How to Hire a Virtual Assistant (VA) for Your Business

Table of Contents

Stop wasting time on $5/hour tasks.

Hire a VA and focus on $500/hour tasks.

How to hire a virtual assistant (VA) for your business:

Get my free course on delegation and the art of leverage here.

Where to find VAs:

  • Upwork: good for hourly, more expensive than onlinejobs
  • OnlineJobs ph: The biggest marketplace for hiring in the Philippines. Cheap rates, great volume, need to vet yourself.
  • Jules: Agency that vets for you. Great to find a few good candidates. Pay upfront fee. Some help with training.
  • Athena: Managed service. Finds and trains VAs for you. Includes playbooks for tasks. Expensive long-term with the added monthly fee.

Writing a VA job description:

Include basics about your company and what you are looking for.

Don't have to be overly specific. You can test later.

Mention that great English is a must to save folks from wasting their time.

Evaluating VA candidates:

You will get tons of applicants.

Make them jump through hoops to narrow it quickly.

Didn't follow directions. Cut.

We look for:

- Excellent spoken & written English

- Ability to follow directions

Everything else can be trained.

Hiring VA candidates:

No amount of vetting will guarantee success.

We like hiring a few. Some won't work out. That's fine.

The best way to test if they can do the job is by giving them the job.

Hire quickly. Fire quickly.

Training a VA:

We document our standard operating procedures (SOPs) in Notion.

Record a Loom of tasks. Ask them to write out the steps in text.

Do 1-on-1 meetings often in the early days to answer questions & get to know each other.

Invest time to make the relationship work.

Paying a VA:

We use Veem and pay on the 15th and 30th of every month.

From our side, we just send the amount in USD.

Everything else is handled by Veem or the VA on their end.

If you are interested in buying, growing, and selling small companies, check out my course & community on it at IndiePE.com.