on your industry, you should determine the preferred personality traits you want your assistant to have, such as ready to meet the deadlines, good organizational and time-management skills, resourceful and problem-solving, and great communications skills, if you need them to interact with your customers and clients and make them feel comfortable.
While making the list, bear in mind that they will be working remotely and need skills to work independently.
Create the job description
After determining the tasks and the personal traits you expect your VA to have, you should create a detailed and accurate job description. You should list all the responsibilities, hours per week, duties and the needed qualifications.
Provide useful details of your company, since if you are outsourcing, your ad will be seen from people around the world, and they may have never heard about your company. You can also include some useful information, about your values and mission, about your way of working, your expectations and salary.
Make sure to highlight some important selling points, like if you are offering a flexible work schedule, are you providing your employees with tech devices, etc. Be honest if there are some trial periods.
Before posting the job on the freelance platforms, make sure that all of the required tasks and qualifications are listed in the description, double check if your description is without typos and misspellings.
Post your job on the online platform
If you want to hire a virtual assistant, you need to post your job ad on a website or platform that is dedicated to remote work. These websites are connecting employers and remote workers, freelancers and virtual assistants, by paying a fee to get access to a vast database of qualified candidates. On these sites, you can check ratings of the virtual assistants and the feedback from their previous employers.
Another way of hiring quality and trustworthy virtual assistants is through referrals. If you are a part of a business networking group, ask the members if they have some recommendations.
Third, if you don’t have time to do the whole hiring process, you can use the services of freelancers agency. These agencies will help you in hiring the best candidate but will cost a lot more, than working directly with the virtual assistant.
Review all the applications and make a list of the top candidates
After you post your job ad, you will receive a certain number of emails from potential candidates, with their resumes, references and cover letters. Go through each of these applications, and evaluate them, to find the best candidate that will meet your criteria. Of course, many of these candidates won’t meet your expectations.
If you want to narrow your search, you should probably ask for their salary requirements, so if some particular candidate requires a higher salary that’s more than you are offering, try to find a middle ground.
Interview the top candidates
After you made your list of top candidates, contact each one of them to set up an interview. For hiring a remote worker, especially a virtual assistant, a video call would be the most effective way of interviewing the candidate to get an idea of their experience and skills.
You will have the opportunity to ask them specific questions regarding different software apps that are required for doing the tasks efficiently. Depending on your niche, e.g. if they need to have great communication skills, it is essential they can be very clear when talking.
Offer the position to the best candidate
Once you went thoroughly through each application and done all the interviews with the candidates, and checked their references, contact the candidate that suits you best. Set up one final meeting to confirm all the details regarding the job, and provide all the needed documentation, that your new virtual assistant has to fill out.
The contract has to contain all the terms of the work agreement with your new employee, the amount that is paid to the virtual assistant, the scope of the tasks and projects, a timeline for completing the project, and all the offenses that can bring the termination of the contract.
If you are working with sensitive information, it would be the best, your new virtual assistant to sign a non-disclosure agreement, that binds them to keep confidential information secret. Of course, if there is an NDA violation, you can sue for all the damages that happen as a result of breaching the NDA contract.
Onboard and train your VAs
Since you probably have some preferences of how you want the tasks to be done, the best way to have an effective and efficient virtual assistant is to set clear directions on how to perform their tasks, with creating a manual with instructions, including screenshots and tutorials. Make sure that all the questions that appear from the VA’s working, to include them in the manual. So in case, you have a new VA, to help them have faster onboarding.
Even though your virtual assistants may be already proficient in all the needed tools, you still need to take the time to implement all the training plan you have made before. Train your virtual assistant on the most crucial aspects of the job to ensure that they are up to speed with all the processes and can have everything they need for successfully doing their job.
It will take some time until they are perfect in what they are doing, so be patient, give them positive, even negative feedback on how they are performing their job and have open communication with them.
Find the best virtual assistant tools
You will need a few software apps for having excellent communication with your virtual assistant. These apps or tools may include some calendar programs, apps for documents and passwords sharing for all the accounts they will have to use, such as Google Apps, Dropbox, LastPass, etc.
Set probationary period
You can start your working relationship with a test period that would be long enough to work through all job aspects, and short enough that either you or your new assistant can end the contract if you are not the best fit. For start, you can go with pay per hour or weekly rate.
Monitor the progress of your new virtual assistant
When hiring the virtual assistant, make sure that they have completely understood all key concepts and can complete the tasks that you have delegated to them. Give them some period to adapt, and if you notice that after that period of adaptation, they still seem confused about some tasks or are under-performing, make sure that you talk to them and even provide some additional training.
Make a comparison of the invoiced hours and the completed amount of work. If you notice that there are some irregularities with the work hours, deadlines or quality of the work, be open and have a discussion with your employee about their problems.
Have constant communication with your virtual assistant
When working remotely, a lot of times there can be confusion about some details and aspects of the job. To prevent this, make sure to check up on your new assistant and ask for their feedback. Having frequent and clear communication with your virtual assistant will help both of you, since they can freely ask you for further instruction or explanation on a certain task, and you will get the most out of them. For example, you can have a video call every week, where both of you can share your thoughts.
What are the pros and cons of hiring a virtual assistant?
Pros
- A virtual assistant can complete the tasks much faster;
- You can delegate tasks that you don’t have a lot of knowledge;
- You can delegate tasks that are not that interesting for doing;
- You can direct your attention to more valuable parts of your business;
- Reduces the stress for doing everything in your business;
- You can earn more. If your hourly rate is worth more, you should be focusing your time on higher income activities, and let the VA do the smaller tasks for less hour rates.
Cons
- Hiring virtual assistants cost money. A virtual assistant can help you earn a lot more, but initially, you have to pay for their help;
- Let go the control of some tasks. Sometimes can be difficult to let go of the control you have over all of the activities;
- Spend some time in training your virtual assistant.
Which tasks can be done by a virtual assistant?
- Email filtering and management;
- Set up autoresponders such as MailChimp, Aweber, etc.;
- Book meetings with the clients;
- Follow up with customers or clients – asking for feedback or sending thank you notes;
- Making occasional calls;
- Managing the calendar;
- Managing the documents and files with using Dropbox, Google Drive etc.;
- Building database – updating the contact and email list;
- Booking flights and hotels;
- Doing personal tasks such as purchasing gifts for your loved ones;
- Do transcriptions on voicemails, podcasts, video or audio files etc.
- Creating weekly reports on tasks, sales, etc.;
- Making Powerpoint presentations;
- Communicating with all other team members;
- Recruitment tasks;
- Set-up the needed social media accounts – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter;
- Maintain and update all social media accounts;
- Making research on relevant topics for future blog posts and newsletters;
- Blog managing which will require basic WordPress knowledge;
- Posts publishing on your blog;
- Reply to the comments on your blog;
- Posting comments on other blogs or participating in different message boards or forums to increase the popularity of your blog;
- Responding to support tickets, using Zendesk od some other platform.