How to Maximize ROI on Virtual Assistant Recruitments?

Need to Know

We believe that ensuring a good start is half the battle won when it comes to maximizing ROI via a virtual assistant. A good beginning instills positivity in you and your VA, which, although intangible, is the most invaluable aspect of your new work relationship. However, you can only feel positive if you have hired a VA worthy of your trust and time. So, let’s find out the qualities that make a VA worth hiring, especially when you are looking to take your ROI to the next level. Also note that the hiring process for VAs mentioned in this guide is in sync with VE’s own hiring process:

Qualities to Look for While Hiring a Virtual Assistant to Ensure High ROI

Some qualities that can boost the ROI from your VA recruitments are:

• Communication Skills: One cannot stress enough the importance of strong communication skills when it comes to VA hiring. Especially if you are looking for VAs for management roles, you need individuals with excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Relevant and Appropriate Skill Level: As you are hiring VAs for their specific skills, you need to gauge that they are good at what you want them to do. Hire the right fit for the right job.
• Passion: Even the best VAs can perform badly if they lack passion for your business. So, find passionate VAs, who take pride in their work and have the zeal to give your company the best chance to maximize its ROI.
• Experience: Remember, VAs come with different price tags based on their competency and experience. So, matching the skill to the work that they will be doing is crucial.   
• Ethics: While skills can be learned, it is impossible to train someone to be ‘honest’ and ethical. For the success of your VA relationship, you need to find an earnest individual who does not fudge the facts and tells you exactly what’s going on. Hiring from a reputable company maximizes your chances of recruiting an honest VA. 
• Discipline: Just like the success of your business hinges on discipline, the fruitfulness of your VA’s endeavor is also dependent on his/her being disciplined. Hiring a disciplined individual to ensure consistent work output will definitely increase your ROI.

As VAs could be sitting thousands of miles away from your location, you will probably not meet them in person. So, it is essential to ‘discover’ their personality traits through a detailed face-to-face online interview. The best VA providers go out of their way to create transparency between VAs and entrepreneurs.

Firstly, you are presented a descriptive CV with all the qualities, strengths, and weaknesses. Once the CVs are in front of you, you can shortlist candidates that fit the bill. Later on, you can interview them and select one/(or many) based on your requirements.

Importance of Recruiting VAs from a Reputable Company

Hiring a Virtual Assistant is more than just hiring a person to perform some tasks for you. It’s actually an alliance of two different organizations – a marriage that comes with strings attached. You are hiring from a company that is looking after the candidates and ensuring they work to the best of their abilities. If the organization overseeing the candidates is not in the best position to look after their welfare, your VA won’t be able to work or perform as desired.  

A VA who is paid regularly, provided timely incentives, and recognized for his/her effort will be in a much better state of mind than someone who is not compensated as per expectations and is not motivated. A reputable company like Virtual Employee looks after its employees and keeps them happy. As a result, you always get employees performing to the best of their abilities. Some even outperform themselves in their efforts to prove themselves and rise to the top.

Why do VAs from Reputable Companies Maximize ROI?

You stand the best chance of improving your ROI with a reputable company as your VA provider. The results may vary from company to company, but the maximum returns are only possible through employees of seasoned virtual employee providers. Below are some reasons for that:

Horses for Courses

Every employee has a USP. For example, a python developer might be good at Django but not so good with machine learning, and vice versa. A reputable company has a vast selection of employees with carefully curated CVs. Therefore, you can choose an employee for the exact task you want to be done. You can leverage their expertise from the get-go and immediately make a difference. Result – Higher ROI.

No Need to Train on Skills (still need to train on your specific process)

As you already have an employee who is a master in his/her domain, you do not have to train them on skills. You only have to impart process knowledge, and the employee will do the rest. For a company in a developed country, the cost of hiring newbies is way more than the cost of hiring seasoned professionals in developing countries. Moreover, in many situations, newbies need to be upskilled to make them ready for the job. The money spent on training can come out to be a lot. On the other hand, a veteran virtual assistant has all the skills needed to perform the job. So, you get the best of both worlds through VA recruitments – better quality and improved productivity. Consequently, your ROI increases. 

Longer Tenure Ensures Reliability

Due to skill shortages in the US and many developed countries, access to proven talent with the promise of a long tenure has become a rarity. However, most companies in developing countries have excellent virtual assistants with long-term tenure. So, when you are recruiting from them, you are getting the best-in-class VAs and onboarding people you can rely upon for months and years. 

Immediate Talent Scalability

Scalability is the biggest USP of hiring from a reputable company. Most companies aren’t able to break new ground in their respective industries because they don’t know how to exploit new opportunities. In this world of ‘Big’ eat ‘Small’, it is essential to expand whenever you are doing well, or you risk getting eaten by whales in the business world. But with an abundant talent supply from a reputable VA outsourcing partner, you can increase in size whenever the opportunity presents itself. So, you can become ‘Big’, and instead of getting eaten by big fish, you can start gobbling the competition.

What to Do

A Proven Plan to Maximize ROI with VA Recruitments

After going through our guide so far, do you have a plan taking shape in your head about how to maximize ROI? It is possible that the plan that you have is a bit fuzzy, and you are unable to take action? So, let’s help you in coming up with the perfect method to maximize your ROI through VA recruitments.

• Feasibility Study: First and foremost, you need to understand if VA recruitment is possible for your business. It is essential to understand the financial aspect. Do you have enough money or can you take a loan? It is even more important to be sure about the exact spot a VA will be taking in your business structure. You must find the perfect position for your VA instead of putting a round peg in a square hole. The VA can be a replacement, an upgrade, a complement (of the existing workforce), or a supporter. But it is crucial to have a clear and well-defined role if you want to enhance the ROI with your new VA recruitment. 

• Analyze the Time and Effort Saved: Through your new VA recruitment, you will be saving some time and effort. It is essential to analyze how much time is saved to understand the value of your VA initiative. If the time and efforts saved are below your expectations, you must change your VA strategy. Note: It is essential to make a note of the time and effort spent on tasks before VA recruitment and after VA recruitment. It is advised not to rely on your instincts and use data to analyze the VA impact.
• Compare Regular Hiring Cost vs. Virtual Hiring Cost: Create an estimate for regular hiring (including benefits, infrastructure costs, etc.), and then compare it with a virtual hiring cost. If you feel that your price would decrease and ROI would increase due to higher-skilled VAs, you can take the outsourcing decision with the assurance of a brighter future. 

Periodic Performance Monitoring and Review to Sustain ROI

Once you have generated high ROI with your VAs, you need to sustain it too. Below are some ways you can maintain your ROI and even increase it in the long run:

• List Performance and Rating Standards: Formulate performance and rating standards before evaluating your virtual assistants. Rate their work based on the time spent on tasks, performance, work quality, etc. 
• Create Specific Goals: Develop specific goals and share them with your VAs. Be very clear about what you expect from them and how you want them to achieve those goals.
• Evaluate Performance Objectively: Evaluate the performance of your VAs on set parameters objectively. Do not be biased toward your in-house employees, as it can render the whole analysis disputable. 
• Evaluate Performance Based on Results: Although the best performances do not always translate into the best results, this is still a much better way to evaluate the work done by VAs in the long run. 

Upon seeing the performance, you can upscale and downscale your virtual assistant roster. It is even possible to swap virtual employees based on your current requirements. For instance, a newbie can be upgraded to a veteran when the task challenge increases. Top VA companies such as Virtual Employee provide the provision of scalability and allow you to increase your ROI and maximize it.

Key Points

• Virtual Assistants are an essential part of business operations in today’s world
• Virtual Assistants can help you increase your ROI and even sustain it in the longer run
• Ensure a good beginning to foster positivity in your new VA endeavor
• First and foremost, you need to hire VAs who have qualities such as communication skills, passion, honesty, discipline, and appropriate skill level
• Recruiting Virtual Assistants from a reputable company is your best bet to increase ROI
• Reputed companies provide you with turnkey solutions in terms of talent acquisition
• Reliable companies provide highly skilled talent that can be scaled as per your dynamic business requirements
• It is vital to create a well-thought-out plan before recruiting a virtual assistant
• One should perform a feasibility study and also compare the cost of hiring a VA with a regular in-house resource
• A high ROI can be sustained by continuously monitoring the performance standards, creating specific goals, and evaluating performance based on results

Concluding Thoughts:

Entrepreneurs worldwide have taken to recruiting VAs to simplify and reduce their work load. Although these entrepreneurs outsource work to VAs, not everyone is reaping the best rewards in terms of ROI. The ones who flourish are those who know how to make the most of their outsourcing endeavor.

Outsourcing to a reputable company gives you the best chance to maximize ROI with minimal effort. Apart from outsourcing to a top VA company, you must also be very proactive and strategize meticulously. You also need to know how to sustain your ROI by objectively creating performance standards and evaluating your employees (both onshore and outsourced). The fact that VA recruitments empower your business to scale quickly also allows you to exploit market opportunities in a way that is not possible with regular recruitments. Therefore, if your play your cards right, you can generate unprecedented ROI through VA recruitments.