Virtual Assistant Hiring Process by Dennis - HTML preview

Training Your Virtual Assistant

The beauty of having a virtual assistant is that you can start them off at a lower base salary as the inherent room for growth is apparent by providing training for them to “level up” and increase their workload in time. This allows you to see their progress and to evaluate the value they give you every step of the way. It also gives your virtual assistant a continued sense of accomplishment as they see a system for growth and promotion as compared to freelancers as they’ll need to have the specific skill set immediately in order to “snag” the project.

As such, they’ll demand more money but will only provide you with one-off value which will always be trumped in the long run by your dedicated virtual assistant.

Even if you’re putting a VA on the right projects, you cannot assume they know all the details and systematic approaches.

For example, specialists might understand what it means to update a client’s Content Library, why this is important, and how it fits into our processes.

But if Specialists and Managers are not explicit, VAs will make mistakes and do things like:

• Blindly copy and paste every single Facebook post into this document-- burning weeks of time for something we could do in 10 seconds or have automated (which we do).
• Insert irrelevant or negative content-- since they don’t understand the 3 components of authority, even if we explicitly direct them to training on it and to update the 3 columns to score authority.
• Bill 4 hours a day on an inactive project for months-- not wondering whether what they’re doing has any value, if anyone is using it, or anyone even knows about it.

Filipinos are some of the hardest, loyal, and caring people we have. Their culture is just different from ours.

You have to be explicit about these components and make sure they understand the business value of these tasks, allowing them to grow into tasks tangential in the chain (to go from collecting content, to editing content, to cross-posting content, to boosting, etc).

What makes a senior VA is part skill (to bridge from a single task to working the entire value chain), but the understanding to think from the standpoint of a client-- what drives business value and what is “common sense”.