Questions To Ask Yourself Before Hiring A Virtual Assistant

When it comes to hiring and managing someone virtually, there are a few things that you’ll need to be clear about before getting started.

As the employer, it is your responsibility to make sure you have the clarity to move forward in hiring before you even start looking for your Virtual Assistant.

The following are questions that we ask our potential clients to get further clarity on how hiring and managing someone would work so there’s a clearer system moving forward.

Below are the top questions I recommend you ask yourself before you start the hiring process:

Who Am I Hiring?

In previous articles, I’ve talked about one of the biggest hiring mistakes people make: thinking that the assistant that they’re looking to hire is a “Unicorn”

What this means is that they think their VA can and should do everything in the business: from bookkeeping to admin work, to managing clients, or even employees.

In reality, this is just not the case, since the reason why you even want to hire an assistant yourself is to be able to have someone take on or start other tasks you just can’t do.

The best way to have this clarity is to write out what are the common tasks that you do in a day, week, or a month that takes up too much of your time, or you don’t want to be doing, and prioritize them based on what you need your assistant to work on.

If the tasks are more related to creating content, graphics, managing social media, then you might need a social media manager, not a VA.

But if the tasks are helping you manage your business, the admin tasks, then a virtual assistant is a better fit to hire.

How Have I Managed People In The Past?

The reason why you want to ask yourself this question is you want to find out:

What kind of manager am I?

What kind of a leader am I?

Your management style is essential when it comes to hiring your Virtual Assistant because you’ll need to find someone who matches that style.

For example, if you’re more of a micromanager, you’ll need to find someone who can handle being micromanaged.

If you’re someone who is more of a “Here’s the outcome, you can figure it out” kind of manager, then you’ll need to find someone who can figure things out as they go.

How Organized Am I?

From your tasks to your projects to your goals, it’s important to assess where you have everything organized in your business.

As it starts to scale and grow, things are probably falling through the cracks, that’s why it’s important that you start creating some system where it would make it easier for you to introduce your virtual assistant to your business.

It definitely doesn’t have to be perfect, but having a place where your assistant can easily find the information they need will make the onboarding process smoother as they start working.

How Do I Plan Out Tasks & Projects?

Knowing how you generally plan out tasks and projects can help you have clarity on the type of assistant you’ll need to support your process.

For example, if you’re someone who constantly creates checklists and detailed documentation of what needs to get done, you’ll need someone who also appreciates checklists and can organize them in a way that’s easily understandable.

How Often Do I Want To Communicate? & How Quickly Do I Reply To Communications?

You can set times on when you want to sync with your assistant to give each other updates on where the tasks and projects are at that don’t cause friction or pause in between the work that needs to get done.

That means setting up daily syncs at the start where you might hop on a 15-minute call to iron out what needs to get done, and then slowly doing this weekly so you’re being given the top projects that are being moved forward or done.

You also want to set with your VA when to expect replies from you and what are different modes that you can reach them, so they know that they can reach out to you when they’re stuck on something instead of waiting until a meeting before they tell you if something is wrong.

What Hours Do I Prefer Working?

Setting with your assistant the times that you’d like to work and for them to work can make it easier with timezone differences if you choose to have them work either only at the beginning of your workday or at the end of it.

This way there’s a time for you to talk and sync, as well as they become aware of what times you can respond to them as they get the work done.

What Are The Different Tools That I’m Using?

In an article where I talk about the tools to use when working with a VA, I outline different tools that are essential when working with someone overseas.

You’ll need a tool that manages tasks and projects, a tool to monitor their hours and their work, a tool to pay them, and many more depending on your business.

Laying out the different tools and how you use them before hiring will help make the transition and onboarding easier as you can start adding them into your tools’ space, as well as they would be able to train themselves easier on how to use the tools.

What Level Of Quality Do I Expect?

Setting expectations with your assistant is important when it comes to having a smoother relationship with them.

What are your standards? What is acceptable or what isn’t in the workplace? Do you have examples of the output you’d like to see from them?

As the employer, it’s your responsibility to give effective feedback to your VA and to give them the space to get work done.

What Is My Main Focus?

Knowing what your goals are in your business makes it easier for your Virtual Assistant to help you get there.

This is something most people skip, as they think that an assistant should just focus on getting their work done and that’s it.

But in reality, if you’re able to effectively relay with your VA what the goals are and giving them that zoomed-out version of your business, will help them get ideas on how to get there faster, and even what tasks can be skipped in order to get to the goal.

Whether or not you’re hiring someone today or the next week, having clarity on what you want moving forward will help both you and your assistant get to where you need to go in your business.

Comment below any answers you have to these questions, and help others out get their clarity as well!