How the First Freelancer Didn’t Do Such a Good Job of Researching Job Opportunities Quickly

by Francis
(December 11, 2012)

Roman got me to have quite a headache to be honest. Right after we hired him, he said he would start working. It took one day for him to complete the initial two-hour assignment which mainly consisted of watching the videos of me giving instructions on how to do the task.

As a sign of goodwill and to compensate the virtual assistant for the training, which took those 1-2 hours, I agreed to have that training be paid. In other words, Roman receives his hourly rate even for only watching the training.

I assumed that the task would be crystal clear as I really have put much much thoughts in to the training.

What did I get as a result?

An email saying that he forgot the first gist of the project.

The first gist, seriously?

Did he even watch the videos?

I was a little bit disgruntled. However, managing this provider was mainly the task of my virtual assistant.

So I gave him a piece of my mind and asked him to motivate Roman to work a little faster. Two to three days later, Roman finally got to start the task.

Sidenote:

This sounds as if I was yelling at my VA. I was not. But since we work together very closely for quite some time, I am free to express myself freely when I’m not happy about anything to my VA – without having to fear him taking it personally.

To be honest, at that time of writing while Roman was working on the project; I was also a little bit ill. So I had to lie in bed and could not do much research on my own and I was expecting somehow this outsourced job research task to go well.

When I saw what sort of businesses and firms Roman was researching in the actual excel sheet, I was not greatly impressed either.

However, this much is not his fault. He is researching in a foreign language after all.

The good thing is my virtual assistant has reposted the same job opening a second time in order to find a fallback option provider for this project. In other words, if Roman should fail; we would be able to hire someone else right away.

Now for the awesome part, one applicant who is interestingly from Pakistan actually tells me that he has basic understanding of Germany and he has a diploma in Chemistry. How much more could I ask for?

I’ll start the competition of both providers next week. Let’s see who gets me the better and more results and makes the race. It’s always good to have a healthy competition. Not so much to put pressure on the applicants. Roman doesn’t know about his competition, but more to find the perfect fit of a virtual assistant for your project.

That’s what I’m going to do.

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