General Virtual Assistance

Virtual Assistant: What They Do, How to Hire, Manage and More…

Are you looking to hire a virtual assistant?

Or are you thinking of becoming one yourself?

In this article, we will talk about both the above topics in detail.

Here’s what we’ll cover. Use the links below to jump to the section of your choice.

What Is A Virtual Assistant?
Why You Need A Virtual Assistant
What Tasks Can Virtual Assistants Do For You?
Where To Find Virtual Assistants?

Let’s get started!

***What Is A Virtual Assistant?

A virtual assistant is a person who provides various services to entrepreneurs or businesses from a remote location. There are a host of things that virtual assistants can do, including:

Social media management
Event management
Managing calendars, appointments and emails
Preparing reports
Personal tasks like booking hotels and restaurants
Simple digital marketing tasks

It’s a never-ending list!

In fact (pardon the pun here) they can do virtually anything.

Think of them as what Jarvis is to Iron Man.

They’re not there in person – but they’re still a vital part of your business.

If you’re curious about all the different tasks they can do, we’ve outlined 98 tasks that you can outsource to VAs.

We’re not going to go over each of those here, but we’ll touch upon the main ones later.

But why do you need a VA in the first place?

***Why You Need A Virtual Assistant – 3 Great Reasons

Virtual assistants are everywhere these days. More and more people are turning to them and it looks like they’re here to stay. Here’s why you should hire one yourself.

1. Better Use of Your Employees

Say a mid-level or senior-level employee had to choose between these two options:

Playing an active role in spearheading growth strategies
Preparing routine reports on a daily basis

What would they choose?

Chances are, they’d opt for option #1.

Why?

It’s more interesting and seems more important.

But that doesn’t mean you can neglect these mundane tasks like emails and finances. Your business would crumble without this boring repetitive work.

So how do you keep your in-house team happy but still get the mundane tasks done?

With virtual assistants.

They can take up most of these mundane tasks that can be done remotely.

The result?

A full-time employee (especially those you are more senior or talented) can stay focused on more pressing matters that need to be done in person at your office.

2. Reduced Costs

One of the main reasons why entrepreneurs and businesses outsource work is that it costs less.

Saving Salary Cost

Instead of hiring a full-time employee for a small job, you could choose to outsource it to someone at an hourly rate.

Lower pay isn’t the only way you can save money with virtual professionals though.

Saving Training Cost

A business owner can also save a lot when it comes to training costs.

Usually, companies have to train their in-house team on tasks and duties after they’ve cleared the hiring process.

All this costs time and money – that most companies can’t afford.

With VAs though, small business owners can hire professionals who already experts in their field.

This way, a business owner doesn’t have to waste time and money training them – they can get started right away.

3. Saves Time

Another reason why small business owners turn to VAs is that it saves them a LOT of time.

We all know that time is money – especially in business.

For example, let’s say you are a small business with no HR team.

Your employees shouldn’t spend hours posting job advertisements, doing preliminary resume screening, organizing an interview process – all on a hiring process for someone at an entry-level position.

Why not skip all this and get a professional to work on specific tasks instead?

With virtual assistants, this is what you’ll get:

You’ll have verified experts that you can hire in no time
They’re time savers as you don’t have to waste time training them
As they can stay focused only on tasks you’ve hired them for, they’ll get the work done quicker than someone juggling multiple demands

It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

Take a look at what Liam Martin, co-founder of Time Doctor has to say about the things he’s learned from hiring VAs for over 10 years.

***What Can Virtual Assistants Do?

I’ll be honest.

A more appropriate title here would be – “What Can’t Virtual Assistants Do For You?”

As mentioned earlier, there’s a host of things you can outsource to them.

It’s far too many to list down here, so we’re just going to cover the most common virtual assistant work by us VAs.

1) Administrative Work

You can hire virtual assistants to be…

*cue drumroll*

Assistants.

They can take over all the business duties that a typical administrative assistant does.

That entails:

Diary management – Scheduling meetings and appointments
Answering phone calls
Basic data entry
Organizing your to-do list and calendar
Booking travel arrangements

Basically, anything that an administrative assistant usually does.

The only difference here is that an executive assistant doesn’t have a desk in front of your office.

Apart from that – it’s pretty much the same thing as a typical administrative assistant.

2) Personal Tasks

You can always hire a VA to help out with tasks in your personal life as well.

Here are a few examples:

Organizing your personal to-do list and calendar
Booking travel arrangements for weekend trips or vacations.
Helping you make purchases – gifts, books, stationery, hardware and perhaps even clothes!

As a lot of these tasks don’t need to be done by someone in person, they can easily be outsourced to a VA instead.

3) Content Creation

Content writing has propelled itself to the top of the digital marketing ladder in recent years.

There’s a reason why large corporations put out blog posts often. It helps boost their search engine optimization and drive traffic to their website.

Having someone oversee this process can be a great digital marketing decision on your part.

If you have a blog that puts out new blog posts on a regular basis, you will:

Have more people finding it on search engines
Have more of them clicking on it and visiting your website
Have more conversions as a result

The problem is, content creation isn’t easy. In addition to writing, there are a bunch of specific tasks like research, finding and editing images, uploading articles to your blog and so on.

That’s why it’s a good idea to outsource your blog posts to a virtual assistant. You can either outsource the ancillary tasks like images or uploads or the entire process.

For example, an increasing number of agents and brokers are using virtual assistants for their real estate marketing activities – including content creation, organizing open houses, social media and so on.

Outsourcing it to only one person ensures that each piece of content has a personal touch and doesn’t dip in quality.

***Where To Find Virtual Assistants

At this point, it’s clear that having these virtual team members can be of great assistance to you.

They can boost your productivity, take routine stuff off your hands, manage travel arrangements – the list goes on.

Now let’s get to the hiring process – How do you hire a virtual assistant?

What’s the interview process like?

This poses a unique challenge because you’re never going to be face-to-face with them.

As they’re remote workers, there’s always an element of risk associated with them.

How will I know they’ll be working diligently?

How do I verify their credentials?

Are they trustworthy?

These are all valid questions.

The first solution is to get virtual professionals from reputed sources.

The second solution is to use a time tracking tool to ensure they are working diligently.

Your selection process should also be good enough to weed out unsuitable candidates. Check out this list of qualities to look for in a VA.

But let’s start with where you can find them.

Freelance Marketplaces

Think of a freelance marketplace as the NBA draft – without all the hype.

You have a bunch of prospects and you select one that appeals to you.

It’s that simple.

This is what happens:

You post a job listing on a freelance marketplace
Freelancers can respond to that listing if the job description interests them
You can then sift through all the replies to hire a virtual assistant that suits you

There are a few challenges though.

You need to be extremely clear in the job description – it’s not uncommon for arguments to take place over what the requirements were once it’s payday
Usually, there are hundreds of replies to each posting. While this gives you a large talent pool to choose from, it’s often way too much to sift through.
As there’s no real interview process for screening, you may even have a lot of bogus applicants to go through in a virtual staff finder.

THEN WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR! HIRE YOUR BEST BUDDY VIRTUAL ASSISTANT NOW!!!