Stoked to hire your very first VA?
Silly, why wouldn’t you be? Virtual assistants are practically life-savers, whether it’s in the house or at home.
With their incredible support, you can earn your time back and do the things you love to do—breezing through your personal and professional lives. And the best thing about this? You don’t need to break the bank to have them in your corner.
These remote professionals come from all over the world, doing the heavy daily lifting, while you build your business.
But before you dream about all the amazing benefits of virtual assistants, you need to find the right remote worker first.
If you don’t know how to kickstart that journey, you’re in luck, because we have broken down the easiest steps to hire a virtual assistant.
What’s a Virtual Assistant?
A virtual assistant is a contractual remote worker who provides many business-related services to business owners and professionals.
Do People Hire Virtual Assistants?
Yes. Many entrepreneurs and business owners hire virtual assistants to manage escalating administrative work—all with consistency and less cost.
- Business Owners and Entrepreneurs
- Busy Professionals
- Large Corporations
- Coaches
- Online Educators
- Content Creators
- Digital Marketers
What Exactly Does a Virtual Assistant Do?
A virtual assistant generally provides administrative tasks like answering phone calls and managing emails. They work as independent contractors, offering flexibility to their employers.
But even though they mostly handle the typical day-to-day tasks, some VAs are super skilled in other specialized areas like content creation, digital marketing and graphic design. This makes them a versatile asset for a company.
Here are the common tasks that you can delegate to your remote helper:
- Data entry
- Inbox management
- Calendar management
- Travel management
- Customer service
- Marketing
- Bookkeeping
- Project management
- Research
Find out how to work strategically with a remote assistant manager.
Is It Worth Having a Virtual Assistant?
YES!
The time will come when you’ll finally decide that you’ve had enough of taking care of everything—and that is when you need a virtual assistant.
You can’t grow your business without a solid team to back you up.
If you handle every little thing in your business, you risk filling up your time with low-value work that doesn’t directly contribute to the growth of your company. You’ll be wasting more than 300 hours a year doing menial tasks.
Hiring a virtual assistant allows you to work ON your business, not IN it. By bringing them to the team, you free up your time to do more meaningful work and make more impact.
When you hire VAs, you get to work on what you’re good at, in the areas of your business where it’s needed the most.
Why Should You Hire a Virtual Assistant When You Can Work with a Regular Employee?
Remote working is dominating today’s business environment. And with that rise, virtual assistants are taking on the limelight, with demands growing stronger than ever.
What makes VAs a better hire than yesterday’s regular office employee?The big VA benefits!
- VAs can boost your productivity and efficiency.
- VAs cost less money to hire.
- You can work with the best the world has to offer.
- Virtual assistants are easily scalable and flexible.
By offloading your back-bending workload to a remote professional, you have more time to work on strategies and projects that can drive your company forward.
Hiring a virtual assistant is perhaps the most cost-effective solution for your staffing needs. You only pay for the hours they worked without setting up a central workplace and providing office equipment.
Geography will never be an issue when you hire virtual assistants. You have talents around the world to tap into. And access skills and expertise that are hard to find locally. This increases your chances of finding the right person to help grow your business.
Virtual assistants can work around your schedule and preferences. If you want them to work odd hours on a part-time contract, they very much can.
VAs offer their services depending on your current needs. Up or down, without a hassle, you can easily scale them.
How Do You Prepare to Hire a Virtual Assistant?
Pat yourself on the back for getting to this point in your entrepreneurial life—you’re finally looking to hire a virtual assistant.
Once you let go of control, it’s easier for you to run your business and grow it to where you want it to be.
Although it happens remotely, hiring a virtual assistant needs preparation. Here are some easy steps to turn your VA into your greatest asset.
- Define Your Needs
- Assess Your Budget
- Create Proper Documentation
- Set Clear Expectations
- Test Your Relationship
You want to hire a virtual assistant to handle the small stuff. But before you make a list of what tasks to delegate, evaluate the situation first. Think about your everyday workload—in which areas of your operation do you need VA help?
Is it social media? Website management?
Create a job description, detailing the duties of the position and the skills necessary for the role. It’s easier to find the virtual assistant you need if you have all the requirements drawn up.
VAs are not made equal, which is why some virtual assistants get paid more than others. By looking at several factors, such as location, skills and experience and the difficulty of work, you can determine whether or not, you can afford them.
You have to know your budget so you can control your finances and ensure efficient resource utilization.
This is an important step to follow since work needs to achieve some level of consistency.
By creating step-by-step guidelines on how to execute a task, you can control the process and the quality of your VA’s output and receive your desired results.
These “expectations” can pertain to the performance and communication level that you wish to set with your virtual assistants.
This step is somehow part of the onboarding process, which is a great way to create a trusting environment. Setting expectations keeps everyone moving in the same direction. Your VAs will be able to use their abilities to meet the same ends.
It’s easy to get lost in your candidate’s spectacular resume and portfolio and forget about this important step.
Test the waters before jumping right into it, headfirst. Try giving your virtual assistant a test project, just to see if they have what it takes to excel in their role. After all, their credentials don’t really tell the whole story.
Yes, you’re hiring them for their skills and expertise. However, a successful working relationship goes beyond the quality of work. You need to be able to work with someone comfortably because sometimes personalities clash—and there goes “teamwork.”
We recommend letting your VA go through a probationary period for a month so you can assess their suitability for the job.
How to Manage Your Virtual Assistants after Hiring?
Great job on your virtual assistant hire!
As a gift, we’ll be giving you additional tips on how to manage your VAs so you can both thrive in your roles.
Make sure that you already have the tools to work effectively with your VA. The applications that you’ll be using have to be the same, so you don’t jump from one tool to another. This easily creates confusion and thus damages the workflow
Create an environment where feedback is encouraged. This helps a lot to address concerns earlier on and adjust your processes. Letting your VA share their insights drives professional development.
It’s important to respect each other’s time zone differences. When you’re setting deadlines or meetings, you have to be mindful of each other’s convenient times. This could go a long way toward fostering a positive working environment.
Avoid micromanaging. It’s a morale-sapping approach to management that stifles the creativity and development of your VA. Empower them by trusting them to handle their work.
Provide instructions instead, and guide them through the process by answering their questions.
Provide instructions instead, and guide them through the process by answering their questions.
Streamline Your VA’s Hiring Process with US!
Integrating virtual assistants into your company’s system can maximize your productivity and efficiency.
By heeding our guidelines on how to hire and manage a virtual assistant, you’re well on your way to not just finding the right VA but also ensuring a fruitful virtual collaboration.
However, if you need support landing a VA for your unique needs, we, at VAV Asia, will be very happy to assist you.