Welcome to episode number 67 of The Growth Booth, where today we are going to be talking about virtual assistants. This is the first of a two-part series where I'm going to be talking about VAs. Today we'll dive into how you can find a VA, what you should expect, the kinds of jobs they can do, and then in the next episode, we'll dive more into managing VA and how you can make sure that you're getting the absolute best from that relationship that you're setting up.

So, the first thing that you need to think about when hiring a VA is the pre-hiring tasks, which are assessing why you actually need one, learning a little bit about the culture, deciding on your budget, and building out a job description. And then once you've done that, you can move on to hiring a VA.

So in terms of prehiring, what I think is really important is to assess your why. Why do you actually need a VA in the first place? Why do you need a virtual assistant? I think it's a good idea to start thinking about the types of tasks that you would like to delegate to a virtual assistant. For me, I think virtual assistants are incredibly well-equipped to handle things like social media, and that could be the entire management and communication on social media channels for your business. Customer support is just a complete no-brainer, I think at this point, content creation as well, admin.

Recently I had one of my virtual assistants organize flights for me. This is something that you can do. It's quite easy that they can do the heavy lifting, and oftentimes the jobs that the virtual assistant might do might only save you 20 or 30 minutes, but this really accumulates. When you have a virtual assistant who's well-trained and can work as your right-hand person there, you can end up saving yourself enormous amounts of time by offloading tasks to them that today you probably couldn't imagine offloading to anyone.

Another time I used my VA to organize flights was when I was flying to Tokyo. It was quite a long trip. I was traveling all the way from Buenos Aires, and I asked her to find out all the different options that I had at my disposal: who were the carriers, what were the prices, what were the flight times, and so on and so forth. This is a simple task which probably saved me at least an hour and allowed me to find the very best flights that were going to fit my needs.  It's not just about things specifically related to your online business. It could be anything at all, really, any kind of tasks that can be done online, even if it's related to your personal life. 

I think it's important to learn a little bit about the culture of your VA. These days, any virtual assistants that I hire, they're almost always from the Philippines. The Philippines is a great breeding ground for very talented workers in a whole wide range of fields. We've got people in the Philippines who do video editing, actually, for this podcast, and he's fantastic. We've got people who do programming and development for some of our software tools. We've got customer support, virtual assistants, coders, and other bits and pieces as well. The Philippines is a great place to hire people. 

But you should still take some time to learn a little bit about the culture, starting with holidays, which are the important holidays that you should respect. What about local holidays that may exist in the Philippines, but elsewhere they don't. So they've got a bunch of them. They've got their own Independence Day. They've got Bonifacio Day. I hope I pronounced that one right. National Heroes Day, amongst others. There's also health benefits that you might want to consider when hiring someone. Do you want to provide benefits like health insurance, for example? These are things that will make good perks oftentimes for virtual assistants and employees that you may hire in the Philippines. 

The next thing that you need to decide on is your budget. How much are you willing to pay? And one of the first questions that I get when asked about hiring a virtual assistant, other than where to actually find them, and we'll get to that shortly, is how much do you pay them? We're typically looking at between $3 an hour at the low end, up to about $10 an hour at the high end, and that would be for an absolute superstar. You can hire people at incredibly good rates, and it really can be a win-win scenario because you're leveraging a developing economy.

You should also figure out the different payment methods that you could potentially use, and we'll get into more of these later on, and the schedule in which you'll pay. You probably also want to consider conversion fees that may be apparent when making these payments, because you should probably absorb these yourself rather than expecting your Filipino virtual assistant to absorb these for you. You always want to make sure that you're providing fair compensation. I would go to the extreme of saying you want to be beyond fair to make sure that from a financial standpoint, there's a lot of positivity happening from the outset, and you're not trying to nickel and dime someone who's providing a great service or great work for you.

The next point that I would like to consider before hiring a virtual assistant is actually taking the time to construct a job description. This is going to help give me clarity in my mind about what I'm looking for. What you'd want to include in a job description are things like a list of responsibilities and qualifications that you're looking for. If you've got someone who's creating content for you in English, then you're going to want to make sure that they've got a very high level of English.

You might want to also manage expectations around how many hours per week you're looking for someone. So if you're looking to hire someone full time, 40 hours a week, you should specify that because otherwise you might get someone who is only looking for part time work and vice versa. And then what are the working hours? What time zone do you expect your virtual assistant to work on? Are you expecting them to work on your time zone, which could be late through the middle of the night and early morning for them, or are you happy for them to be working on whatever time zone they prefer? 

In my case, because of the nature of the tasks that I typically have my virtual assistants doing, I'm quite happy for them to be working on their own time zone as long as we've got some overlap so that we can catch up with one another. Then if you are offering some kind of a trial period, which is really probably not necessary given how I will recommend that you actually hire someone, then just specify what that is. 

Then it comes to where are you actually going to find this virtual assistant? The two very best sources in my mind are onlinejobs.ph, that's the best one for finding a virtual assistant, and Upwork.com. Now upwork.com, you're going to find people from outside of the Philippines, whereas onlinejobs.ph, you'll only find people who are in the Philippines. It almost seems like onlinejobs.ph is sort of a specialist area for virtual assistants, at least that's what I've found. You may want to publish a job in multiple places, but I would be pretty happy just going direct to onlinejobs.ph. You're going to be able to tap into a huge talent pool there and find someone, find multiple people to start working with you. 

The next step is hiring. This is where you start to roll out the job posts. So you've already got a job description fleshed out at this point. I would say that you also want to make sure that you've got some keywords built into it. When I say keywords, what I'm really talking about are words related to the skills or the tasks that you're going to be outsourcing. The reason you want keywords is because if a potential candidate for your job is searching through onlinejobs.ph, they might be searching using keywords, and if your job description turns up there, then it may be because you've used certain keywords. You can use that to your advantage. 

I'll give you an example. Let's say you are hiring someone, want to hire a virtual assistant to help with your ecommerce store, then I would include the words ‘ecommerce store’. If part of their job is going to be writing product descriptions, then I would include ‘product descriptions’ in the description of the job post.

You also want to make sure that you manage expectations regarding the salaries and the benefits that you're willing to offer. Sometimes I leave this open and I say, “Let me know what you are expecting for your salary,” and then they can come back to me with what they are expecting. It's an open marketplace, so you're going to have a lot of different people putting their hand up to work for you. I think that automatically works as a measure to make sure that a virtual assistant doesn't just give you a crazy high price. Because if they do give you a crazy high price for the job, then chances are you might end up choosing someone else. I think that this sort of fixes itself, if you like. 

Listing out any benefits that you may have is also a good idea. So, for example, if you are willing to provide things like health insurance or paying the 13th month of the year, or not requiring that your virtual assistant works on public holidays in the Philippines, then these are the types of things that you want to add in there because that's going to make the job much more attractive to the virtual assistant. 

Once you publish your job, you're going to start getting applicants, and you want to start filtering them out. I tend to do this according to the skills and the experience that they've got. Typically, I'm going to be wanting to hire someone who's got a good level of experience because it's just going to save me time and headache, and not just experience in working in the type of job that I'm offering, but also experience in the skill set that I'm looking for. If having perfect written English is important, then I want to make sure that they tick the boxes in that area. 

I want to look through the CVs and resumes and cover letters that I will receive, and in the job description, I'm going to be asking for specific things. I want to make sure that I'm not just getting a cookie-cutter reply here. I want to make sure that the candidate is specifically replying to questions that I may have posed them, and if they're not, then they'll be filtered out immediately. 

In most cases, it's a good idea to ask for applicants’ references just to verify that their skills and experiences are as they say they are. This is not that important though, because you're going to have an opportunity to test out the virtual assistant firsthand by having them do some work for you anyway in the next step, which is the second pass I go through when filtering out my applicants. So the first one is to look at their CVs, their background, their experience, and then once you've done that, it's to identify people that still tick the boxes and set them up with a test job.

Now, the test job is something that I want to pay for. I'm not looking for them to do a job for me for free, firstly, because I don't think that's fair, but secondly, because I want to make sure that my virtual assistant has got an easy way of getting paid by me. I want to make sure that we go through that whole process. A test job might be something that's worth $5, so we're not talking a huge amount of money, but I want to make sure that they can actually get paid and receive the money. I want to early on flesh out if there are any hidden fees or anything like that that we didn't know about.

I want to set up a test job for a number of applicants, and typically I'll test out five or six different people. The job that I'll have them do is something that I'm going to hopefully be repeating when they come on board working for my company. One simple one, if they're going to be doing social media, would be “I want you to come up with ten social media posts for my brand. These are the key messages that I'm looking to convey. I want you to send over what the posts would be and tell me how long it took you.”

By the way, “Tell me how long it took you so that I can pay you and tell me what your hourly rate is.” So if someone says that their hourly rate is $5 an hour and they complete the job and they say, look, “This took me 30 minutes,” I'll say, “Okay, great, so your rate is $5. Now I'm going to pay you $2.50 for that.” It allows me to assess the quality of the work that has been done. It allows me to assess how long it took them to do it, and then it allows me to actually pay the applicant as well.

Typically, I'll try to come up with a job that's going to take more than 30 minutes, that might take an hour or two so that I've got a better gauge on that. Sometimes I'll even do multiple parts to the job. So the first part might be something like social media posting, the second part might be research, or it could be something else like writing a product description or something like that.

The key though is that you're trying to assess the abilities of the candidates of the applicants in a number of different tasks. Most of my virtual assistants are not people that just focus on one single thing. They're people that can do multiple, sort of like a broad range of tasks and I like to assess that from the get-go. I find that the test jobs are a win-win because you get to see how the virtual assistant is working firsthand. 

At this point, after they've done the test jobs, you may be ready to just go out there and hire someone. If you are, fantastic. I've gone oftentimes where I've hired two people or three people and I might hire them on a part time basis to begin with, 20 hours a week, and give that more like an extended test, and then based on that end up hiring one person full time. The good news is it's very cost-effective. You can get amazing tasks done and you can test someone out without having any fixed and permanent contract.

This is also why I said earlier that having a trial period is less important because if the virtual assistant is a contractor, then you're not going to be obliged to keep them on indefinitely anyway. Obviously, you want to make sure that you keep your end of the bargain up, and you're not just going to lay them off without any notice or anything like that. But at the end of the day, they are contractors, and you can just say that there's no more work. Most of the virtual assistants that I've worked with in the past, I’ve always gone into hiring them with the idea of having them on as a full-time employee working 40 hours per week.

There is one other thing that you can do and really should do when you're hiring a virtual assistant. However, it's another one of these things that I feel like sort of takes care of itself, and that is to actually have an interview with the virtual assistant prior to hiring them full-time. The best way in my opinion to do that this is to have a video call so you can see face to face the person, you can see what might be going on around them and you can assess their spoken English skills and go through any other questions that you may have about their experience. Just get to know the applicant a little bit more. I don't always do this though because I feel like this just happens naturally as part of the trial periods and as part of the sort of testing one another out early on in the relationship. 

Now once you have hired someone and you've bought them into the fold, at that point it's about managing them and making sure they've got everything that they need to be able to do really good work for you. I think the most important thing are the instructions and the training that you give someone because if you ask someone to paint a wall but don't tell them what color you could get a wall, come back, that's yellow or blue or pink or black, and it would be your fault for not specifying it.

So the same is true when you are working with a virtual assistant. It's really important to give specific requirements about the work and to manage expectations. There are a few different ways that you can do this. I like to use different tools, like Loom, for example, to film videos. I like to give examples. And I also like to manage expectations around the amount of time that I expect them to spend on a task, because if I leave it open ended, then it could take hours and hours to do something that was hoping would be done in 30 minutes. I think it's good to manage expectations there a little bit as well.

Regular check-ins are important, but not to the point of micromanaging. So you might want to have a weekly meeting with your virtual assistant, or you might want to have them provide you with a report once a week showing the work that's been done. You can also do this using the time clocking software if you're using anything like that as well, where they can specify the amount of time that was spent on each project.

We do time tracking, not in a formal way, just so that we know how much time was spent on each project. Because oftentimes the virtual assistants that I've got in my team are working on multiple different businesses, so I want to be able to sort of build them out accordingly to each of the businesses. It's more of an internal thing for me, but the side benefit is I can see how much time they've spent on each project. 

The next thing I would recommend is to utilize communication and project management tools. One of my favorites right now is Trello. You can set up free accounts for Trello and this is how you can manage projects on a board, visually, if you like. And one of the simplest ways to set this up is to sort of start building a pipeline. So maybe on the left hand end of the board you'll have work that's coming soon, then you'll have another board that says, ‘Next up’ and you'll have another part of the Trello board for them to be working on right now. It's a little bit hard to explain how Trello works. The best way is to head over to trello.com and take a look, but we use Trello boards for management of a lot of different projects and it works really well. 

There are multiple different options out there these days. I know that some of the businesses that I have use Asana, others use the likes of Google Drive. Then in terms of communication, Skype is good, Zoom, Teams is another one. You just want to find the simplest way to achieve what you're trying to achieve from a communication and management standpoint and use that and stay consistent with it. 

And then finally, I think providing feedback is important. Showing appreciation for the hard work that's been done. It doesn't cost you anything to say thank you, and providing feedback, be it constructive feedback or just, “Wow, this was wonderful,” kind of a thing. That's the best way for your virtual assistant to get better and better and better. So if something is done for me by my virtual assistant, but it's not really what I wanted, or it was done incorrectly, instead of being negative about it, I try to use that as a learning experience. 

In the next episode, we're going to be diving into managing the virtual assistant in more detail, and that'll be over on episode number 68 at The Growth Booth, coming out a week from now. Like I said, we'll get into more of the management, day-to-day, and different tips and tricks to get the best from your virtual assistant.

There are a couple of blog posts that I've done over the years which you can find on Aidanbooth.com, and I will provide links to those in the Show Notes. One of them is aidanbooth.com/virtual-assistant-gameplan and the other is aidanbooth.com/virtual-assistant-tips. But like I say, I'll provide links to those in the show notes along with a transcription and links to some of the other tools and platforms that we have discussed here in this episode. 

I think for me, the last thing I'll say here is that if you're not using a virtual assistant, there is absolutely zero downside in testing this out. A virtual assistant could change your life. It could change the trajectory of your business by offloading a lot of the less strategic tasks that you may otherwise need to do on a day-to-day basis to someone who, quite frankly, might be better than you at doing them anyway. That's certainly the case with my virtual assistant. So we'll wrap this episode up here, and I will see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth.