How to choose the best virtual assistant for your small business
When it comes to hiring a new virtual assistant you want to make sure that you hire the best virtual assistant the first time.
Hiring the right virtual assistant will help you achieve your business goals a lot faster.
In this post, we show you how to find and choose the best virtual assistant to complete business tasks for your small business. With this information, you will avoid hiring the wrong type of virtual assistant and begin receiving the right type of virtual business support that you need.
Did you know that most virtual assistants have an ideal client?
This means as a virtual assistant we usually have an idea of the type of client we want to work with, so we target our marketing towards helping this type of client.
So just like a virtual assistant defines their ideal client, we recommend that our clients also define their ideal virtual assistant.
What is a good virtual assistant?
A good virtual assistant is reliable and will meet the specific requirements and conditions that you require.
To find the best virtual assistant you will need to pick what requirements your virtual assistant must have and what conditions they must meet.
After selecting you can then narrow your search by selecting from the VA’s that are the closest match to all of the conditions you picked.
The following are the areas you need to confirm with your virtual assistant
Skills
To find the best virtual assistant define what skills your virtual assistant needs.
Write down all the tasks you want to delegate. You can use your list of tasks to add to a delegation sheet and send your tasks directly to a virtual assistant.
Ask yourself the following questions about your virtual assistant’s skills.
- What skills does your virtual assistant need to complete the tasks?
- Does the virtual assistant need to be highly skilled in one specific area?
- Or do you need a multi-skilled virtual assistant that can do a bit of everything?
Availability
It is important to decide when you want your virtual assistant to be available.
You should choose a time when you are also available so that you can potentially use this time to discuss tasks with your VA. Choosing a virtual assistant who has matching availability to you makes communicating easy. You can find out more about the importance of both of your availability here
Contact
Communicating with your virtual assistant can be done in various ways.
Some of these include:
- Phone
- Video meetings
- Messaging platforms
If you prefer to give your VA instructions by phone and don’t like sending email instructions, then your ideal virtual assistant should be available to be contacted by phone during your available hours.
A lot of virtual assistants communicate only via email or other messaging platforms so it is important to ask the following questions to make sure you choose a virtual assistant that is available via your preferred contact method.
Which contact method do you want to use to communicate with your virtual assistant?
What contact method do you want your virtual assistant to use to contact you?
Experience
To find a good virtual assistant you need to consider the experience level the VA needs for the tasks you want them to complete.
The more basic the tasks are the less experience your VA may need.
Select the level of experience you want your virtual assistant to have using the questions below. To find your ideal virtual assistant filter out all other virtual assistants that do not have that level of experience.
Do you want your virtual assistant to already have experience?
Or do you not mind, as long as they can complete the job?
Type of virtual assistant
Different types of virtual assistants exist, and many small business owners are not aware of the differences between how virtual assistants can operate their business.
Some virtual assistants operate as professional virtual assistants and others as freelance virtual assistants. Both types of virtual assistants are usually capable of completing your tasks, however, it is good to be aware of the benefits of hiring a professional virtual assistant vs hiring a freelance virtual assistant. This post also covers the main differences between the two types of virtual assistants and how this could affect you.
Location
One of the main factors that enable virtual assistants to be so useful is the fact that they work remotely. This means your virtual assistant can be located anywhere when they are completing your tasks.
Even though your VA can theoretically be based anywhere it still may be important to know where your VA is located.
You can narrow down your most suitable VA options by asking the following questions.
Does your VA need to be located in the same country as you to complete the tasks?
Can your VA be located abroad?
The bigger the location you are willing to consider the more options of suitable VAs you will find.
Price
If you are looking for the best virtual assistant with a lot of experience then you can expect to pay more than you would for a virtual assistant without any experience.
Decide on a budget for your tasks. This can be per hour, per project, or per month, and see what can you get for your budget.
This means narrowing down your potential VAs by choosing only VAs that are within your budget and who also match all of the other conditions you specified.
Once you have done this you will have a clear picture of what your ideal virtual assistant looks like.
This is an example of conditions an ideal virtual assistant would need to meet according to the answer to each question:
Skills – Multi-skilled
Availability – Must be available on Tuesdays and Fridays after 12:00
Contact – By telephone or email within my available day and time
Experience – Ideally 3+ years experience needed
Price – No more than £30 an hour
Location – Ideally Europe or U.S.
Type – Professional virtual assistant
To find the best virtual assistant for you, answer each question and use the answer to create a list of the conditions your virtual assistant must meet.
Now that you have your ideal client conditions you can use this information to create a shortlist of the best virtual assistant candidates for your small business.
Once you have shortlisted options for a virtual assistant, if you are only left with a small number of virtual assistants who match your chosen conditions you should contact each of them as they are potential candidates.
If you have a long list of virtual assistants who match the conditions you chose you might as well narrow the list by removing candidates who have less experience or skills than others, this way the candidates you are left with will be of more value should you ever need them for different tasks in the future.
When you contact your shortlisted VA candidates begin by asking them these 5 questions.
At Prime PA we are a team of virtual assistants that provide virtual assistant services to small businesses and entrepreneurs. One of our professional virtual assistant team is likely to match your conditions and can help you to quickly achieve your business goals.
In addition to having in-house virtual assistants, we also have a database of virtual assistant candidates that we use to provide recruitment services for employers who are looking for a virtual assistant to hire as a permanent or temporary employee.
Whenever we match you with a virtual assistant for employment purposes you will always be matched with the virtual assistant with the most suitable training and experience that matches your ideal client.
The majority of the time we already have the perfect employee on our database. If your requirements are unique and we don’t already have anyone matching your specific requirements on our database, we will endeavour to find them for you. We have new applicants registering for virtual assistant jobs daily so we are sure we will come across the right virtual assistant for you.
To connect with the best virtual assistants fill in this form and add your conditions.
