For many of us, becoming an entrepreneur is the ultimate dream because of the potential freedom it brings. However, the road to entrepreneurship is often a long journey. During the early stages of your venture, you will have to wear different hats as you attempt to navigate your way through the highs and lows of running a business. Of course, everything will change once you get over the hump and your business starts picking up speed. The things you have to do will multiply, so you have to delegate where you can. By this time, you should already have the money to hire people who have the skills to help you move your business forward. So take a little breather and hire a virtual office assistant who can take tasks off your hands.
So why go for a virtual office assistant instead of an in-house employee? Read on.
The cost of hiring a virtual office assistant is substantially less than hiring an assistant locally. Think about it. Which one would you rather hire? An office assistant in the US asking for around $15 to $30 per hour or someone overseas whose rate is about $3 an hour. That’s a huge wage difference. And let’s assume that both have the same skill sets and can do the same tasks efficiently. Would you still hire locally?
Of course, some of you may prefer an assistant who is physically present. If that’s the case, go ahead and hire one. But for those who want to spend less, a virtual office assistant can do everything that an in-house office assistant can do.
Need someone to take care of all those administrative tasks that are taking so much of your time? A virtual office assistant can do that for you without being physically there. You don’t need someone in your office for tasks like managing your emails, making travel arrangements, taking messages, scheduling meetings, and drafting emails.
You’re not required to pay benefits such as social security, Medicare, medical and dental insurance, and workers’ compensation if you hire a virtual office assistant from outside the US. Since you no longer have to worry about all the perks that are usually provided to US-based employees in addition to their standard pay, you can use the money elsewhere. You can even hire more virtual employees if you want with the money you have saved so they can free up more of your time.
Aside from that, you also don’t have to allocate money for additional supplies and office space since virtual office assistants already have their own equipment and home office.
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Finding someone who’s the right fit for you and your company’s culture is so much easier if you decide to go for a virtual office assistant because of the enormous talent pool available. There are hundreds of job markets online and staffing agencies, so you’ll have access to the best talent from anywhere in the world. You just have to know where to find them. We’ll talk about this more in a minute.
There are millions of virtual workers on freelance websites like Upwork and Fiverr as well. If you’re looking to hire someone on a short-term basis, you can check out these sites. However, you’ll want to hire a virtual office assistant that is going to be in it for the long-haul, so you’re better off looking at online job markets, agencies, or social media platforms like LinkedIn.
If there are a lot of job markets and agencies to choose from, which one should you turn to? That depends.
If you have the time to find, train, and manage a virtual employee, you should consider hiring via online job sites because you can save a lot more. Remember what I said earlier about how there are people who are willing to do this for around $3 an hour? Well, that is the average hourly rate for a general virtual assistant in the Philippines, and there are even others who are willing to take less. I want to point out that these are professionals with college degrees, but they prefer to work from home.
In any case, OnlineJobs.ph is the perfect place to find a virtual office assistant from the Philippines. It has the largest database of Filipino virtual workers (over 500,000 resumes), and the cream of the crop is usually there. So head to the site, sign up, make your job posting, and wait for the resumes to start coming in.
While signing up is free, you will have to upgrade to a paid subscription to communicate with applicants on the site. You can look at their resumes with the free account, though, so you’ll get a chance to see if the applicants have the skills you want in a virtual office assistant. If you like what you see, go ahead and upgrade the account. It doesn’t cost much anyway.
There are two pricing plans available on OnlineJobs.ph: the Premium plan, which is $99 per month, and the Pro plan at $69 per month. The Premium plans have several features not available on the Pro plan, like unlimited background data checks, a worker mentoring service, and a video guide to outsourcing. However, you don’t need these at the moment, so just choose the $69 plan.
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When you’re all set up, go ahead and reach out to the top candidates and interview them. Once you’ve found the one you like, just cancel your OnlineJobs.ph subscription so you don’t have to pay the monthly fee.
So that’s option number one. Option number two is to hire a virtual office assistant via an agency. The good thing about going through an agency is that you don’t have to train or manage your virtual office assistant. They will do that for you. Of course, you will have to pay a little extra for that.
There are hundreds of agencies online, but let us stick to the ones that are offering workers from the Philippines since they are inexpensive. TaskBullet has a good reputation. You can give them a try. VA Staffer, Virtual Staff Finder, and OVA Virtual are good options as well.
So if you don’t have the time to train and manage your virtual office assistant, just get one from an agency. But if you’re willing to invest your time to train one, go take a look at those online job sites.
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