Virtual assistants are remote employees who work from the remote location and take up general administrative to marketing and many more services.
The distance does not matter, the virtual assistants make sure they work round the clock in their flexible hours. Since the hiring people believe these employees with important and dedicated job roles, like managing your files, folders, calendar or customer relationships, it makes a clear meaning to be extra careful when hiring them.
Here’s how to create a hiring process so that you view, evaluate and hire the best virtual assistant employee:
Define the Job position
When you have decided to recruit a virtual assistant, first list out the details regarding:
Employment type. Do you need to recruit a permanent team member or a part-time freelancer who can assist you with a specific project or job assignments? And make a study whether the job assigned is this going to be a full-time or part-time position?
Payment plan. What’s more cost-effective and money-making: paying for an hour (for small supporting tasks), paying for a project (when there’s a stipulated deadline) or providing monthly/yearly contracts (when you’re hiring full-term employees to handle various job duties)
Skillset requirements. What skills are mostly needed for this position? For example, should you hire a specialised generalist who can perform a wide range of general administrative services and competent in several activities or is it wise to look out for the candidates who are expertise in tasks like bookkeeping or market research or social media coordinator?
Create a suitable Virtual Assistant job description
Once you are aware of what you are looking for, it is time to correspond the job description to job seekers.
Below given are few tips to form a clear, optimized and well-organized job description for virtual assistant job role:
Furnish your company’s details. Since there are no location boundaries in website, your job advertisement may be viewed by people from all over the world who might not be aware with your company. Make sure to include important facts and useful information, like your objective, mission and values or a quick sneak peek description of your teams and clients.
Detail the profile of an ideal candidate. Considering your new recruit will work remote location, think what skills they require to be generative, beyond the exact job requirements. For instance, it’ll be useful if they’re familiar with association and task-management and prioritizing tools, like Slack, Tasque and Trello. Also, it is important to specify essential soft skills, like communication, interpersonal skills and the ability to work independently with no monitoring.
Describe your way of working. Define and Encourage job seekers to apply by sharing significant job details and any skill and information that’ll help them evaluate if they’re a good fit. Be clear about prospects, payment and time schedule. Also, be transparent about probation periods, if there are any.
Highlight your selling points. Are you providing remote employees with latest technological techniques? Are you paying for shared working spaces at their location? Are you offering completely flexible, convenient working hours? Mention any increments and advantages that will capture potential job seekers attention.
Post your jobs and find Virtual Assistants through online mode
To recruit virtual assistants, find where they are. Maybe not physical mode, but virtually, by advertising on job portal websites suitable for remote work. There are also other job portal websites that intents to connect recruiters with virtual assistants, remote location workers and freelancers. In this case, you are usually pay a subscription fee to get admit access to a candidate database or share your job requirements so you can be matched with eligible job seekers.
Below given are some of the best places to look for virtual assistants:
Post your job advertisements on: Flex Jobs, Remote.co, Remotive, Skip the drive, Working Nomads
Connect with eligible candidates on: Guru, Upwork, Virtual staff finder, Zirtual.
Seeking to get your job advertisement in front of the right employees? Try Workable website for free advertisements to quickly reach all of the top job portal websites and social media and manage the full recruitment process.
Assess Virtual Assistant candidates
Finding right remote employees can be tough and challenging, as you don’t get a chance to meet and correspond with candidates in-person. On the other hand, you can use video software like Jobma and Spark Hire or simple video call applications like Hangouts and Skype. Here are few tips to get the most of your interviews with virtual assistants:
Assess communication skills. Communication is a major part of a virtual assistant’s job. They need to communicate efficiently on your behalf (for example when they correspond with clients or make flight bookings), but they should also be able to stay in touch with their remote team as quick as possible and effectively. While recruiting eligible candidates, keep in mind the candidates who:
- Observe your guidelines quickly.
- Clarify with follow up questions when they are not sure.
- Take initiative in beginning a productive conversation and landing up in bringing a solution.
- To convey themselves clearly both verbally and even in writing,
- Use job-related assignments. A good way to evaluate soft skills, like organizational abilities or attention to detail, is to use assignments that simulate real job duties. For example, ask candidates to research options for a software type you consider buying:
- Provide job-related tasks. The best way to evaluate their technical skills, soft skills, task management ability, paying attention to detail is to assign real time job duties.
For instance: Ask the individual to browse details about certain client and their strength in the market.
Capable candidates should research the internet and pull out the details of the concerned person. They should analyse their position and strength in the market.
The best candidate will form a consolidated and thorough list though which you can come to a verdict.
Reward them with extra points who gives a very detailed research points and taken more efforts. You can also share the list or report for further decision-making. If you need assistance to valuate the list sent by the candidates, make use of the recruitment assessment tools which offers varied range of pre-recruitment tools to help you to take better decisions.
After you’ve drawn and valuated many number of candidates successfully, you’re ready to recruit a virtual assistant. The next step is to employ them onboard and train them for the specific job role. To make this process simple, use tools like HelloSign or DocuSign to accomplish job-related documents. Live Videos and brand manuals are also useful when you want to detail your company’s objectives and rules from a distance. Once your virtual assistant is hired on board, they’ll take up important administrative tasks or services leaving you relieved and, enabling you to put your focus on other aspects of your job.
Advantages of hiring Virtual Assistant
Whether you recruit a single Virtual Assistant or you form an entire team of virtual staff, outsourcing business to remote team members can have a noteworthy impact on your efficiency and the growth of your business.
Here are some of the main well-being of recruiting a Virtual Assistant:
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You don’t need a physical work environment
Depending on where you abode, renting a physical work space can be quite expensive and does not fit into your budget. Recruiting a Virtual Assistant helps you to start forming your team while keeping your budgeting expenses within your limit. With an exception of using few software tools for corresponding with and organizing your virtual staff, the primary cost of onboarding virtual staff is the salary amount you pay for their devoted time.
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Virtual Assistants does not cost a great deal and are economic
Virtual Assistants are cost-effective alternative instead of hiring regular full-time employee. Most Virtual Assistants work as independent contractors and based on where they are put up, their hourly or weekly rate may be significantly lesser than what a full-time local employee would charge you. A Virtual Assistant in Korea, for example, will typically cost considerably less than a Virtual Assistant in South America costs for the same tasks and job responsibilities.
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Do not limit with few talent and skills
Not every business entrepreneur has control to the available talent pool of eligible and capable candidates for a specific job role. A Virtual Assistant can technically or non-technically work from any part of the world as long as they have a reliable internet connection. If you do not wish to hire someone locally increases your number of capable candidates for specific roles increasingly.
Virtual Assistants are not the only individual professionals who work remotely. There are email marketing companies spread across different cities operated with skilled and talented team members.
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Invest more time in your areas of strength
You cannot master every skill nor you should have over-confidence to become so. Every task and step that is needed to run your business which includes your strength and weakness. You may be poor in completing your weakest part of your business where other person is very well-equipped to handle such things. Recruiting people to split tasks helps you to pay attention on other activities in your business and where you really excel.
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Focus on high-value and money generating activities
Finally, when you onboard a Virtual Assistant, you get freed up and devote more time to focus on activities that add meaningfully more value to your business than the task you assignes to your Virtual Assistant. In other words, you spare more time to focus on activities and tasks that have a major impact on your income.