Hiring Guide: Qualities A Professional Administrative Assistant Must Have

Francis:

Okay. So that is actually a very good plan. I cannot add anything to that. You find first how to do it perfectly for one picture including you making notes so that you can sort of make a manual of how the perfect solution can be.

And if you choose to, you can always find either more assistants to support your workload or have another professional administrative assistant if the existing assistant leaves you for some reason so that you have a backup solution. 

So if you have perfect picture result, keep the process of where you went there – ready on paper. 

Stefan:

Yes. Yes. Definitely, that would be. But right now as I’ve said, this is something that I didn’t have a lot of expertise in the editing process.

I know I have basic knowledge about Photoshop and editing but I have no detailed knowledge about that stuff. The whole design creativity, I like that and I don’t have that so I need somebody who has that.

And since I couldn’t do that, I was stuck on the layout, and on the picture problem and so I had to go that way with hiring a professional administrative assistant having this specific skill. 

Francis:

Yeah. It’s daunting to not just the wrong idea. By the way, can you tell me a little bit about your assistant? You do not need to share any personal information with me; although, I probably could research this within oDesk since you sent me the invitation.

Since it is your assistant, I would only like to know which country is he from and if you are comfortable with it which amount of money roughly are you investing in to him. 

Stefan:

Okay. Right now, I hired him for $60. That is more than the $50. He applied to the job for $60.

That is actually a good thing because I liked that he applied for the amount of money that he wanted instead of the amount of money that I was willing to pay. I did like that.

Francis:

So in other words, he didn’t try to undersell himself.

Stefan:

No. He knew how much he wants for this job. He had a rough idea how much he wants. So I think that was a fair price.

Francis:

Okay.

Stefan:

So he’s from the Philippines and he is studying Media Design.

Francis:

Very good.

Stefan:

So he’s a student, obviously. He seems like a young guy and he didn’t know about the backdoor design.

Francis:

Okay.

Stefan:

Backdoor graphics. He took a whole day after we discussed that possibility to get familiar with backdoor graphics. To teach himself backdoor graphics which was a huge surprise for me that he…

Francis:

Very good. That’s very good.  

Stefan:

…was willing to put himself out there and learn what is necessary for the job. The other thing is that, what really surprised me and that was the point where I hired him was after like 2 or 3 days when we worked together.

He told me the magic words that I think, at least I as an employer would always want to hear the words from a professional administrative assistant;

“I will find a way. Let me research that. I will find a way.”

And that I never hear that from somebody so I thought that’s a good work ethic. 

Francis:

I think it is an excellent work ethic and I think you had a very good catch with him. Try to hold on to this person.

Try to see if he’s ready to take up more work in other areas of your expertise. Try to see if he’s willing to be taught by you.

Stefan:

Oh, definitely. Definitely.

Francis:

And if you do that, try to see if you would be ready to propose him an hourly job. Assistants on oDesk love hourly jobs because hourly jobs have a payment guarantee.

Stefan:

Yes.

Francis:

If you have a fixed price job, you could say at any point in time, “Oh, you didn’t work well. I don’t give you any money.” 

Stefan:

Yeah.

Francis:

He might be able to protest. You might be banned from oDesk but you won’t see any penny.

Stefan:

Ah yeah. That is true. We talked about how we want to handle it and I proposed that we just do it like fixed price right now…

Francis:

Okay.

Stefan:

We’ll see how it works and we can later adjust the payment or something like that. Right now, the situation was like this.

We talked about this project yesterday and right now the idea is that he is redrawing the pictures by hand. Then scanning them and then edit, finalizing them in Photoshop.

Francis:

Okay.

Stefan:

He contacted me today that he tried it and it didn’t work out like he wanted it to be. And that he will propose a new solution to me tomorrow. Maybe, again, redrawing by hand a new picture something like that.

He will contact me tomorrow with one or two new solutions for the situation. And I told him that is no problem because for my side I have to do some work on the E-book still. So, we are in no rush.

Francis:

Okay. My proposition, perhaps, he is not happy with his work. You have to know something about assistants from the Philippines. I have had a few and I’ve also read a lot of resources from experts that teach about hiring from the Philippines.

So, it might be stereotypical and it’s not always the case but often Philippines feel very insecure about themselves. That is why I was really surprised when you told me about your assistant. He was confident and proactive which is rare. A very rare and very precious quality…

Stefan:

Absolutely.

Francis:

Such a professional administrative assistant is like gold. If you have someone who’s intelligent, can speak English and is proactive; you have gold in your hands.

Stefan:

I had, in the past, outsourcers from the Philippines. I had a full time professional administrative assistant from the Philippines who helped me on a project that I wanted to try out that was…

Can I talk about it really fast because it’s about outsourcing into the Philippines?