Top V.A. Skills to Look For When Hiring

If you’re struggling to manage the workload in your business, or been hit with some unexpected leave from one of your employees - hiring a virtual assistant can be a great choice! There are many reasons business owners hire virtual assistants. The virtual assistant market sees year-on-year growth, showing the effectiveness and popularity of the practice. If you’re looking to hire a virtual assistant to work with your business, you naturally want to make sure that you’re hiring the right one. Like with any hiring process, it often comes down to experience vs cost. Rather than looking at the experience or price tag of your prospective virtual assistants, look instead at the skills they seem to possess. But which virtual assistant skills are most important?

1. Time Management

Often, the whole point in hiring a VA is to offload tasks for cheaper cost and without having to manage them as much as you would regular employees. For this - you’re going to want a virtual assistant that has excellent time management skills. If a VA has this skill, they will be able to get the tasks you’ve set them done within the allotted time you’ve given them to do it. What’s more, the process will be done without you having to manage their time for them through check-ins and providing timeframes.

2. Creativity

If you’re looking for a VA to help you with some work, often this is because you require some creativity in a business that doesn’t usually operate with creativity needed. In this case, creativity is an important virtual assistant skill you’ll need, so that they can provide that for you! When in the hiring process for different virtual assistants, look for some samples in their portfolio of creative endeavors. If their professional experience is a little light, ask them to give an example of something creative they’ve done in their personal life to get a good feel.

3. Good Decision Making

A virtual assistant is often expected to go off and do work that your team doesn’t have time for. In which case, your team does not have time to be hit with a barrage of questions. Rather than hiring a VA that you have to mollycoddle throughout the whole process of their work, try to find one that can do it alone. A virtual assistant with good decision making skills is perfect for this, as they’ll be able to get on with the projects set to them by themselves. When obstacles show up (as they always do), a VA with good decision making skills will be able to get around them using their own intuition, which is very valuable for a business struggling with time.

4. Excellent Attention to Detail

Let’s be honest, sometimes you’re just hiring a virtual assistant to offload the soul-destroying work that’s killing morale amongst your regular employees. In which case, having a VA with excellent attention to detail skills is vital. The monotonous tasks tend to be repetitive ones where overlooking details can cause issues (such as data entry). If you hire a VA to do this and their attention to detail is lacking, you’ll waste more time in the long run by having to then fix their mistakes or repeatedly send it back to them to complete properly. To test a prospective VA on this, you could set them a (paid) sample work task to do where you purposefully include errors and see how well they can catch them.

Hire a Virtual Assistant Based on their Skills, Not Always Experience

Hiring a virtual assistant based on their experience is a mistake that many business owners do that leads to higher costs than necessary. While it’s true that VAs with lots of experience tend to have the greater skill sets, this doesn’t always justify the cost. If you want/need an experienced virtual assistant - that’s fine. But don’t discount a newer VA, especially if they are demonstrating that they have all the skills required to perform the tasks you need them to do.