John Jonas walks through four ways to screen VA applicants from the Philippines: require a specific action in the application, ask detailed questions to let bad fits drop out, do Skype interviews later since many are intimidated by video, and use small paid tasks to see how they work rather than just what they produce.
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How to weed out applicants when hiring a va. There are a number of ways people weed out candidates when trying to hire a virtual assistant. From doing lots of personal interviews to doing test tasks to just communicating via email. Now there's not a right and a wrong way, but in my experience Here are the four best ways to weed people out. Number one Require something small when applying. This is often done by requiring them to attach something to their application or to make the title of their application something specific. Like when you apply, make the title of Your post graphic design 49 from and insert your name here but put your name in. So I always put this somewhere in the middle of my job post so I know the person actually read the job post. Then anyone who doesn't follow the directions, I can discard them without even looking at their application. This is the easiest way to weed people out because it happens up front. They self select and you know you're getting applicants who read your job post and who followed the directions. Number two Ask lots of questions. Now when I recruit I ask lots of questions over lots of emails. Every time I do this I always find that most people weed themselves out because they don't want to answer the questions. Or I can easily drop people from my recruiting pool as I see that they're not a good fit. Simple, effective. This is very time efficient. Number three A face to face interview. So usually this is a Skype interview. Now this is one of the controversial ones because I don't do it and I don't recommend you do it. But I know a lot of employers who swear by it. So if you can pull it off between the time zone difference and the cultural barrier of the Filipinos not showing up, then great. There are obvious benefits. The drawback that most people don't realize is that most Filipinos don't want to do a face to face interview. They're scared. And Filipinos don't deal well with things that scare them or at least with things that have the potential to embarrass them. And a face to face interview is one of those things that with a potential foreign boss that is likely to embarrass them. However, let me give you a piece of advice that will make you much more successful. If you decide to do the Skype interview, do it later in the recruiting process. The earlier you do it, the more likely you are to lose a good candidate just because they're scared. So the more interaction you've had with them via email before you suggest the Skype interview, the more likely they are to show up to the interview. Plus, the later you do it, the fewer times you have to get on a face to face interaction call, which is always time consuming and dealing with time zones. So Number four A Test task. Now there are tons of ways to do this, and I'm not going to go over a bunch of examples, but here's some advice. First, keep the test tasks simple. You're trying to test them not to get productive work done. If it appears that you're trying to get them to do work before you hire them, they'll be super leery and you'll probably lose the best candidates. Second, make sure to pay them for this test. If it's more than one hour of work, tell them up front that you'll pay them for it and tell them a specific amount you'll pay. Filipinos are super scared about doing work and not getting paid, so being upfront about paying them for this test task is really important. Also, when doing this test task, the most important thing isn't who accomplishes it the best, but rather how well do you work with them. So those are my four ways to weed out candidates when hiring a virtual assistant. For more help, head over to OnlineJobs PH Education where I teach everything I know about hiring VAs in the Philippines. I'm John Jonas and I created OnlineJobs Phone.
