VA Checklist: 5 Things To Know Before Hiring A Virtual Assistant
Hiring a virtual assistant is exciting and rewarding, but it is definitely not a piece of cake. So, a wise entrepreneur would first balance things out before making any move. That is why taking new changes and improvements in a company shall consider a clean and concrete process.
Once these business owners finally figure it out and claim the changes to be valuable, then they can make the decisions immediately.
It’s the same if you think of reaching out for any help through virtual assistant services. So, take your time and consider the following things in this checklist.
Are you ready to weigh things out and see how virtual assistants can improve your business? Before unlocking these ways, let’s see first the reasons to hire a virtual assistant.
Why should I hire a virtual assistant?
Virtual assistants services would help you a lot in all aspects of your business. They are skilled and experienced in various tasks such as administrative, designing, editing, content creation, and even marketing and financing.
Besides that, virtual assistants are also capable of doing several assignments that you would ask them, invoice, payroll, email marketing, social media management, and even personal errands for you.
These individuals are also dedicated to lending you a hand with everything you need. They might also give their part-time or full-time schedule to help you accomplish your business goals and vision.
Hiring a virtual assistant is extra challenging but entrepreneurs should take it easy. You should give yourself time to see the best fit for the job.
To guide you, here’s a provided checklist that you may determine before choosing your virtual assignment. See our five things to consider to get you ready to hire a virtual assistant and why you must not skip any of them.
Things to Know Before Hiring your Virtual Assistant
1. Set your own goals.
Having clear goals for your business is not something that you should take lightly. While goals are there not to make you feel overwhelmed (if you are unable to get it), they are there to make you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, the results that you want to see for your business.
So, begin with an end in mind. Knowing that you have a glimpse and clear goals for your business, all your tasks and priorities revolve around your goals. Ensuring that you’d be able to hit your goals at the end of the month or even in a year and move on to the next goals for the future.
You could have your own short-term and long-term goals. In this way, you can see which one needs to prepare immediately. Moreover, the goals would also guide you with the decisions you are about to make.
Tip: You can use tools that can help you clear out your mind and jot all the goals that you have in mind. You could also use a trustee pen and paper to jot down all of these goals. Or you could download our Make it Happen worksheet that lets you write down all your goals for each month of the whole year. You can download the “Make It Happen!” worksheet here.
Benefits: As you begin to see your vision, you would be able to track your accomplishments. It would motivate you more in taking further steps for the future. Aside from that, your business would have a better chance of improving as it pursues a particular goal in the future.
2. Establish your tasks and priorities.
Based on the goals that you set for your business, for each month or the whole year, you would be able to list down all the essential tasks and priorities that would lead you to achieve your goals.
But why make a list of tasks and priorities? Can't you just do the routine tasks that you always do for your business? It is the reason why you have to make a list of tasks.
Usually, business owners and entrepreneurs get stuck in repetitive and routine tasks instead of the more important things to leverage their business. And these routine tasks keep on growing and become never-ending, consuming all your energy and time, especially for yourself and your loved ones.
Looking back, you may feel productivity shame, a feeling that you may never have done enough work. It would tell you that you did not accomplish anything resulting in a negative business mindset. Prevent these things to happen as you unravel your priorities.
Tip: You can read more of what productivity shame is and what you can do to end its vicious cycle here: The Vicious Cycle of Productivity Shame.
You can use a powerful tool to help you set which tasks need to be prioritised and which tasks come after. You can list tasks down based on importance and urgency. You can use this tool to set your top priorities: The Prioritisation Matrix.
Benefits: You see, writing down your tasks and prioritising them would help you have clear tasks for the day, week, and even for the coming months. You can set a target deadline for each of these tasks and set which tasks should be prioritised and completed first.
In this way, you would see your progress that hits the set goals you made. You will not wander and wonder whether you are doing something important for your business.
3. Know which tasks to delegate.
Once you have listed all the tasks and prioritise them, you need to know which tasks you need and want to do and which tasks you need and want to delegate.
Tip: You can use the Kaya Tool that we use to help delegate tasks to our virtual assistants. You can download it here: The Delegation Matrix.
The delegation matrix can help you decide which tasks you need to do and which tasks you need to delegate based on wants and importance.
Once you have decided which tasks to delegate, you can now use several tools to set your tasks and priorities for yourself and your team members. You can always use some of the best software tools to create and keep track of the tasks and priorities for the month. You can read them all here: The Best Virtual Assistant Software Tools.
Benefits: Task delegation would improve your workforce. It can help to finish projects faster, resulting in greater efficiency. Moreover, as you list down the assignments, you would see if you need an extra hand. Thus, you will know the things you need to fill up.
As you determine these things, your business setup would improve, ensuring a more organised operation.
4. Create a Job description.
As you finalise everything you need assistance for, you should move forward in choosing the right person for the job. But still, you must prepare the job description.
It is one of the most important things you need to consider before hiring a virtual assistant. You need to make sure that you have defined the specific role for your virtual assistants. You can check our Services Page resources to find out the list of virtual assistant services to reference the different types of virtual assistants, their roles and job descriptions.
Another thing, you must know where to find the virtual assistant. You can find virtual assistants in the Philippines and other countries. You can also find outsourcing companies of virtual assistants in Australia. As you write your job description, kindly consider these details.
Tip: When creating your job description, you need to list all the tasks you can delegate, the processes that need to be followed, and which department your VA should be under. You need to know which area in your business needs help (sales, customer service, content, website, etc.)
Benefits: Once you have determined the specific role you are looking for, it will be easier to create a specific job description fit for the virtual assistant role.
5. Create your VAs schedule.
Once you know the tasks you are about to assign to your virtual assistant, you shall now proceed in plotting their schedule. Plan out their schedule based on your personal schedule, too.
You may consider the time difference, the days of the week, and other aspects of their working schedule and off leave. Moreover, you may also indicate the process of reporting and meetings with each other.
Tip: There are many time-tracking tools that you can use to help track your progress and the time spent in finishing tasks. You can also view the total spent on specific projects your VA accomplished using these specific tools. You can view the tools that we use to track our team’s progress and time spent on each project or tasks here: The Best Time Tracking Tools for Your Virtual Assistants.
Benefits: Having a clear schedule for your virtual assistant is important because you would want to consider the amount of time, the working days, and hours that your VA would have to spend working for you. It can help track the VAs progress and the time spent working, which is very important if they are paid per hour or even per project.
The five easy steps mentioned are very important to follow. It would guide you before finding the right person for you. You should take this seriously and not just assign anyone to a vital task for your company.
The challenge for entrepreneurs
Before you dive into choosing what business you would like to venture into, it took you time and effort to make something out of several factors. You weigh each factor carefully, not to overlook anything just to be sure that when you spend your limited resources such as time, money, and energy, you get to see a business that would not make you regret it later.
Similarly, when you decide to grow your business and hire a virtual assistant to help your business. It takes a lot to consider; for one, you are ready to delegate tasks to your virtual assistant, and two, if what you’re looking for is what you really need for your business.
If you fail to prepare the changes for your business, it might lead to future issues and additional backlogs. Unlike if you know where to step in, you would have a safer alteration and improvements in your business.
So, follow the five steps above. From these five things, you could ultimately start hiring your very first virtual assistant and, of course, looking for the best VA for your business, and the hiring process that you need to go through would be more tedious than hiring a physical staff.
However, it does not end with these steps because you should now decide on who and where to find the best dedicate for the job.
Are you ready to find the right one?
Complete the five steps, then start looking for the best!
To help you with all these things, you could always ask for help from outsourcing firms to help you get your hands off the whole hiring process.
Kaya Services is an Australian-based outsourcing firm specialising in providing virtual assistance to business owners and entrepreneurs. They assist them to claim back their time to the most important things that matter in their business and outside their business: their personal lives and family.
Moreover, Kaya Services provides you with a pool of virtual assistants from the Philippines. These virtual assistants are highly trained and experienced in various tasks ranging from business management to digital marketing. So, Kaya Services is capable of giving you someone with skills in social media content creation or even administrative tasks.
To know more about Kaya Services and what services it offers, get a Free 30-minute Consultation here to help you get started and truly start growing your business with the help of virtual assistants!