You have made the decision to hire a Virtual Employee (VE)… Congratulations!

Now what?

You have known for a long time you needed some assistance, but you have hemmed and hawed hoping that the solution would magically appear. Well, it hasn’t – so you need to find a solution. Hiring your virtual employee isn’t as hard as you might think if you follow our methodology.

Before you begin in your quest to find the perfect VE, you need to think about what you want them to do. Make a list of all the duties you want them to handle for you. Once you do this, categorize the tasks into administrative tasks, sales tasks, or customer service tasks. If you have more sales tasks that other tasks – you need to find a virtual employee that is equipped for selling. If you have admin & customer service tasks – you can use a generalist to assist you.

Good sales VEs are harder to find and generally paid more than generalists. They have a different personality style as well so all of this needs to be evaluated before you start interviewing.

Once you have determined the type of virtual employee you need, you can then take the tasks and start developing your perfect job description. Take your time on this task as it will become the foundation of your interview questions, your training,  and your performance evaluation after you have made your selection.

We recommend using a global staffing agency. If you want access to ours – you can contact us & we will put you in touch with them. You can also review more about your hiring options. This one step will save you hours of your searching on your own. If however, you want to go at it alone – google is your best bet for finding many options. Make sure that you interview the staffing agency to make sure that they are a good fit for you.

If you elect to bypass the staffing agency – then you are going to spend a ton of time looking on your own. We don’t believe this is the best use of your time nor are you able to attract the best talent. Think about that before you make a final decision.

Narrow down the candidates. Whether you have a shortlist from a staffing company or you are culling through all the responses, you have to narrow the field down to the best candidates. We recommend finding 3 – 5 to do personal interviews.

Now you have to prepare for the interview. Have specific questions that help you determine if the candidates are best suited for what you need. Want some of our special hiring questions? Check out this post. You can sign up for more, but we give you our top 3 and what they reveal about your candidate.

Make the offer. Depending on your hiring option, all you may have to do is to let your staffing agency know which one you want. If you are going alone – you have to craft the offer, determine how and when to pay your VE and what the other working arrangements will be. Put it all in writing and have all parties agree and then you are good to go.

You will find that having a Virtual Employee is something that will help you grow and reduce your stress. You will be asking yourself – why did I wait so long? Book an appointment today.

One of the most repeated problems people that have attempted the use of virtual employees is they had to re-train each one. Virtual Employees  (VEs) are available part-time, full time and some companies have a group of staff VEs where you can buy a certain number on hours per month.

In the last category, we have a friend who coined the phrase “$100 per month plan”. She has a set number of hours, five, for the access to a virtual employee, but unfortunately, it never seems to be the same one. The service has an office suite full of staff, and you got the next one in rotation. Basically it is a call center with a revolving staff and revolving assignment.

Unfortunately, due to the lack of consistency from one VE to the next, our friend developed a negative view of using virtual employees based on her experience because each month she spent a lot of time with the new staff training them as to what her work requirements were.

While you may need some help to do a project or one time task, the staff you get from Staffing Options/Hire Smarter Solutions is a dedicated virtual employee. They work for you exclusively, so when you train them to do your tasks, they can do them over and over. No starting out new with a new person each time. They learn your anticipated needs without having to start over each time.

Your dedicated staff works the hours you want and during those hours are available for all your tasks. It doesn’t matter what time zone you are in – when you hire, you agree to a set schedule. We have found this to be the most productive and best use of VEs as it helps the small business owner scale their business while providing the support that they want and need.

Interested in finding out more? Take a minute to fill out this form and we will provide you with some options that meet your requirements.