How to hire virtual assistants for your business?

Virtual Assistants are one of the rising jobs in the 21st century, where the initial job of assistant in an office is now transformed into a virtual one, making it all the way better and easier for the employers and employees to appoint and work, respectively in form of the most suitable places as per their needs and skills. They can be found in many countries and as per the demographic area they are likely to show more efficiency like a professional Canada virtual assistant is more likely to be more effective when working for Canadian businesses.

Benefits

Virtual Assistants are the magic potion in this work from home era. The lack of physical presence does have its own disadvantages, but comes with a lot more advantages, like, the virtual assistants who freelance, can be hired as per the need of the hour or task, making it easier in terms of finance and flexibility. Moreover, virtual assistants deal with work that is more monotonous in nature, and can deal with the administrative, financial, research, and even customer service-related tasks, etc. sparing your time for the core functions, and hence, more productivity with efficiency, better organization of the business, and obviously a well-deserved break for you!

How to hire

Jumping right into the procedure of how to hire a virtual assistant. Here is a step-by-step guide as to how to hire a virtual assistant, which you may use.

• Things to consider before

The very first step is the consideration of need of the virtual assistant for the business. You need to make sure and list down all the points like:

1. To begin with the “Why we need a virtual assistant”, consisting of all the work that is been lagged behind, or has become a prey to the inefficiency.
2. Then moving forward to “The tenure for which the virtual assistant is required”, where you can decide whether and which work required what kind of commitment, and you can further decide upon whether it can be done by one virtual assistant or two.
3. Then going ahead with the “Tasks required to be done by the virtual assistant”, consisting of the list of tasks rather than a overview of kind of tasks, like instead of customer service, it should have email management, and follow-up calls, etc, which would further help in the next step.
4. Moving on, with the tasks in hand, we can now make a list of the “Qualities required in the virtual assistant”, which would be then helpful in the final selection of the virtual assistants.

• What to look

In case you are a budding business, or a business who is planning to have a virtual assistant since day one, to avoid any future inefficiencies, here are a few general tips as to what to look in a virtual assistant:

1. Communication skills: As the job of virtual assistant is to make things smoother and help run the organization in a more efficient way, the basic need is the communication here, which is the rock-level need when aiming for organized work and structure at a place.
2. Organization skills: The interest and experience in tasks like making and keeping a schedule updated, organizing bills, phone lines, emails, invoices, etc.
3. Confidence: This work requires a lot of confidence as it is the building rock of stress-busting, and hence, needs to step-up and take off the load from the business which is starting to a chaos.
4. Area of interest or expertise: It would help in short-listing the virtual assistant, as in case of need in a technical work-related business, a technical student would be more helpful rather than a literature one.

• Where to find them

For hiring of virtual assistants there are a lot of ways to where you can either find the candidates. You can invite applications for the post of virtual assistants for your esteemed organization. Some of the ways are listed below:

1. Freelance Websites: These websites help you connect with freelancers, providing you a huge data base of candidates, along with flexibility of choosing the virtual assistant. As a freelancer works on projects, rather than on a constant tenure, it makes it easier for the organization to hire as per the need of the hour. And for as low as one week job, or even one hour job, and also it would be financially flexible. Websites like Up work, Fiverr, etc. can be really helpful.

2. Companies: There are virtual assistant companies who help you connect with the right virtual assistant as per your needs, not only do these companies provide you an easier way of finding candidates, they also save a lot of your time so you can then utilize that time in core tasks. Websites like Wood Bows, Serve Team etc. can be really helpful. In Canada, the website Virtual Assistant Canada consists of a data base filled with trained virtual assistants. As per the need of the business and provides professional Canada virtual assistant.

Even though these are the few ways of where from and how usually a virtual assistant is hired. The few not so famous. Bit less efficient ways could be posting up on all social media platforms regarding the vacancy.  Even though it would be a lot more work and you yourself would need to manage everything. Consider all factors, yet it is used be a few organizations.

• Procedure of final selection

Once you have finalized the way of recruiting the virtual assistants. You can now move on to short-listing and finalizing the virtual assistant. To begin with:

1. Firstly, set up an eligibility criterion, consisting of qualifications of the candidate, to judge the basic knowledge.
2. Then, move on to the soft skills, like communication, adaptability, etc., to judge the candidate’s nature and behavior.
3. If everything seems satisfying, you can then move on to giving an assessment. Which would be better if it is company related to judge in the most appropriate and accurate way.
4. After qualifying all of these you can now move on to the final interview. And can also have a trial basis if needed.

If all satisfies, yay, you got your virtual assistant. Load’s off your shoulders!

Special considerations

Since it is in online working mode, to ensure the least preferable negligible number of misunderstandings. Written instructions and conducting of frequent meetings. Just to catch up on the updates can turn out to be very useful, leading into more productivity. Also, websites like ClickUp, and Trello help organize the work in an efficient and easy-to-access manner.

Conclusion

It is no doubt that virtual assistants are a big help in 21st century, especially for people who are either entrepreneurs or someone who is into leading and making ideas, virtual assistants can really save you from all the extra work, helping you focus more on the core tasks.