Becoming an entrepreneur offers various benefits that can help your personal and professional life. It makes you feel proud and allows you to create a memorable legacy. This new venture also enables you to become a boss, pursue your passion, set a flexible schedule, and control your financial future.
As your business grows, so will your daily responsibilities. It can be challenging to accomplish everything in a day, but hiring a virtual assistant (VA) can help run your business more efficiently and free up more time. However, you can only enjoy the benefits if you find a reliable helping hand.
There’s a handfull of things to consider before hiring a virtual assistant, but here’s an eight-step guide to hiring a responsible virtual assistant.
1. Write the Tasks You Want to Assign
Outsourcing means delegating tasks that aren’t high-priority but are time-consuming, even if you like doing them or have the skills to accomplish them. This step is especially crucial for rapidly growing companies because you’ll have more responsibilities. While it may be challenging to outsource these assignments to others, it can significantly improve your work process.
This step is also helpful for entrepreneurs if there are tasks they simply don’t want to do because they dislike them. Moreover, hiring a virtual assistant can help with tasks that require specific knowledge and skills, especially if you don’t possess them.
2. Create a Job Description
Once you’ve enlisted all the tasks you must delegate, create a notice that you’re hiring a General Virtual Assistant. It must have an overview of your company, necessary qualifications, skills, experience, and a comprehensive list of duties. Don’t include tasks requiring specialized skills; ensure all assignments are at a similar skill level to justify the offered hourly rate. Also, specify the necessary tools, applications, or software the VA should use.
3. Shortlist Potential Applicants
Review applications and conduct video interviews with the top five to ten candidates to read facial expressions, assess their spoken English skills, test their internet connection, and determine compatibility. You should also ask them about their goals, hobbies, work styles, strengths, and weaknesses to understand them better. Moreover, consider requesting a free personality test to determine if they fit well in the company. Avoid candidates who refuse video interviews.
4. Evaluate the Candidates
Before hiring a virtual assistant, give the top three candidates a test task. It will help you see how well they perform in an assignment that will be part of their daily responsibilities and determine who’s the best fit for the job. Your main goal here is to evaluate for attention to detail.
5. Schedule a Trial Run
Once you hire the best candidate, conduct a 30-, 60-, or 90-day trial period. It will incentivize your new virtual assistant with an incentive to perform well. Remember to have them sign a formal Service Agreement to prevent future discrepancies.
6. State Your Expectations
You can ensure success with a virtual assistant by being clear about your expectations, like your needs, turnaround time, and frequency of updates. You should also describe what success looks like for you and your relationship with your VA.
7. Assign the Needed Tasks
When delegating tasks to a virtual assistant, clearly convey objectives and expectations and let them recap instructions to ensure understanding. You should also document business standards, style guides, and other guidelines to help them perform well. Moreover, be clear about deadlines and reporting expectations, and note staggered deadlines if applicable.
Creating video walkthroughs of tasks using tools like Loom is also highly recommended and can save you a lot of time.
8. Hold Your Virtual Assistants Accountable
You can maintain productivity and review your VA’s performance by providing regular check-ins. You can also manage productivity and attendance and minimize distractions by using time-tracking tools and Slack for daily communication.
Conclusion
A rapidly growing business is good news for entrepreneurs, but no business owner has time to handle all tasks simultaneously in one day. You can be more efficient and focus more on running your company by following our guide to hiring a reliable virtual assistant.
If your business needs help hiring a virtual assistant, contact Rad Hires! Our company is committed to finding talent whose career goals align with your current and future needs. Schedule a consultation now!