Hiring a quality virtual assistant may seem at first like a daunting task, but it is actually quite simple and just requires a bit of patience.
Over the last several years, I have hired 100+ online freelancers from all around the world, so with that in mind, I have put together this short outline of how I would hire a virtual assistant knowing what I know now.
For a virtual assistant job, I have had the best luck with people based in the Philippines. I find that Filipinos have a strong work ethic, tend to be very responsible, are highly responsive, and take their work seriously.
The two best places to hire people based in the Philippines are www.OnlineJobs.ph and www.Upwork.com.
Job Posting: To get the best results, you need to put together a well-thought-out job post describing the types of tasks you plan to have your assistant perform for you. The posting should indicate that you are hiring for an ongoing position and that it will be for a virtual assistant role. Below is a sample job posting.
Sample Job Posting
Title: ONGOING ROLE: Business Owner Seeks High Performing Virtual Assistant
Job Post Content: I am the owner of a business that is growing rapidly, and I need a high-quality virtual assistant (VA) to help me with basic online research tasks, Google Calendar management, data entry, and other similar projects. The VA should be comfortable working with Dropbox / Google Docs / Google Sheets / PowerPoint. The VA should be available at least 15 hours per week and should be able to perform tasks each day for at least two (2) hours per day. Please submit your resume and a short fifty (50) word description of your work experience to date and why I should choose you.
Narrowing Applicants Down
With the above post, I am sure you would get 100+ applicants in a matter of days. So, the question becomes how do you filter and pick the best person? You should filter all applicants by number of hours billed on the relevant platform, by their project success rate percentage, and by the quality of their written communication that you receive back. You want to target someone who has billed at least 500 hours and is doing virtual work, ideally as a VA, as a full-time job and whose written English is fairly strong. Once you narrow down the field of applicants to 3 or 4 high-quality options, I suggest assigning each of them a basic web research / data entry project and allowing them to work for about 5 hours. Then review the results of each one and pick the applicant who followed instructions the best and produced the highest quality output given the time spent.
Cost: A quality virtual assistant today should be anywhere in the $5 to $7 per hour range. Remember that most hiring platforms take 10-20% of the total amount earned by freelancers through the platforms. The platform tracks the time, and your credit card gets automatically billed for time spent.
How to Scale It Up
Once you get the hang of the above process, you can modify it as needed based on the type of role you are looking to fulfill. I often use this approach when I have a very large project that I know will require 500+ hours to complete. Large research / data entry projects like this would take 10+ weeks for a single person to complete by themselves, so the approach I’ve found works best is to hire multiple assistants and then divide up the project into chunks.
When dividing work, consider using a Google sheet and assigning each person a set of topics/components to handle. Then, give each person access to the same Google sheet, which allows them to enter all the information into a single database. When I do this, I normally have a project manager (also a freelancer) in charge of hiring the team through Upwork or OnlineJobs.PH, and then I perform a quality control review of all the entered data and provide feedback to each of the freelancers to make sure that the data is being entered correctly into the spreadsheet.
