How To Hire A Virtual Assistant? (9 Steps)

You may need to do quite a few tasks that aren’t really essential. You plan to hire a virtual assistant to help you do them but you’re unsure about the hiring process. Here are the 9 steps you can follow to hire a virtual assistant that meet your needs.

1. Know What Your Need Virtual Assistant Do for you

To begin the process of hiring a virtual assistant, you should first be clear about your goals. Decide on the tasks that you want your visual assistant to work on.

After having clearly defined your goals at the starting point, it will help you in choosing the right person for the job. In addition, knowing what you want is a good way to weed out the candidates who are not suited for you. Keep in mind, these goals will also be important if you decide to use a VA management or VA company service. In this case, they’ll help you choose the most suitable candidate from their pool of VAs.

2. Figure Out Your Budget

Before hiring a virtual assistant, ask yourself if your budget is flexible or fixed. Based on that, you can have an image of how much money you’ll spend on VAs. If you finally hire a good VA and know his work performance, then you can work out the time the task can be done. If you want to reduce the project completion time, you need to hire another or more VAs, that is to say, you need to increase your budget.

3. Search for a Virtual Assistant

You can search for VAs if you want to contact them directly. There are many ways you can find them. For example, Upwork, Fiverr, and Problog, where I usually use to find writers. Also you can try to find them like Redditt and Quora. 

When reading through the applicant’s resume, be sure to take note of their skills, availability, location, and the length of time they have worked for their employers. Once you have narrowed down your search to a few candidates, contact them via email or through the site messaging services to request samples of their work (if any) and ask them some questions about themselves.

4. Write a Job Post

If you want to attract quality VAs that cannot be found by search, writing a job post would be a good choice. In a job post, where you should put all of the job duties that are inherent in the role, as well as any tasks that are specific to your business. Be sure that this list includes everything that needs doing, and also include any requirements or preferences, so that applicants know what you are looking for and what’s your expectation of them.

Therefore, VAs can decide whether or not to proceed in applying for the position from your job post. If the applicants are from a VA management or VA company service, you’ll be able to choose from several different VAs, and you can pick the one that best matches your needs.

5. Review Applications 

You’ll get several applications after your post is published. Then you need to look through applications one by one to select quality applicants with the right experience and skills you need. This step is to find suitable VAs to be involved in the test process.

If you find that an applicant is not a good fit, reject them politely. Rejecting applicants can actually improve the quality of responses to your post and therefore save your time.

6. Give your Candidates a Simple Test

Now you have some good candidates selected from the first round, then you need to test them to see if they meet your needs for your project. Create a simple test and assign it to them so you can see their level of English and their ability in the test. If you find there require some improvement, ask them to do it and later review it with feedback.

7. Schedule Video Interview for Your Top Candidates

After the simple test, you have selected some top candidates, then you’d better interview them through a video to know who you are going to hire. 

Another purpose of the video interview is to pick the most suitable ones from top candidates. Perhaps you’ll know VAs personalities and what kind of jobs are more suitable to them. Some VAs are not willing to attend a video interview, you’d better not choose them.

The common questions you prepare to ask VAs during video interviews are: 

• How long they’ve been providing virtual assistant services
• Where are they live
• What’s the hobby
• What are they like most about their work
• What projects they enjoy doing 

8. Train VAs Before They Start Their Task

After the video interview process, you’ll know who meets your demand best. After hiring VAs, you need to train them to do tasks. In order to save your time, you can have a training program. You can prepare a written manual or video tutorials for them to follow.

9. Give the Best Candidate a Trial Period

After training your VAs, start to hire them for a short trial period, for example, 30, 60 or 90 days. Then choose the best candidates for your job task for a long term. 

Let them do some tasks. Once your VAs complete the task, review their work and explain how to improve. After weeks or a month, you’ll know who is best and who is good. You can decide if you want to hire them after the trial period or not. If they are doing well for you, continue with them otherwise look for other candidates.

Final Thought

Sometimes, hiring a virtual assistant is a must, so you can focus on what matters most. However, there are many things to consider when looking for and hiring a VA. With the above 9 steps, hope you can hire a good VA for your task.