John Jonas walks through onboarding a new Filipino virtual assistant: send a welcome email with hours, pay, time off, and reporting expectations, then pay weekly at first. The first task matters most. Give clear instructions, require daily reports on what got done and what's stuck, and tell them to ask for help instead of disappearing. Budget 5-10 extra hours per week upfront.
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Hey, welcome to video four in the how to Hire a Great Virtual Assistant series. In this video, I'm going to cover actually hiring someone and the first task. You're ready to hire someone, You've interviewed them, you feel good about it. Here's what you do next. You're going to send them a formal email with your expectations, the hours you expect, the pay, the paid time off, sick days, daily reporting, your company vibe. This is a somewhat formal email explaining to them kind of your work policies and let me go through some of this stuff. Your expectations include that you expect them to work 40 hours a week, or you expect them to work certain times, or you don't expect them to work certain times, but you expect them to get in their hours each day. You expect them to get this much done or whatever it is that you expect of them. Okay, so hours, let's talk real quickly. You can ask them to work 40 hours a week, eight hours a day for five days. If you're using time tracking, don't expect to see eight hours a day of time. If you see five hours a day, consider yourself lucky. That's great. And that just is what it is with time tracking in the Philippines because they're super concerned about you seeing something that you don't like. So just be prepared for that pay. So I would set expectations of pay with them right now. When you're beginning, you should probably pay them weekly for the first couple months. They're very concerned about not getting paid, about doing a whole bunch of work and not getting paid. So pay them weekly for the first couple months. Then you can shift to paying them bi weekly or monthly, however you want to do it. I for paid time off, I don't do paid time off with my people. Actually, I do paid time off. I don't do specific number of days or sick days. Whatever. I tell my people, you can take off whatever you want. Whenever you're sick, you can take it off. Whatever vacation you want or need, you can take it off. I just want to know ahead of time. I just want to know, hey, I'm having this vacation with my family or sir, I'm so sorry I'm sick today, or if you're really sick, that's fine, just let me know afterwards. Just be quick about it. That's a big deal for me. The biggest deal in this whole thing is setting the expectation for daily reporting. I need an email every single day from you or a communication every single day from you. In that email or communication, I want to know what did you do today? What problems did you run into and what can I do to help you? And those three things will make such a big difference in number one, holding them accountable for what they're doing. But number two, getting their work off of my plate in knowing that I'm going to get an email from them, I'm going to get a communication from them, they're going to let me know what they did so I don't have to focus on it or worry about it until I get that, and then I can focus on helping them out. Okay, so you've sent this initial formal email. Now you're going to move on to a training email where you're going to do the first task. Now here, the first task. Here's the purpose of it. The purpose is for you to figure out, can I work with this person? That's your goal here. If you can work with this person, it may take you a couple of weeks to figure out if you can work with them. If you can work with them, this is going to be amazing. If you can't work with them, it's time to let them go. It's time to try hiring the second best person you recruited, or maybe, I don't know, try something else. But that's the point of this first task. Can we work together? So here's what you're going to do in this first task in order to establish this correctly, and if you'll do this this way, this will solve 90% of the number one issue that people have with hiring virtual assistants, which is my va disappeared. So here's how you're going to do this. In the email, you're going to say, hey, here's your first task. Here's what I want you to do. Here's training for this first task. Yes, you have to create training for it. You have to give them instructions. Giving the instructions is a super important part of eliminating the disappearing worker and establishing trust. So they do really great work in the future. If you give them training, you'll create a rock star worker. If you don't, it's going to be difficult. So you're going to give training. Here's your first task. Here's training. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to try this and try and solve it. Try and do this task when you get stuck on something, because I know you're going to get stuck on something, I need you to try and Google it. See if you can find a solution. Ask your friends if they know anything. When you feel like you're getting stuck and you're not making progress. And this is key. When you're not making progress, I need you to come to me and I'm going to solve the problem for you. I'm going to help you solve the problem. I'm going to find a solution. I'm here to help you succeed. I want to help you succeed. So this, I don't want to say this specific language, but this language is really important that you tell them, don't disappear. Did I say that in there? What I. Here's what you're going to include. What I don't want you to do is I don't want you to disappear. I need you to come to me with your. With your problem. That's really important. Saying, I want you to come to me, that I'm willing to help you solve the problem. This will prevent them from disappearing. Because a Filipino worker, culturally, they get embarrassed. If they don't want to let you down, they really don't want to let you down. And if they feel like they're going to let you down, if you're going to be disappointed in them, then they would rather just kind of slink away and shy away and disappear rather than say, hey, I'm sorry, I don't understand your instructions. So it's really important that you tell them they can come to you. And if you do this, this will set the stage for the rest of your working relationship with them where you will solve, like I said, like 90% of this number one problem. This is really, is the biggest problem. And it's really. I mean, there are other problems, but it's the only one you really need to be concerned about. So now, really quickly, let me set some expectations with you. You go to do this, this is not a magic bullet. This isn't going to solve all your problems right up front. This is going to take some work on your part. You can expect to spend five to 10 hours a week extra for the first couple weeks while you train this person to work with them and try and get something done. If you're working towards getting something off of your plate after a couple weeks, you're not only going to take away those five to 10 hours, you're also going to gain five to 10 hours back. Hopefully you. You're going to get time back in your life. If you are working 50 hours a week, you're going to work 60 hours a week for a couple weeks, then you're going to start working 40 hours a week, and maybe it won't be 40, maybe 48. Whatever it is, you just bought time. This is the only way I know of to buy time. And then you're going to do it again. And you're going to do it again. So, again, my name is John Jonas with onlinejobs Ph, the largest and safest marketplace hiring Filipino virtual workers. If you have questions, feel free to go to onlinejobs Ph and use the Contact us link. And if you ask for me, obviously it's not going to come to me at first, but it'll come to me, and I'm happy to answer any of your questions. I would love for you to succeed with this. Just get started. You got to take a leap and see if it works for you.
