virtual assistant skills
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What To Look For In A Virtual Assistant – Start Of An Interview
What to look for in a virtual assistant is part-1 of the second interview from Stefan from Germany, who lives the Four Hour Work Week lifestyle in Thailand.
Summary:
- Usually most VAs/providers promise higher but can’t deliver what is expected.
- Trust building process between both parties is crucial for a long term relationship
- Good work ethics is probably the most desirable skill an employer is looking for in a virtual assistant.
Start of the Interview:
Francis:
Hello, Stefan. We already talked about this subject and here are my thoughts about how to create confidence in a freshly hired assistant so that later on he can work with self motivated drive for you and what to look for in a virtual assistant at the first glance. That’s where we want to go, right?
Stefan:
Yes. That’s good.
Francis:
Okay. In principle, it’s important at the beginning of the working relationship that your employer has no fear from you and has the room to grow self confidence in his work. If he’s afraid of being fired all the time or something then it’s difficult.
What’s also very important at the starting of a new working relationship is to figure out how big are the cultural barriers. Are there some? Where are they? How can you overcome them?
In my opinion, there’s not much of a short catch around this first trust building stage. It needs regular communication from both sides and the rough approach of “Do this work or I will fire you” often does not work in my opinion.
Please feel free to share your thoughts.
Stefan:
Yeah. I have experienced that when I’m trying to find someone who’s doing a good work. In the beginning, the promise is so very high.
You have a job and the employee, most of the time tells you right away that he can do this or that. And he will, in the beginning, most likely not say that he can’t do something.
Francis:
Yeah, that’s natural. They need the money. That’s totally natural.
Stefan:
Yes. I understand that but this goes on for awhile. In my experience too long and often the whole working relationship is built along that.
But the promises are very high and the delivery is very low. And because they don’t want to get fired, as you said, they’d rather say that they can do it or they need more time or whatever.
Francis:
They will come up with excuses, right?
Stefan:
With excuses instead of admitting that they are somewhere or that they’re not able to do it or whatever.
Francis:
In my opinion, this trust building goes both ways. You added that even before the virtual assistant should have the room to work and build his own confidence; he must give the employer (so us) the confidence in his work.
So if within the first few days a virtual assistant does not deliver at all, I would be extremely careful. I would immediately let him stop working and first figure out where’s the problem.
If the problem is clearly something that he does not have the ability or the programs or anything so that he cannot do the work and that he lied to me then I would have to end the working relationship. Or, figure out a way to train him so that he still can work for me depending on the situation.
If there has been some dishonesty going on at the beginning of the working relationship from the side of the virtual assistant and, in my opinion, this happened to me personally not so often because I’m very thorough in the interview process. But if it still happens then you have to take your consequences.
In general, there are many virtual assistants out there and many of them are highly motivated and capable people. You do not need to work with people who don’t have good working ethics.
There are many other people which have good working ethics which you can find instead. So before it gets expensive and time consuming, it’s better to end a bad start than to continue and try to fix it.
Stefan:
Yeah but the problem is that in the beginning it’s often a good start. Then you have the impression that your worker does understand the job, has the skills and he gives you feedback.
He talks with you about the job and you are coming to a conclusion together. You’ve given him job. You tell him what he has to do in the next three days and the next week. And often, he delivers the first week whatever you wanted from him.
In my case, I don’t want my worker to deliver the job. I tell him the job and he delivers the end product.
That’s how I work. I give him a part like a partial goal first.
Francis:
Yes.
Stefan:
Like the job is, for example, 3 weeks. I have estimated 3 weeks to finish it and I break it down to 3 parts, for example.
Francis:
I think the tactics of using milestones is very effective.
Stefan:
So, for example, I have a job 3 weeks. I’ll tell him after I hire him, because we had a good interview, I had the impression that you understand what we’re talking about. He could do the work and he assured me he could do the work. I give him his first milestone.
In 1 week, you have to do this and that, this and that until end of the week. He tells me, “Yes I can do that. I come back to you end of the week.” Then I let him work because he can’t work when we were “Skyping” so I leave him alone to do work.
At the end of the week, he comes back to me with finished part of the job. It’s done but it’s not as I had imagined which is okay because we can work that out.
We can rearrange stuff and then finish it so that it’s perfect. But there the problem starts. Because most of the time after that he lacks the work ethic, most of the people.
If I’m not happy with the first milestone which most of the time I will never be happy because we just started working together; he will start taking longer and longer for easier parts of the job.
Francis:
In other words, his efficiency drops with the time that he provides.
Stefan:Dramastically, yes.
Continue reading part 2 – Fixed Price vs Hourly Jobs
How To Train An Administrative Virtual Assistant To Have Exceptional Organizational Skills
Administrative virtual assistant is part-2 of an interview with Eric, a fellow entrepreneur interested in outsourcing his work to virtual assistants all over the world.
Follow along to learn from our experience on working with VAs!
Summary:
- Creating an administrative virtual assistant as close as you can to “a second version of you” is possible through training and patience.
- How hiring a virtual assistant for an affordable price can be a breakthrough in your outsourcing efforts.
- Can a written contract affect the ability of your virtual assistant to function well in his field of work?
- Avoid side scamming each other.
Start of the Interview:
Francis
Although this does sound a little bit arrogant, I like this metaphor; a virtual assistant is not magical like a “fairy that swings a wand” and leaves your site perfect. But, the virtual assistant is the closest you can get to cloning yourself. So, think of it: how do you say this stuff for pottery, the material for pottery?
Eric
Clay?
Francis
Clay, yeah. So, think of it, the assistant being clay. If it’s a good assistant who’s willing to learn and adapt to your business and is willing to please you (the employer) he/she is probably open to suggestions and improvement.
And, if you also have a trusting relationship and put lots of effort into training him or her, then the clay metaphor makes that “assistant” as close as you can to a second version of you.
So, when you want to clone yourself because you have to go to your day job and want to continue taking care of your business, you have to put in quite a bit of training into the assistant.
Eric
Right, yeah. And, that’s what I noticed. At first, I thought, okay, I could give my assistant any kind of task and they could sit down and be able do exactly what I wanted them to do without a whole lot of training.
And, that was just totally not the case. It took me, I’d say at least 4 or 5 days to kind of get them to understand exactly what I instructed and get the rapport between the two of us working together well.
And, then after that, it seemed like things started working a lot better as far as communication is concerned and, as far as they (The VA) understands what I wanted and a frequent communication between the two of us to kind of get a lot better.
Francis
Yeah. I think that’s the main reason why a beginner in outsourcing has this sort of assumption. – Actually, I probably have something similar – it’s from the marketing of 5 or 4-hour work week and other stuff like that.
Of course, they want to sell their products so they have to slightly exaggerate it or only tell you the good parts without openly telling you all the bad parts.
And, especially, on my part, I really believe in being super transparent with even the bad parts. So definitely, the good part is that you can hire someone at a very affordable price when you go overseas in some developing countries.
And that’s definitely good and a breakthrough in the mind of many people who are not aware of that.
But, the bad part (sort of), is the amount of training and patience you have to bring up and many people are not ready to bring that to the table.
Eric
Right. I think, for me too was that I didn’t have the necessary funds. I didn’t want to waste a whole lot of money trying to train them. Because, I thought, okay, I’m kind of limited on funds in the first place and if I’m going to take a week of my money to kind of train them, then that’s a week of money that I felt like it was going down the drain.
In reality, that’s investment money that you’re putting back into your business where you’re training that person. Where in the future they will know exactly what they need and what you want a whole lot better and a lot quicker.
Rather than not train them at all or not putting the proper training in place.
Francis
Yeah, I agree. Also, if you put yourself into the shoes of your assistant – I think one of the main fears your assistant obviously has is that he/she will not get paid. That he will be scammed out of his money.
There are lots of scammer employers who do this just because there are masses of virtual assistants that you can try to scam and the other way around is also possible.
But, I think the investment at the beginning especially is really just to set up the communication channels such as:
- share the Dropbox accounts,
- email accounts,
- how to communicate,
- how often they should be reporting
And although this is paid time, this is also a test for the assistant to see if you are paying them.
I strongly believe that many assistants are sort of a little bit not so invested into the relationship from the beginning because they don’t have a written working contract that will guarantee those three months of payment.
Even if they had that—for them, for example, from the Philippines to legally pursue you in the US and vice versa. If they are scamming or damaging your business then just go in hiding, you have no chance.
Eric
I think that was one of the things that I was concerned about. At the beginning, I thought, “Am I going to hire this person and am I going to hire them and they’re not going to be getting any work done? I’m going to pay them and not get exactly what I wanted from them”?
And I noticed that usually 99% of the people that I worked with did an amazing job. They wanted to please me as much as they possibly could. Because, if you think about it that this is their livelihood, it’s their business. It’s the way that they make their money.
In the beginning, I thought, “They’re going to scam me. This is going to be a big rip off and they’re going to take my money and ran off. And I’m not getting any of the stuff that I was asking for.”
But, what I noticed was that every single person that I worked with has been very eager to please and wanted to give me exactly what I was wanting and would go over and above even to give me exactly what it was that I wanted.
Francis
Yeah. This is an experience that you have made especially with VA’s from the Philippines in comparison to other countries or in general?
Eric
Well, I think in general, because I’ve worked with virtual assistants from all over the globe. I worked with some from India, from Bulgaria, from Hungary and different places, and I’ve noticed, for the most part, mostly all of them are very eager to want to give me exactly what I want.
They’ll say, “I will give you as many revisions as you want,” for a particular thing or they’re just very eager and give me exactly what I’m looking for.
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