3 tips for hiring a virtual assistant

Hiring a virtual assistant to handle some of your professional and personal tasks can free up your time for more strategic, profitable opportunities. Here are some tips for how to make the most of this relationship.

1. Trust the process. “One of the biggest hurdles for folks in hiring a virtual assistant is letting go — not figuring out what they’re able to delegate but how to delegate. Often clients will pick something small to start,” said Ryan Johnson of Upwork, the world’s largest freelance marketplace. He suggests tasks such as setting up meetings or scanning and sorting your email inbox. Johnson cites a study indicating that busy CEOs spend one day per week managing communications and two days in meetings.
2. Trust the person. One of the biggest challenges with virtual assistants is they’re not physically in your space every day, so you have to find somebody you absolutely trust, said Thomas F. Levasseur, CLU, CLTC, a 28-year MDRT member from Dover, New Hampshire. “And you have to find somebody who operates like an entrepreneur rather than an employee, because employees operate on a time-for-money economy. You’re going to hire them for 15 hours a week. You’re going to give them tasks to do, and once they finish those tasks, they’re not going to automatically look for something else to do. So it’s somebody you have to trust, somebody who has an entrepreneurial spirit.”
3. Get in sync. “It’s very important to choose people who are similar to your personality. They don’t have to be just like the person they work with, but they need to connect. They need to be able to communicate,” said Emma Farmer, marketing director for the International Virtual Assistants Association. “If you have a baby boomer and you have a Gen X, many times they don’t speak the same language. But if you have a baby boomer with a Gen X mindset or one who knows how to work with Gen X because they have children that age, that could work. You definitely want to make sure you can connect and you speak a similar language with a virtual assistant that you work with.”

Read more in the Round the Table story “Is a virtual assistant right for you?”

Written by Matt Pais, MDRT Content Specialist