What is a Virtual Assistant?
A virtual assistant is an individual who provides administrative services to a business or company while working in a remote location or at their home. They are self-employed contractors and independent and have a few years of experience as an administrative assistant or office manager in a professional office setting.
Why Hire a Virtual Assistant?
Business owners and startup entrepreneurs hire a virtual assistant for them to delegate excess work they categorized as non-essential. While you delegate this work to a virtual assistant or home-based workers you can focus on a bigger workload that only an owner can do.
In this time of the Covid-19 pandemic, more businesses were outsourcing services like virtual assistants. This strategy became popular in the business world. Having a modern technology, business owners take advantage of it by delegating admin duties to their virtual assistant rather than dedicating office space to assistants. If you hire a virtual assistant it will improve efficiency because you will get more finished work in less time. A virtual assistant is paid by hours when they have accomplished pre-defined milestones.
If we compare it to a regular full-time employee in a company you need to compensate for a fixed rate per hour per day as mandated by law. This means you need to pay their hourly wage of 8 hours whether they are productive or not. Since virtual assistants have previous work experience, they require only minimal training just to know more about your business. In addition to this, the majority of the business owners who make use of virtual assistance have a lot of time to be with their families and attend to other aspects of their respective lives. They can achieve balance in life simply by affording you the benefit of time having a virtual assistant who works extra hand for you. When you can find time for things that matter the most like family and having a break, you become more productive. Having a trusted virtual assistant is like enjoying and traveling the world while business continues to run.
Why work with a virtual assistant staffing agency?
A virtual staffing agency was created for business owners who want to focus on the important and bigger tasks in their company. A staffing agency will find you the best virtual assistant that will handle many of their administrative tasks.
The Covid-19 pandemic hit a lot of businesses around the globe. Many startups and small business owners are looking for a virtual assistant. In today’s employment, remote work has been a necessity. Remote jobs have become popular and have grown over the past years. Online webinars and customer relationship management had contributed a bigger role in the business world. Technology plays an important role in the business world, administrative jobs require a lot of skills than was seen before. This new normal forces employment to learn new skills about computers and software. Every company utilizes a mixture of software and hardware to finish a task. Computer technology is a huge factor to run a business or a company. If you are hiring an assistant they should be well knowledgeable in computers. A virtual assistant must be fluid in your company’s choice of technologies to accomplish their job.
Why work with a virtual assistant staffing agency?
There are positives and negatives to having staffing agencies, it will depend on what you’re looking for. It may vary in how much time you will invest in the process and how much money it will cost you. If you are hiring a virtual assistant in a staffing agency you will be going to spend a little more through an agency rather than a freelance virtual assistant.
Hiring a freelancer is extending extra effort to place ads, interview, and then train them. If you are the type of person who likes to do it yourself and have enough time to handle this recruitment process yourself, hiring freelance would allow you the flexibility to look for a wider range of candidates. You can look for freelancers in LinkedIn, VA forums, or even place an ad on CraigsList, these are some of the many different options you can look for for a virtual assistant.
Directing to a staffing agency to hire a virtual assistant comes at a higher price, however, it has good advantages as well. Having a virtual assistant staffing agency has benefits that they can provide. Consulting is one advantage, they will provide an initial consultation to help them place you with the right virtual assistant. They will help you to decide what type of virtual assistant you would be needing in your business. They will decide what type of tasks a virtual assistant can handle for maximum hours, maximum efficiency, or even if you need them every month. Through staffing agencies, they can provide consultancy throughout the entire relationship with clients.
Having an agency can provide you with an experienced virtual assistant. It is important to have an experienced virtual assistant in your company. They know how virtual relationships work, and they have experience in different apps to use for virtual success.
Life is not perfect. Having backup from your agency is a great relationship. There will be some instances that the relationship between a client and a Virtual Assistant may not work out for whatever reason. Maybe your current virtual assistant from a particular agency moves on at some point to do other things. At first, you will think that you will need to start again from square one and begin again with searching and hiring and training another virtual assistant all over again. Having back up with staffing agencies, they will have another experienced virtual assistant that can start the next day and get started at your company. Staffing agencies offer pieces of training for their virtual assistant to keep up-to-date with the latest apps and programs. Another benefit of having a virtual staffing agency is they will provide a contract that is in place with both the virtual assistant and the client. This contract will protect the agency, virtual assistant, and the clients’ information to maintain confidentiality.
People who are compensated well for their skills and experience and enjoy their work are productive, efficient, and happy virtual assistants. Staffing agencies have benefits not just to the client who is searching for a virtual assistant, but also for virtual assistants themselves. Looking for a virtual assistant is hard just like looking for a job in a conventional office. The virtual assistant has the option to choose a client to work with and even decide to choose the number of hours they would like to work with the help of virtual assistant staffing agencies. The agencies will help you make the right choice more efficiently.
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