Hiring virtual assistants (VAs) is a trend that has become a common practice in 2023. These are professionals who help you tackle a huge amount of workload without any stress. VAs are your ticket to productivity boosts for many functions that can be done with minimum supervision.
How can you unlock such channels of higher efficiency in your business?
Here is a comprehensive guide to let you get all the key facts right about hiring virtual or remote assistants. The information will help you discover a whole new world of talent and find people who will add huge value to your business.
First thing – get the VA role right.
What is Virtual Assistant (VA)
In the simplest words, a VA is a professional who can work for you from anywhere in the world. You want engineering blogs written to promote your products in California. Find a virtual blogger assistant. You want to get someone to market your products in Toronto. Find a virtual sales assistant for Toronto.
From PA tasks to financial analysis work and marketing analytics, there are so many things that VAs can achieve for you. They can be hired as remote contract workers or remote consultant employees.
The question that might have come to your mind is: “What types of VA services are available?” Read on.
Types of Virtual Assistants (VAs)
1. Administrative VA
There is always a lot of administrative work that never gets done on time – if that is the case for your department or team, you can easily solve the problem if you hire a virtual assistant for administrative tasks.
2. General VA
As the term indicates, any general work that can be done online or using a computer from anywhere in the world can be assigned to a VA. For example, you benefit from hiring a virtual employee to sort, filter, and manage enquiries from websites and sales emails and create daily, weekly, and monthly reports. It costs you much less, too.
3. Data Entry and Reporting VA
A lot of invoices, delivery notes, vouchers, bills, employee records, etc., need to be entered and databases updated. Having an FTE might not be the need of the hour. You can always hire a virtual data entry assistant.
4. SEO VA
For many companies, the backlog of SEO work only gets bigger. If your small business plans bigger growth, you need a strong, intelligent SEO team, which might either be difficult to acquire locally or too expensive. But with a virtual assistant agency that offers virtual SEO assistant hiring support, you can find a brilliant remote SEO employee or team.
5. Social Media VA
Not everyone is making the best use of the power of social media for their business. One key reason is that they do not have the right professionals nearby. Well, with a virtual social media assistant, you can engage with past, present, and potential customers in a strategic manner and create a popular brand and growing customer base.
6. Customer Service VA
A customer service VA is ideal for all businesses that are unable to meet all their customer queries and information requests on time. The number of demands can vary from one month to another. You can enhance your permanent team with a remote one and get things on track.
7. Secretarial VA
Are you tired of secretaries leaving you frequently? Is your secretary overloaded with work many times? It could be an unmanageable workload increase that is disturbing your secretaries’ work-life balance, leading to high attrition. A virtual secretary can serve as a great support to handle burnout issues.
8. E-commerce VA
Your ecommerce business needs an efficient team to handle the hundreds of tasks for updating websites, product information, customer calls, chat support, transaction support, etc. By hiring a virtual e-commerce assistant, your business can achieve tremendous improvements in CX, customer loyalty, and retention.
9. Specialized VA
The VA roles mentioned above are among the most in-demand, but in the last few years, specialized VA hiring has been getting increasing attention.
Specialized functions are those that need specialized knowledge, certification, or expertise levels. It could be CRM analytics, marketing analytics, financial modelling, product design, UX design, healthcare assistance, or technical marketing.
You can hire a virtual assistant agency to find super-specialized or mid-level specialized assistants from any geography that offer the most benefits. The more choices you have in getting better talent, the more your business can get advantages of managing and driving better performance levels.
How To Hire A Virtual Assistant
1. Get reports from every team about work that is not getting done
From marketing to productions and customer order fulfilment, identify areas of inefficiency, customer complaints, and problems. Find out how these areas can be improved and which tasks can be outsourced for part-time, partial-time, or full-time.
2. Find out what activities can be managed through minimum supervision
Check activities that can be done by an experienced professional remotely and with negligible or minimum supervision.
3. Consult With A Virtual Assistant Agency
Take the support of an established agency offering virtual employee or assistant recruitment services. You get the chance of highly specialized and personalized search services, leading to finding people who are the best for the functions and outcomes to be managed and achieved.
4. Explore talent opportunities
Let your virtual assistant agency partner explore great VA service opportunities onshore and offshore. Find out where you can get efficient, dependable, and affordable virtual staff or assistants.
5. Assess the impact on busines
Compare the pros and cons – of hiring part-time in-house assistants versus remote ones. Remote assistants that get you desired outcomes with higher productivity and at lower costs definitely provide more value to your business.
6. Frame the right contracts
The right contracts are key to success. You do not want people leaving midway. You do not want mediocre performers. The hours of work, wages, and incentives need to attract the best talent. At the same time, it should help you lower overall HR costs.
Summing Up
A lot of businesses across industries are still waking up to realize the extraordinary benefits that hiring a virtual/remote assistant can provide. You can start by hiring one VA and slowly ramp up and have a small talent pool of remote workers, offering high value through productivity, performance, and diversity.
Alliance Recruitment Agency
We are a global recruitment agency with AG recruiters in the USA, Canada, the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, and 20+ countries. Through our local agriculture recruiters, you can discover brilliant talent in the agriculture sector from across your region and other locations in your country. Partnership with us provides long-term value and higher growth.
Expand your capacities by getting the right manpower
Find excellent professionals in the agriculture sector without spending a lot of time and money
Get the best talent support aligned to your growth goals.
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