Want to Hire a VA but have no idea where to start?

You really need to consider your options in hiring a VA, Determine the training process and cost aspect.

Remember that is going to be a higher cost vs training them yourself.

Want to read the transcript instead?

Thank you everyone for joining today. We're gonna be diving into some tips to help you find a VA the easy way and dive into all the stuff that kind of comes along with getting a VA. So if we haven't met, hey, I'm Crystal from Krystalbella.co I'm a hiring expert in tech automation Go. And the first part that I want to touch on is the training and cost aspect when it comes to getting a VA. So you really got to consider that. So if you want somebody who's a little bit more trained, it's gonna be a higher cost. Whether you're going with somebody who already has that skills or typically a VA company who trains them themselves, either on the software or on the industry and software. Again, that is gonna be a higher cost versus if you're gonna do all the training anywhere from um, 70% to a hundred percent of the training, then that would be more of the direct higher approach.


It's definitely gonna be cheaper long term. It's just gonna be about, um, a week or two difference in the training aspect for the, the differences in those. But you do also have replacements versus no replacements. So just keep that in mind too. We're really gonna be diving into this for you. So when I'm talking about software trained, it's typically AVA who's trained on the booking software versus 90% trained typically falls into somebody who is trained on the software and more of the industry, but they still need to learn your company processes. And then you have the direct hire approach, which is more of you're having to do the training and find them yourselves and you don't have those instant replacements. So let me dive into it a little bit further of the pros and cons of each one so you can make that decision yourself on which approach you want to go with.


So if you're doing direct hire where you're training them yourself, you're typically gonna have a lower hourly rate. So if you're looking for a social media, um, va, those typically range anywhere from two to $5 an hour. If you're looking for customer support, um, that could be around four to five or $6 an hour. If you want somebody for sales, again, that's anywhere from three to $7 an hour as well. If you want somebody who's doing web design, um, development, stuff like that, that is typically around seven to $11 an hour typically for those VAs as well. So you have a cheaper rate and you're able to cut out the middleman with that expense. But it does take about two to three weeks to train them. But you're able to really get, um, very specific and you're hiring. So if you really want to filter out qualities for the application, qualities for the interview, qualities for um, the second interview and so on and so forth, and have them go through this process, you really have the flexibility of filtering out, um, through that process versus with the company, you really kind of get whatever one that's assigned to you and you kind of have to go from there to ask or request for a replacement.


You also have flexibility on the pay cycle. So if you wanted to pay weekly, biweekly, again, I wouldn't really go past biweekly, but the, you do have that flexibility versus being stuck on that invoice. And then you do get to choose whether you want part-time or full-time. So typically some of the cons when it comes to direct hire is you don't have the instant replacements. You are having to do your own payroll for the um, VA and there's typically a three to $4 processing fee per VA per payment that you're doing. So just keep that in mind on your pay cycles as well too. In addition, VAs typically do want to have 15 hours minimum on their schedule versus a VA company may be able to give them five hours for this client, five hours for this client and they're still getting that schedule versus direct hire, you do want to make sure that they are getting a 15 hour minimum.


So if you do want a VA who is trained, that's typically with a company, right? So a VA company where they're either training them on their booking software or training them on the booking software or industry. Keep in mind they do also have VAs who aren't trained on your software or industry for the same price as well too. So just keep that in mind when you are looking for a VA company. But again, let's go over a little bit about the differences on that training aspect. So for 30% trained, they're typically trained on your booking software. They're not trained on maybe the lead generation sites. They're not really trained on how you are as a company or company culture. Um, they're not really, um, trained on, you know, how you do payroll, all this other stuff. So there's still training involved, but they're only trained on the software versus you're having to kind of teach them the industry because again, just for instance, booking koala services, so many different industries.

So you may get somebody who's experienced on that software, but maybe not in your industry. So just keep that in mind as well too. There are still training, so you're typically gonna be paying about five x of the normal rate. So again, remember you may have a VA who's $2 an hour for social media, or you may have a VA who's $7 an hour for web design and you're typically paying anywhere from um, five x of that. Typically around 25 an hour is basically what we've seen on average, um, per hour with the VA that you're getting. But it is one week less of training. You're, again, you're still having that training aspect, but the training isn't typically based on your um, software. It's typically based on the processes in your company and you do have the ability to request a new va. So booking software and industry train, they're typically, uh, one to two weeks to still train.


Again, you're not really training them on your software, but you're training them more on your processes, your company culture, stuff of that as well. And then you do have the ability to request a new VA as well too. But some of the cons when it comes to having a VA that's 30 to 90% trained or working with a VA company in general is typically there is a higher hourly pay. There's less flexibility when it comes to choosing a va. Typically you get, you get assigned a VA and then you get to work with them, interview them, possibly train


Them, and then if you don't like them you have to request an UVA and they have to go through that whole process again versus being in control from the beginning on your filters and the different interview processes on really being selective on what you want versus um, having to do that after the fact. And you also have, uh, less flexibility on the pay cycle versus for that VA company, you're typically stuck on whatever billing cycle that they offer. If they're flexible, that's awesome, but typically most of 'em are on a pay cycle, whether it's monthly, um, or you're getting an invoice monthly. Um, so those are some of the cons when it comes to having a company. So now you gotta decide, so do you want to have a VA company? Um, and if you do, then you gotta accept that you're willing to pay five times the normal rate in order to have a VA company.


But again, you get instant replacements, you have less training aspect, and if that's for you, that's awesome. I'll go ahead and link some, um, options down below so you can go ahead and choose from any of those, um, that we would recommend, um, and have kind of worked with, um, people wise, not necessarily VA wise, but have, you know, we know the people and they are, um, very trustworthy. Um, and that we would recommend. So we'll link those down below if you want to check those out. But if you want to go the direct hire approach, I would definitely recommend onlinejobs.ph. That's where all of the VAs are, but if you've ever tried posting a job there, you know, it can get very overwhelming. So typically if you post a job, So for this job right here, we posted a job for virtual assistant.


So we didn't actually post this job, but one of our customers posted this job and they got 3,863 people to click on the the ad and to go ahead and view it. That's awesome, right? But they got 751 people to go ahead and click apply and go ahead and start trying to message this company. If you get 751 inbound inquiries for the position, you're gonna get overwhelmed, stressed out, you're not gonna know how to choose, you're not gonna know how to filter. You're gonna have some drop off and you're gonna have a very inconsistent process for onboarding that VA and choosing one, um, that's gonna be a good fit for your company. So how do we filter out and choose out of this 751 who just applied and are blown you up to work with your company? Well, before we dive into that, I really want you you to look at this comparison right here with the two examples we have on this screen.


So we have one where our customer posted and we just went over that one. So it was for the virtual assistant, 751 people applied. We got 3,863 views, which seems great. And then we have another one that we posted where we have customer support, virtual assistant role, We have seven people who applied via the apply button and we had 1,739 people view the job post, click on it and view it. So which one would you assume performed the best? You would assume that the virtual assistant one performed the best. But if you look at it by having such an open and broad title, it led to almost twice as many views and clicks onto the job post, bringing some people who weren't necessarily looking for more of that customer support role. Virtual assistant is a very broad term, so you're gonna get so many different people kind of going to it as well.


So what this posted is we had a more specific title and it really narrowed down the views for VAs who were really looking for that customer support role. In addition, when we're comparing the 751 people who clicked apply, we also had this one to where we were directing them to a part in a funnel which would go ahead and automate the video interview process and go ahead and get that automatically done. So you're only seeing the ones who basically didn't listen to our instructions and clicked on the apply button. You're not able to see the hundreds of people that went to go apply on the funnel, which automatically filtered them out and went ahead and it started that automatic video interview process that you can go ahead and review their video recording of the questions that you came up with for the interview. So when you're looking at both of those, which one performed the best?


The customer support virtual assistant, uh, role outperformed the other one, which was bringing in a relevant traffic wasn't going to a funnel, and it was a really targeted approach and we actually automated that process instead of getting blown up with 751 emails. So let's talk about that. So for that job post, let's talk about the beginning part of a funnel and then the ending part of a funnel. And if I had a bigger screen, I would really make this one big funnel so you wouldn't have two separate views, but for this instance, we put it on two slides so you can kind of see, um, the different processes because when it comes to a video interview funnel or video interview process, when you're filtering out a va, it's typically a longer process than working with, uh, for instance, a cleaner or employee or a contractor.


It's, it's a lot longer of a process because we have those automated video interviews and we have such high quantity versus cleaners. You may have a lower quantity, you may not have 1700 views of people clicking on it within two or three days. That may take a week or two in order to get that many. So there is the difference. The video interview process is really recommended when you have such a huge volume of people applying. If you don't have volume, you don't want to video, video interviews, but on online jobs, pH with this um, VA training, um, and hiring process that we're going over in this, um, tutorial, this is again where you want to use that process. So again, bringing us back to the funnel, um, for this job post we had seven, ten hundred and thirty nine targeted views. So remember those weren't so broad that it was any virtual assistant, it was really narrowing it down to people who had customer support, um, in their mind of wanting to work with an employer.


So we got those views targeted, now we're bringing them to our site. So they clicked through to the site. We had about 500 people click through to the site and 300 of them applied on the actual application, which did its own filtering based on whatever you want. So as I'm going through this example with one of our clients, you can do this yourself, you can rebuild this yourself, you can create your own application, your own filters. We're just showing you the process that you can do to go ahead and filter them out and get the best VA whenever you need it. So if you wanna turn it off, turn it on, you can do that instantly. So again, 500 people went to the, went to the website that we were directing them to, 300 people applied using the application that had automatic filters to go ahead and filter out VAs.


Then we also had a hundred of 'em that were qualified and that got automatically invited to complete the auto video interview. Not a video interview where it was Zoom and one on one, it was an auto video interview. So they're able to see the question, they're able to respond via video and complete that. So after the video interview process, we had about 50 people go ahead and submit those video interviews that were invited. And then we have the second part of the funnel, this is our second screen to where we kind of just brought it back up here for you for the visualization to where you're able to see out of that 50 people who submitted their video interviews, 20 of them got invited to the second interview where it just typically a Zoom phone call because VAs typically get charged if you were to call them.


So we typically don't recommend that approach. Um, and Zoom is a little bit easier to have a personal meeting link that you could reuse and reuse and reuse versus having to again, maybe possibly message them on Skype every single time. And it's really unorganized that way. So inviting them to that second interview, we had 20 that were invited to the second interview. We had about 10 get offered the job and we had about five of them except the job offer. So that's awesome. We have five VAs that automatically got onboarded within seven days of this process. They really filtered them out, narrowed and targeted, um, that experience and all the qualification factors, the deal breakers that you wanted and really got to see their English level, some of their experience, you got to see them on camera before and really made sure that they followed through in each of the steps to, um, bring together a really skilled VA that is going to work with your company.


So you could do something very similar to yourself, but just remember you're in control. You could direct them to apply on your website. You could filter out qualities on your application. You could also use a free automated video interview software like my interview that is a great software or video ask, that's another great software as well too. And then invite back the ones that you love for a second interview and then ensure that you have the proper trainings in place prior. Nobody wants to bring on a va. When you have a a rec in the back end, you really want to make sure that you do spend some time prior to make sure that you have that training in place place. Um, if you need something to really document your trainings and processes, we really do recommend Process Street that is great software that you can go ahead and update those processes, um, and or have your VA create those processes and update them as well too.


So if you're great with processes, awesome, you can go ahead and build 'em out and prep 'em. If anything, if you suck with processes, you could always create a Loom video tutorial and then have your VA go ahead and create that process underneath that Process Street video as well. So definitely check out those as well. I'll leave some links down below. Again for all of the resources, um, to go ahead and help you out. If you do wanna go ahead and have this done for you and automated and just to where you only have to do the interviews and review the recordings. Um, and then definitely check us out at Learn Crystal Ball Doco. I hope you guys got some powerful content and ideas to go ahead and help you simplify your VA hiring and make a decision to get one on board and help you reduce your stress. Until next time, bye guys.