How do I hire a kick-ass VA (Virtual Assistant)?

I talk through the steps to recruit, on-board and integrate a new member onto your team!

Transcript

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Hello, gorgeous recovering perfectionist. I'm Claire Riley and you're listening to episode number 66 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. You can head on over to clairy.co forward slash pod forward slash 66 to grab all of the show notes and links for this episode. So today I'm going to be talking about how to hire an awesome VA. I get asked this question a lot. I do training on this and we talk about this a lot in one-on-one sessions, and I'm really excited to share with you some of my top tips and the steps on how to hire an awesome VA for your business. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Alright, so let's get started. I'm super excited for this episode. My background, um, amongst other things, before I started my own business, was in HR and recruitment management. And in some way, shape, or form, I've been recruiting people since I was about 19 years old, and I was in management before I started my own business. So it's been something that's very near and dear to my heart and something that I've always really loved doing, whether it was my standalone job or just part of the management roles that I held in the past. And I know that it's a really can be a very scary thing for a lot of people who've never hired people and they have their own business and they realize that you're at a point where you could absolutely do with some extra help, but it feels really scary. I talk to a lot of people who have had a VA in the past. VA stands for virtual assistant, by the way, if you aren't familiar with that term, it's like a personal assistant, but an online person who you may not ever meet in person, but they work remotely. And often it has fallen down in one of five places. And I'm going to talk through those five steps to effective VA hiring and working with a VA effectively today. And I often it's it is a really scary thing when people start to think I need someone to help, but they've heard the horror stories that other people have had with VAs, or it just feels too overwhelming, or it doesn't feel like your business is ready for it. Now, I'm not really going to talk about getting your business ready for a VA today. That will be in a different episode. So watch this space. Um, all I'm going to talk about today is the steps that you need to take to effectively find a person who's a really good fit for you to onboard them into your business and then to retain them. Because a good VA is absolutely priceless in terms of your mindset and your abundance and being able to do your zone of genius rather than all of the other little bits and pieces that is someone else's zone of genius that they would be better suited to doing than you are. So the five parts of recruiting and having an effective VA in your business are advertising and how you advertise is incredibly important. The second part is recruiting the right person, then we need to onboard them into your business effectively, then we need to actually delegate to them and give them stuff to do, and then we are looking at retaining and upskilling. So they're the five things I'm going to talk through very briefly today. So let's go start with the very first one, which is advertising. Now you can advertise for a VA in a lot of different places. It may even just be having a space where you've created who you're looking for and putting that out there to your Biz Besties, your mentors, any courses or groups that you're in, and doing the word-of-mouth way. You might go through a platform such as Upwork or Freelancer or Fiverr or anything like that. Or you might actually advertise on social media or through job network job search tools as well. So some of the key things that go into being done before you can advertise for this person is you obviously need to have a really, really clear idea of who you're looking for, what you're not negotiable on, and what it is that your business actually needs. The more clear that you can be about with that, the easier it is for the rest of the process, including finding the right person and vetting all of the people that are likely to apply for this job with you. So some of the factors that will come into that is being really clear on what the job description is. Now you might have a bit of a now, later, and ideal kind of scenario where you're not quite sure how it's going to work, but right now these are some of the functions or some of the tasks or some of the actions that you desperately need some help with. So being really clear on what a job description is in terms of what tasks that they can do is really, really important. So you might break this down into their skills. This is a very important one. Also keeping in mind that skills can be taught. Personality can't be taught. So you are also really looking at what are the sort of personalities that you like to work with. If you're ready for this sort of thing, you can do things like archetypes and personality types. If you know yourself and you know who you work with best, you can absolutely factor that into your advertisement in who you're looking for and what personal attributes that person has as well. So when we're looking at skills, you might want to get really clear on some of the key tools or apps that you use in your business that they need to be across or be willing to train them into those things or pay for them to be trained into those things as well. You'll also be looking at their experience. So do they have any street cred? Have they done this sort of work before? Do they have any recommendations or referrals? Can they show you a portfolio where they've done this before? Oftentimes, when you go through the recruitment process, some VAs will actually do a trial or a test for you where you can actually test what their skills are, their comprehension of the task, their speed, and all of that sort of thing as well. So you can keep that in mind. And then one of the really important things that you will be recruiting for is the practicalities. So we need to know that we can communicate clearly back and forth with them. You may want to ask questions such as how many hours do they ideally want to be working for you as well as overall. A lot of VAs, um both domestically and abroad, have multiple clients. So if you're cool with that, you need to be explicit about that. If you want someone who will just work for you, your hours that you're offering may need to be higher, and that might be okay or not okay, but just to be really clear about that sort of thing, as well as the expectations that you have of their turnaround time and availability time. So you might have someone who works in a different time zone. Does that work for you for communication and for output? You might have someone who can only work weekends, is that going to work for you? And so on and so forth. So when I set out a job description for myself, when I'm looking for a new uh project person or a new VA, I kind of design the unicorn, like the person who I ideally would love with all of the skills, all of the experience, all of the practicalities, all rolled into one. Like ideally, this is who I would find, and this is how much I'd be willing to pay for that person, and these are the functions that I would like them to do. Once you've designed the unicorn, you can start working out what you might be negotiable on. And often your unicorn is actually two or three different people, and that also works really well. And I highly recommend that. I'll talk about that in another episode as well. So that's your first step, is how is to advertise, but all of those steps and all of those components that you need to understand before you can even go out and advertise. There's no point saying, I need a VA, and then your VAs or VA potentials are going to come and say, This is the sort of VA I am, or this is these are my skills, or exactly what are you looking for. And if you're not prepared with the answer, you're not going to be able to progress that any further anyway. So that's the first one is to advertise effectively. The second one is the actual recruitment. So there's a couple of things in here as well. Um, how in-depth you do this will definitely determine or definitely has a big impact on the effectiveness of the working relationship that you have with your VA in the future. So part of the recruitment process will obviously include looking at applications, like looking at emails that people have sent you and their portfolio and their experience and their uh their cover letter or whatever it is, that sort of thing. It will probably include vetting them at that stage and you know putting the ones that aren't appropriate in one box and the ones that might go through to the next step into another box. Then from there, you may choose to do back and forth of an like an email interview kind of thing or jump straight into a face-to-face. And I would always recommend face to face with the person who you'll be working with. Um, keep in mind when you go out looking for VAs, often an agency will be engaging with you. Um, and that's fine if that's the model that you want to go down, but you always want to talk to the person who will actually be doing the work to understand if you're going to get along with them, if there's going to be, you know, some nice cohesive communication and that sort of thing as well. So absolutely speaking to them on Zoom or something like that, where you can actually get, you know, build a bit of rapport and get to know them a little bit as well. So then the final stage of recruitment is picking the person who you would like to have as your VA and offering them the job, where it's, you know, you go back to that job description that we talked about in the advertise stage with exactly what your expectations are in terms of the time and the tasks and you know, all of those sorts of things, just to double check that that's all good. I'm not going to go into contracts and all of that sort of thing at the moment, but that's definitely something at this stage that needs to be taken into consideration. How are you going to bring them into your business? How will you pay them? Um, what are the terms and conditions and all of that sort of thing? So we won't go into all of that. If you're using something like Upwork, all of that is built in, which is why I absolutely love that pro that uh platform. So you don't have to worry too much about having your own HR department because it's it's pretty big. All right, so the third part is onboarding them. And this, to be totally honest, is usually where I see it fall over. We've gone out, we've found a really great VA, they're gonna fix all of our problems. Our biz bestie loved working with them, and someone over there also recommended them. We've recruited them, um, and everything's hunky-dory, and then they disappear. And I hear from from business owners so often, oh, they just disappeared, or they they just stopped talking to me, or they just they didn't ever do anything. And my question is always, how did you onboard them? What did they know of your business? Where they bought in. Um, did you actually give them some tasks to do straight up? Or often we give them a couple of tasks and they do that and then they disappear. And it's because we forgot to keep them engaged and we forgot to tell them what the next thing was, right? Because it feels a bit scary. So when I talk about onboarding, I want to cast your mind back. You've probably had a job at some point in the past where you've taken the job and on your first day, you're usually buddied up with someone who shows you the ropes and introduces you to people and shows you where the bathrooms are and shows you where the coffee machine are, and you know, it talks about the culture, and often there's the big policy and procedure manual, which you had to read 4,000 pages and initial every page, blah, blah, blah. We've been there, done that, got the t-shirt, right? I'm not saying it has to be as laborious and disgusting as that, but onboarding your new people into your business in an effective manner is so, so important. What um one of the main things here that we miss, even if we're doing the policy and procedure and process stuff, is the culture. So tell them, tell these people what is it that you're working towards? What is it that you are doing with your business? Why did you start your business? What is the ethos that you want to create, not only for yourself and your team member or members, but also for your clients? What's the client experience? Um, get them to read some testimonials so that they can understand like what you do and who you are and what people love about you. Um, it's a really, really important part for people to feel like they're part of a bigger picture, right? This is not just a robot that's working for you on the other end of uh your laptop. This is an actual human. And if they are brought into your why and your purpose and how you work and what you're delivering to the world, you are much more likely to have a team member who's engaged and who's loyal and who will stay and who will do the work and ask the questions that you need them to do in order to be effective. So this is a really, really important part. So as you're doing this, you don't need to have this prepared before you bring them on. This can be a work in progress, but it never ends. So the onboarding process usually goes for the first three months officially when you're starting a new role, and it is ingrained in everything that you do. So all the emails that you send, how you delegate to your person, how much you contact them, how in um involved and invested they are with all of the processes and all of the other things that kind of go in in your business as well is really, really important. So as you go through this, jot it down. So when you have a new person, if you haven't already got a checklist and that sort of thing, you might have um, you might create a checklist as you go, which says all of the passwords you need to give them access to, all of the programs you need to show them how to use, all of the, you know, places that they can find their job descriptions, for example, how often you'll meet, whether it's weekly, monthly, fortnightly, and how you'll do that. But then also, you know, everything else that you talk people through. And when they ask questions, go and add that to your onboarding list so that next time you're onboarding a person into your business, you've got a checklist there to go back to as well. I get a bit ranty about this one because it's really big, the onboarding. The onboarding makes the biggest difference in in your business when you are recruiting. Also with your new clients, but that's a whole other podcast. I've got like four new podcasts that have come out of this one. All right, the um second last one is to delegate. So this is a really, really interesting one. Um, like I mentioned before, a lot of people seem to get a VA and then they do a few jobs and then they disappear. But when I question them about it, it's actually not that they've disappeared, it's that they forgot to give them anything else to do because they did the first thing and then that was done and it felt a bit scary and a bit weird. So then actually it's the business owner, the boss, who's kind of disappeared. So you can absolutely, in the beginning, I would suggest meeting up with your new VA at least weekly to talk about what's going on. Part of this is really important culturally is to empower your person, your VA, to ask for more work. So if you have committed to five hours a week, um, I always say to my VAs, if um I've I've committed to five hours a week or 10 hours a week or whatever, if it gets to Thursday and you've only done an hour and a half, can you come knocking on my door? Like literally send me an email and say, hey, I've only done an hour and a half, got a few hours left, what would you like me to do? Because I guarantee if you are asking me for more work, I will go to my to-do list and pick something to give to you so that it's off my list and onto yours. If I haven't been proactive about shooting things over to you anyway. So part of that is empowering your VAs to ask for more work and to manage you. This is a really big one for me that when I onboard people, my number one thing is I need you to manage me. If I say I'm going to give you something and I haven't given it to you in a day, email me. And if I haven't given it to you the next day, email me again and just stay on me. It won't, I won't think you're being rude, I will think you're being really helpful. So please just ask me as many times, ask me as many questions as you want. Um, keep on top of me. So it's a really big um prerequisite for me is that that person understands that they need to manage me as much as I manage them. It is a team effort. All right, so delegating. So the other part of delegating is to be very clear and consistent as much as possible with how you are delegating to that person. So you might have a set of jobs that need to be done every single week. It might be these jobs need to be done every Monday, these ones every Thursday, or something like that. Um, but then over the top of that, there'll be some projecty things, some one-off things, some every now and then things, all of that sort of stuff. So um having one place where you're going to delegate to them makes it really easy. If you use a uh project management tool such as Asana, you can say everything I delegate to you will be in Asana. If you've got any questions, send me a message on Messenger or send me an email or something like that. So all of the tasks that I need my VA to do go straight into Asana. I put her name next to it and a due date when I need it to be done. That automatically sends her a notification. And then if she has any questions, she can just reply by email to me. Rather than sometimes I send her a message asking her to do a job, sometimes I put it in an asana getting her to do a job, sometimes I send an email getting her to do a job. It just makes it a little bit like she's got to keep looking. She's almost got to keep chasing me around the internet to try and find where I have delegated tasks to her, rather than just knowing there's a single point of contact, which is Asana, and if there's any follow-on questions, we use email or whatever it is. So just being clear about what that's going to look like for you and your teammate, and then that also sets the tone when other people come into your team, like this is how we work, this is how we do it, this is where we delegate, this is how we manage our project, so on and so forth. Cool. The last thing, which is really not a step, it's really an ongoing project for anyone who comes into your team on a long-term basis, if it's longer than just project work, which is to retain an upskill. So, as you can see, if you have been very clear on who you wanted in terms of their personality, their desires and their ambitions, you've recruited the right person, you've onboarded them into the culture and the entire vision and purpose of your business, and you've effectively been able to delegate and communicate with them, is that we want to retain them. Those people are going to be absolute gold. And in recruitment, we always used to say that retention is better than acquisition because it is, it can be very time-consuming and very stressful sometimes and a lot of hard work and feel really frustrating when you're constantly having to recruit new people. And this goes for clients as well, as I said, but we're talking just about um team team members now. Well, we want to retain them. We would rather that person stay with us for two years than have to get a new VA every six months because something didn't quite go right. So part of your retention and upskilling um ethos may be to have a check-in once every three months or once every six months, similar to how you would if you were in a business. So usually in a business, we do like a one-month, two month, and three-month um checkup just to say, how's things going? You're still in your probation, are you happy? Are we happy? Is there any course corrections we need to make here? Anything like that. Um, but also to stay in touch with their with what um their goals are. They might say, Oh, I really like this section of your business and I'd really like to know more. Or actually, I've got a background in finances, I could help with your bookkeeping and all of these gems that come out when you actually have a meaningful and structured conversation with your team members. So it continues to keep them engaged and to keep them willing to be working with you and for you in a way that's really symbiotic, that works for you and also works for them. So, just to cap that off, the steps to getting the perfect VA or a higher chance of finding a perfect fit VA for you is to advertise for the person who you want because you're very clear on all of the things that you want from this person or people. The second one is to do the recruitment process, which is the interviewing and the job offering. The third one is to onboard effectively and get them into your business and into the ethos and the purpose of your business as quickly as possible. Last um part of that is to delegate effectively, and then the super last bit is the all the beautiful retention and upskilling that pulls all of that together. So I hope that's been helpful. I will put all of those uh dot points into um the show notes, which will be at clairilly.co forward slash pod forward slash 66. And I hope that's been really helpful for you. Please do reach out or comment on the pod or if you see um see this advertised on social media. You can also um email me hello at clairey.co if you have any specific questions about recruiting or if you'd like to talk about a strategy for your business. Um, I would love to have a chat with you and hear from you. Other than that, I hope this has been super helpful and I'll talk to you on the next episode. Bye for now.