Expert Tips on How To Find A Rock Star VA The First Time - Practical Advice

How do I know I'm gonna get a good va? The biggest worry I see from people is that they don't have time to find a great VA to this. The only thing I can say is this is exactly the reason you need to do this. It's the only way you're gonna free up some of your time. The second worry I see is that if I spend the time, how do I know I'm gonna get a good va? So in this video, I hope to answer the second question. How do I. How do I know I'm going to get a good va? Which this should give you confidence that you can spend the time which was your first question. So recently I did interviews with a bunch of successful employers on how they hire VAs and in this video I'm going to go over their recruiting methods. Now, as I do this, you'll notice some patterns, but you'll also notice some things which are unique. Some of them will resonate with you and some won't. I highly recommend you pull out those pieces which make the most sense to you. So let's get started. Dennis Yu, who owns Blitzmetrics, is a super successful entrepreneur who has a bunch of VAs working for him. Here's what he says about his recruiting method. Here's how we quickly and accurately narrow down the list from over 300 to just 15 and then down to the final group. In short, we put a ton of detail into our postings, especially with article links so they know about us. Then we give them instructions on a code word for them to use in the subject line of their initial response. Rabbit is the one for our VA and Squirrel is for the designer. They put that word into the subject line. Then Gmail sorts by threads and subject lines so they automatically group responses. 50% of applicants get knocked out instantly because they didn't include the keyword. So of the initial cut we look to see if they have personalized their response. Another 50% of that gets knocked out. Of the most promising remainder we look at, did they include a one minute video which was in our job post. How good is their English? And then how strong is their portfolio and profile? And then did they have a cheerful positive personality? Then we provide one sentence of personalization, not just to show how we care, but to ask them follow up and clarification questions. And then we paste in our canned response number two for more content to consume from them and another video to make. Of the 5% that passed this filter, which is still 15 people out of 300, we are reasonably certain they would be great employees. Aaron Cordovez runs a super successful business selling over 100 products on Amazon. Here are the bullet points for his recruiting process. 1. Test their skills during the interview process 2. Check how much they're charging, how fast their return is, how much they can do 3. Look for competency rather than individual skills 4. Look for personalized applications 5. Create a screening or recruiting process and 6 make an appealing job post. Here's some tips from Ethan Capp from Wealth Beyond Wall Street. He says not all positions can be outsourced and this varies from company to company. But recognize that not everything you have will be able to be outsourced, he says. For me I find selling is one of the main positions that's hard to outsource. Then make them jump through a couple of hoops during the interview process. Have them do a writing task, voice recording task and then assess their skills. Ethan does a two to three interview process as people progress down the recruiting path. These are the last steps in their recruiting process. Then after hiring them, he says to increase their salary depending on competency and performance after they've started work. Kevin King runs a high ticket dropshipping business with VAs doing most of the work for him. He says instead of looking for someone who knew Shopify already, he shifted to find someone who was intelligent based on the interview, motivated and willing to learn and that changed his focus in recruiting and worked really well for him. Harry, whose successful YouTube channel is Beast of Ecom, he puts in his job post this will be a long term full time and I'm ready for the right candidate to start asap. After putting his conditions. He always puts if you have read all of this, Please add thank you 1, 2, 3 to your reply. So I know they paid attention to the directions. Then he says you may get them to trial just fulfilling 10 orders each or you know 20 orders each or 5 orders each and just see how they take care of the directions. So create a standard operating procedure with a little directions to follow and see who follows them the best. Then see who does the best work and again see who's offering the best price, the best wage and then just make your hire based on that. So that's generally what he would do. Bodhi Davison says interview them through Skype and here's why. You want to be able to check that they are the person that they say they are. So when you are face to face with someone, even if it's through an Internet video, you can see their reactions to how you talk to them, you get a good feel of what the person is like, you're going to be able to get a good read on what sort of person that is. So one of the things that entrepreneurs are afraid of when it comes to outsourcing is that they is that they might end up being trapped with a virtual assistant that doesn't work. And if you're worried about that, here's what Sarah Crisp recommends. She recommends using a fixed term contract. She says when hiring a va, I recommend that you start with fixed term contracts. This isn't just for your benefit, it's for the benefit of both of you. This way you can see if you both like working together. If you both like working together, then you can talk about moving to a permanent, ongoing position. Elisha Gabriel says, our process of hiring contractors includes a one week trial period for them to work on our reporting. If they can follow this task, then we believe they can be trained on almost anything in our business. Dean Soto says, we create job postings and have candidates come to us. We make sure that the titles in the job posting are flashy and detail the benefits of working for us. So for example, rather than a title that says PHP Developer needed, we would use something a little bit more eye catching, such as detail oriented php developer needed. Great benefits. 2 weeks vacation every year. Most candidates will only look at the title, so you want to make your title as catchy as possible. He continues, we have several tiers of testing, but the most important is the very first test that you give your applicants. Once somebody has applied for our job posting, we send them to a Google form that asks several questions. We ask for their full name, their email, their LinkedIn profile, and their Facebook profile. Also have them take a typing test as well as an Internet speed test. If anything looks out of the ordinary with any of these, then we immediately cut the person. Often this will take care of 75% of applicants who are not right for the job, he says. We also have several tests for those who pass the initial questionnaire. Those tests are graded based on several indicators that we feel are important. If passed, then they go on to in person interviews and so on. If a candidate passes all tests and interviews, then we have them work on a trial basis for 40 hours. We then set them up with the tools our company uses. Ultimately, having a good filtering process and giving actual tests to the individuals will help out tremendously when weeding out those who look good on paper but who are not a good fit for your business. Miles Beckler, a very successful Internet entrepreneur, says hire full time, identify the task that you have to do over and over and hand it off to your va. Mike, who goes by Reezy Online, says when you make your job ad, there's a bunch of different stuff that you can fill out such as ID proof or different skill levels. I recommend putting it up a little bit but not too much because the more verification that you require and the more niche out the skill set that you demand, the fewer applicants you're going to get and you want to make sure you get enough applicants. Also, the less applicants that apply because you put too many filters and they're probably going to want to be paid higher. So you have a better chance of finding someone who's really good and capable by not putting those filters too high versus putting them up really high and just limiting the number of replies that you're going to get. I'm so thankful for all these people sharing their tips. In the end, finding a great VA is half science and half art. But the more you follow what other successful people are doing, the more likely you you are to find a great VA the first time. So here are my key takeaways from all of the advice from these other people. Number one. Write a detailed job post. Number two Always include something, some sort of filter in that job post. Ask them to do something specific with their subject line. This will weed out half of your applicants up front. Number three you're looking for competency and attention to detail and intelligence rather than a specific skill mastery. Number four test applicants with a small test project. 5. Do interviews, but do them late in the process. 6. Have some sort of a probationary period where you evaluate them and aren't fully committed to keeping them. My name is John Jonas and I created onlinejobs ph where all of these people found the VAs that they're working with.