So you're ready to hire a virtual assistant but you have no clue where to go to actually find them? What is the best place to hire a Virtual Assistant? When you're looking to hire a virtual assistant, where do you go?
There are lots of great places to find virtual assistants online. It can be difficult to decide which one is right for you. Some people say that it's best to find someone where you live, but others say that this isn't necessary because the work can be done remotely. Additionally, there are a few things to consider when you're looking for the best place to hire a virtual assistant. First, what is your budget? Second, what kind of work do you need to be done? And third, how many hours do you need them to work? Once you've considered these things, you can start to look for the best place to hire a virtual assistant.
In this episode, I'm going to share with you my favorite online platform where you can hire virtual assistants that will help you start your hiring process.
Listen to the Episode
Atiba de Souza: So you're ready to hire a virtual assistant but you have no clue where to go to actually find them. Yeah, I get it. A whole bunch of us have been in that place too. And we're going to tackle that problem here today cause we're going to talk about one of my favorite places to hire virtual assistants.
Hey, everybody! I am Atiba and welcome to my channel where we talk all about hiring and managing teams. So employees also virtual assistants, all that good stuff. Talk about the best practices. So let's dive into today's topic. Today we're going to be talking about where to go find your virtual assistant.
Now the reality is you've got a ton of choices. So choice number one, you can hire an agency and I've done this. You can hire an agency and what agencies do is they actually have virtual assistants that they hire, that work for them, that they then allow to work for you.
Now, the great part about hiring an agency is that they vet the virtual assistant first, okay? Now I often will use an agency when I'm looking for someone who is super skilled in a particular area, especially if I know what I want, but I may not have or understand all of the technical proficiency. I will go to an agency who specializes in staffing those types of people and hire one of their people.
And third, trying to find it on my own. So that's one option. The other option. Is that there are tons of job boards that exist online. There's Upwork, there's Task Rabbit, there is Fiverr, et cetera, et cetera. There are tons of places to go. Now I've tried most of these and I'm not gonna say any of them are bad. They all fit individual needs and some people like them for different reasons, okay? I do like Upwork and I use it sometimes. Whereas Fiverr, yeah, not my favorite at all.
However, there is one that I really, really do like, and by the way, I'm going to drop a link to all of these places in the description down below, including this one, which is my favorite, which is OnlineJobs.ph. Now this is a Filipino virtual assistant job board. So everyone there is in the Philippines, okay? The thing that I love about it is you can go in, you can create your job posts and you can create multiple if you'd care. You can create your job posts and people will respond to you, but in their responses, you get to go see their profile and you can see what their hourly rate is. You can-- they even administer some test to the applicants beforehand. So you can see there, I think they do a DISC assessment in certain proficiencies. So you get a little bit of a sense of who this person is as they respond to your message, okay?
Now let's talk about actually writing this job description. There's a ton and I've done other videos on this. And so you can find my other videos on my channel. By the way, by the way, if you're here and this is good for you, go ahead and hit the "like" button and also hit that subscribe bell so you know when I produce more great videos, but back to the topic.
So, you know, when you create your job listing, this is a ninja tip, all right? This is one of my secret ninja tips that I'm going to share with you here. I always ask questions in my job posting. Usually three, sometimes four that are really spelled out. So you'll have some-- the description of the job, a little bit about the company and then three or four questions that I want them to answer, okay?
But then I also hide a question inside of the job description itself. I'll ask them a question in there. And what I'm doing by, with that guys is I want to see the people who respond. I want to see who answers all of my questions. So if you don't answer any of my questions, I don't even talk to you. But now, if you answer just the questions that are spelled out, I know what, you probably didn't read the full job description. But those people who went in and they found that question in the job description and they answered it. And usually the question that I hide in there is "What's your hourly rate?". They answer that question and then they answer my other specific questions. Now I know I've got somebody I want to talk to. So that's one of the ways that I actually will start to weed people out very, very quickly. If you don't answer my questions, you get weeded up.
Now, is there a downside to OnlineJobs.ph? Yeah, technically there is, okay? And here's the downside. On a lot of job boards, you're going to have a lot of work to do, to find quality people. You're often not going to get a ton of responses. And that's because on a lot of job boards, people have to, when I say people, the virtual assistants have to pay to respond to your job posts, okay?
On OnlineJobs.ph, it doesn't work that way. What happens on OnlineJobs.ph is it's actually a subscription that you pay as the business owner. So they charge us a monthly fee. Now, you only pay for it when you use it. So if you need to hire one person and you pay for it this month, you hire that one person and you cancel. Great! As a matter of fact, they tell you that on the website. As soon as you've hired your person, cancel your subscription. Don't keep it around, okay?
The thing that it does though is, because the virtual assistants aren't the ones paying to respond to the job post, you often get a lot more responses. And I don't know about you, when I'm hiring, I'd prefer to have more people respond so I can sift through and find the right one than say, maybe only have five or six people respond and then feel like, "Oh, am I being desperate and choosing this one because I only had two or three options out of the five or six?". So that's how I look at it. And I look at it that way because I really, after trying a lot of the job boards, find that it makes more sense for me to be the one who pays the post and get more responses in. You may want to do it the other way, okay? Which is fine. Upwork will be great for you. Upwork is a great site! Great place to be!
But anyway, this was about what my favorite was. I hire off of OnlineJobs.ph all the time. And again, I'm going to leave that link down below for you. So check that out. If you have any questions, drop me a comment. We'll love to answer your questions.
I've been hiring VAs and staff a very long time and have tons and tons of experience. And I would love to share anything or answer any questions that you have getting over this hurdle of hiring VAs.
All right, everybody! I will see you soon. Bye-bye!