9 Ways to Hire a Virtual Assistant to Save Time and Money

You’re an entrepreneur, small business owner or someone who works from home. You’re busy, and you’re tired. You’ve got a lot on your plate. You can’t do it all. The solution? Hiring a virtual assistant. But how do you know how to hire a virtual assistant to save time and money, and how do you find the right one? Here are 9 ways to hire a virtual assistant to save time and money.

How to find the right virtual assistant for you

The first step in hiring a virtual assistant to save time and money is identifying which type you need. Traditional and freelance virtual assistants have different skills and personalities. Each of these types can help you with different tasks.

Traditional virtual assistants are great if you need help managing your calendar, answering questions, and handling the occasional larger project. They are adept at multitasking and can become familiar with your business and processes, making them an excellent choice to help virtual assistant save time for you.

Freelance virtual assistants, on the other hand, can offer more specialized skills for specific tasks. They can quickly adapt to your business needs and provide targeted assistance where it’s needed most.

Hire a virtual assistant to save time and money

Start with the right questions: Who is hiring virtual assistants? If you work from home, you may not know many others who work from home. You can’t rely on your personal contacts to find a good virtual assistant. Hiring a virtual assistant means hiring a company to manage your work, so you have to look at the right companies. You can find virtual assistant agencies on websites like UpWork, Zirtual, We Make Your Calls, Purple and Guru. They advertise virtual assistant roles all over the web.

These agencies may not guarantee a perfect match, but they provide a pool of candidates that can help you virtual assistant save time. Look for agencies that offer a mix of in-house and freelance support, and evaluate them based on the quality of their services and their ability to understand your unique business needs.

Creating a job description

If you’re not sure of what you need, create a job description first. Describe the role that you need filled, as well as the duties and responsibilities of the job. You can post the job on sites like Upwork or Monster, or you can create a blog. List the duties and responsibilities in the description, and then ask your network for help.

You can post a Google form on your social media pages, or ask them to e-mail their answers to you. Select the top five or so answers, or other trusted candidates.

Talk to them. Gather information Use the information you gather to decide how you’re going to hire. If you plan to hire someone with 3 years of experience, you’ll want someone with a few years of experience, too. By asking these questions, you’ll end up with more options to choose from.

How to interview a potential virtual assistant

First, know what you need help with. When you’re interviewing a virtual assistant, you’re hiring someone to help with different tasks, depending on their background and experience. Virtual assistants can help you take care of paperwork and administrative tasks such as filing expenses, setting up records and more. You can hire a virtual assistant to prepare proposal materials and write corporate communications. The catch? You might not know it right away.

A virtual assistant may ask to come in for a video interview before taking on the work you need. Give your virtual assistant an opportunity to win your trust. Let him or her see your schedule and demonstrate how busy you really are.

How to make a work contract

When you hire a virtual assistant to save time and money, there are a few things you need to include in the contract. For example, you’ll want to specify the daily hours and the pay rate. Some popular terms you’ll want to include in the contract include: Daily rate and pay rate. How many hours the person will work. A description of the tasks the assistant will do. The tasks the assistant should be able to do (according to your or the position). If the person can do it, how to do it (with a time estimate).

For some people, the key is to get the contract signed within a few hours of hiring someone. If you want to give more time for the contract to be completed, you can give a deadline for when the contract will be finalized. But if you want to get started with a contract right away, it’s best to have a clear and concise agreement in place.

Setting up your assistant

Choosing your assistant is more complex than choosing a full-time employee. You have to figure out how much you’ll pay for the assistance. It also has to be someone you’re comfortable working with. After all, you’ll be the boss, and you have to make the decisions. After talking with people and researching various sites, you can start figuring out if you’ll need an employee or a virtual assistant. Here are three ways to use Google: Find free virtual assistants. They provide additional assistance for free or at a cost.

Find virtual assistants who will do a job for you. They charge a fee and/or will do a good job, but won’t be able to give you the attention you need to get your project done. Search for virtual assistants who specialize in your type of work.

Dealing with employee issues

This is a definite benefit of hiring a virtual assistant to save time and money. If you have multiple employees, you have the added stress of dealing with all of their employee issues. Dealing with insurance, payroll, and tax concerns are all things to be concerned with if you don’t have the right virtual assistant to take care of it.

Cost-cutting is a top priority for many businesses. When you have an employee that’s not performing up to par, you don’t have to spend the time trying to figure out what’s wrong.

Instead, you can get it taken care of as quickly as possible and move on with the task at hand. Tax planning is a primary benefit of hiring a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant is not tied down to a physical location, so they can be accessed at any hour, offering a flexible solution to help virtual assistant save time for your business.

Being a good employer

Your time is valuable, but most entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t have time to spend hunting for and managing a virtual assistant. They either don’t have time to work at all or have time spent chasing down and connecting with a resource they could hire to help.

And if your business thrives on a steady stream of work, you’ll likely have no choice but to search for someone who can help out. Hiring a virtual assistant allows you to hire and manage a person who has skills that you don’t need, or at least skills that you aren’t able to do.

You can see, for example, that you don’t need a full-time graphic designer but a freelance designer who can do some of the work for you. And if you need someone who will work on-site you can hire someone who can do that, too. Of course,

Conclusion

There are several things you should take into account when hiring a virtual assistant to save time and money and work for you. First of all, you need to hire a virtual assistant that is well-versed in specific technologies so that you can continue doing your work as if you were there.

Then, when you need to hire a virtual assistant, it’s good to hire a local one. These are less expensive to hire, they are easier to find, and there is less hassle in locating and hiring them. So consider hiring a virtual assistant today, if you haven’t already, to help your business virtual assistant save time and thrive.