If your process for hiring VAs involves employing the first person with ‘relevant experience’ as long as they have a heartbeat and are willing to work for cheap…
please don’t complain about how every hire ended up in a fiery disaster.
Saying “VAs don’t work for your business” is the same as saying Ads or Salespeople don’t work for your business…
What doesn’t work is your approach to finding the right people and establishing the right processes.
You’re probably looking for a VA because you’re busy and don’t have enough time… but as with everything in business, you get out what you put in.
And investing into a proper hiring process is what will ultimately help you free up tremendous amounts of bandwidth and time.
I’ll be talking about hiring in this post, but if you’re more interested in onboarding, management and upskilling VAs, check the resources from my other posts.
For starters, the quality of VAs you attract comes down to the clarity in which you can communicate the following:
- Outcomes they’ll be responsible for.
- KPIs that their performance will be measured against (quantitative and qualitative)
- Required skillset and experience
- Compensation structure
- Why working for you & your company is an opportunity worth fighting for.
This means you have to sit down and think about what and who you are looking for, before posting a job app.
Communicate your standards, your mission, why what you do matters, why this role matters to what you do…etc. As clearly and succinctly as possible.
Now that you’re getting applications, let’s talk about qualifying.
The average hiring rate of my company is 1 in 158.5 applications (0.63%). Not because weeding out people is fun, but because we’d rather aggressively filter for top talents, than aggressively deal with C players or risk reputation.
Here’s an overview of our top talent screening process:
1 – Score every application – develop a standardized scoring system and score them based on the requirements you’re looking for.
2 – Send qualifier tests to top scorers – depending on the number of apps you got, this can be applicants score above a certain #, or the top 5-10%.
3. Qualifier tests – test time against tasks and problems that they’ll be dealing with on the job.
I.e. If you’re hiring a VA for content, give them a raw video + an example of a Reel-ready video + very brief instructions, and see if they can prove their competence.)
I.e. If you’re hiring an admin – give them a situation where you have to rearrange meetings with partial context, then see how they make decisions and have them explain why they did what they did.
4. Loom interview – Have them send over a 5-10 minute selfie video answering 2-3 questions.
This can be casual questions such as introducing themselves, or questions like “What do you think differentiates you from other applicants for this position?”. Key is to feel their energy, attitude and how they present themselves.
5. Finalist interview – Interview the few that’s left.
6. Choose your best pick and hire on trial where they go through on-ramping and have their performance assessed against the stated KPIs & ability to handle responsibilities.
Since we’re hiring all the time, I also like to keep a pool of strong candidates who didn’t get picked but might be super great fits for other companies.
Long post but hope this helps at least one person who’s looking to hire a Rockstar VA. If you want more resources around hiring intelligently, check out the guides section of https://www.facebook.com/groups/teamppe
That’s all!