Tips on Hiring a Virtual Assistant to Simplify Your Life
Do you feel like you’re always the one answering everyone else’s questions? Do you feel like your responsibilities are out of balance with the rest of your team? Do you wish there were more hours in the day so that you could get caught up and regain some balance? If so, it’s because you need a virtual assistant. Working with a virtual assistant is basically hiring an employee without any of the drawbacks.
They don’t need an office space or any other real-world accommodations from you, and their pay is much lower than what you would have to give someone working directly for your company. In other words: hiring a virtual assistant is an excellent way to simplify your life while also reducing stress and increasing efficiency at work.
Hiring a Virtual Assistant Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
Virtual assistants are often confused with other remote work positions like contractors or freelancers. But there are actually some big differences between those types of work and a VA hire. More than anything, it’s the administrative and legal complications of hiring a contractor or freelancer that make them difficult to work with. A VA is actually a full-time employee who works remotely and whose job is solely dedicated to helping you and your team. They have all the administrative and legal benefits of a full-time employee, but none of the drawbacks of hiring a contractor or freelancer.
How Can a Virtual Assistant Help You?
One of the best ways to figure out how a VA can help you is to break down the acronym. A virtual assistant does all the tasks that are “administrative,” as well as “organizational” tasks and “executive” tasks. Administrative tasks include things like taking care of all your finances, organizing your calendars, and scheduling appointments.
Organizational tasks include things like taking care of your filing and archival needs, running your errands, as well as keeping track of your inventory. Finally, executive tasks refer to strategic tasks like helping you with strategic planning and growing your business, as well as hiring for your team.
Which Type of VA Should You Hire?
With such a wide range of tasks a VA can handle, it’s not uncommon for companies to hire more than one VA. For example, if you have one VA who is taking care of all your finances, another who is organizing your calendars, and another managing your storage, there’s a risk of information getting duplicated or lost.
It’s important to decide what type of tasks you want to assign to each of your VAs, as well as to decide whether it would be better to have one VA who can do everything or to hire multiple VAs who specialize in one area.
How to Find the Right VA for You?
There’s no one way to approach the process of finding a VA for your company. If you already have a team in place and are looking for one more VA to add to the mix, then you can use the same hiring process you would use for any other position. If you’re the one hiring the VA yourself, you’ll want to figure out what your ideal candidate looks like and put together a job listing.
But before you start the hiring process, there are a couple of things you’ll want to consider. First, you’ll want to decide on a salary range for this position.
This will help you narrow down your candidate pool so you can find the right person for the job. Once you have a salary range in mind, you’ll want to create the job posting. You’ll want to include things like the salary, the hours the position will require, and the qualifications you’re looking for in a candidate.
3 Big Benefits of Working With a Virtual Assistant
There are many benefits of hiring a virtual assistant, but the most obvious one is that they can help you get more done in less time. Because they don’t have to commute to an office and they don’t have to take time off, VAs can often get more done in less time than other employees who have more daily limitations. Another major benefit of hiring a VA is that it can help to reduce the amount of stress you feel on a daily basis.
Because you’re delegating work to an employee who is (hopefully) more experienced than you, you can spend more time focusing on your niche areas of expertise and less time feeling overwhelmed and stressed out. One of the best reasons to hire a virtual assistant is that it can help to increase the amount of trust you have in your employees. Because you’ll be offloading tasks to your VA, it’ll be easier to trust and rely on your team members to do their jobs without constant oversight and micro-managing.
2 Problems VAs Can Solve for You
While hiring a VA is a great way to solve many different problems, there are a couple of issues that VAs can help you to address. First, VAs can help to alleviate the issue of not having enough time in the day. If you’re feeling constantly behind, it’s likely because you’re putting all your energy into one area. VAs can help to alleviate this problem by taking some of the daily tasks off your plate so you can get back to focusing on your strengths.
Another problem VAs can help to address that of trust issues. If you’re working with an employee who doesn’t have the same skill set as you, it can be hard to trust them to do their jobs properly. VAs can help to alleviate this problem by doing work that’s outside of your skill set so that you can trust your employees to get their jobs done properly.
3 Tips for Finding the Right VA for You
There are so many benefits to hiring a virtual assistant, and it’s important to find the right person for the job. Here are a few tips for finding the right VA. Put Together a Job Description - Before you start looking for candidates, you’ll want to create a job description that includes all the tasks the VA will be doing for you. This will help you to narrow down your search and make sure you’re hiring someone who is the right fit for the job. Create a Work Sample - Sometimes it can be hard to tell how well a candidate will do based purely on a job description.
To help you figure out if someone is a good fit for the job, create a work sample for them to complete. This will give you insight into how the person works and how much they can get done in a day. Run Background Checks - Hiring anyone comes with some risk, so you’ll want to make sure you do everything you can to protect your company. One way to do this is to run a background check on each of your candidates so that you can make sure they’re a good fit for your team.
Negotiate the Contract - Finally, before you hire your VA, you’ll want to negotiate the terms of the contract. This will help protect both you and your employees and make sure everyone is on the same page moving forward.
Conclusion
Hiring a virtual assistant to help you is often a great way to simplify your life and solve some of the most common issues that people face in the modern workplace. Whether you want to free up more time for your daily duties or you want to be able to trust your employees more, hiring a VA is a great way to do both. It’s also an excellent way to get more done in less time without having to sacrifice quality. With the right VA, you can spend less time worrying about keeping your work on track and more time focusing on your strengths.