So maybe you’ve read The 4 Hour Workweek and you’d like to outsource some of your work to virtual assistants. But the problem is: a lot of virtual assistants suck. In this post, I’ll show you how to hire a virtual assistant that’s actually good so they’ll actually remove stress from your life, instead of adding to it.

I’ll walk through:

• What platforms you should use to hire virtual assistants (VAs).
• How you should interview VAs to minimize wasted time interviewing worthless candidates.

Platforms To Hire A Virtual Assistant

I’ve had the best results hiring virtual assistants from a website called Hubstaff.

You can try other platforms if you’d like. Here are some platforms I’ve heard of and/or tried and my comments on them:

• Fiverr – They’re generally low quality labor and their gigs are more optimized for a one-time job. You can certainly pick up a VA from Fiverr after a couple of “trial gigs” if you’d like by emailing them to see if they’d be interested in a longer term work relationship. But I wouldn’t recommend it to due to the quality of labor on this platform.
• Upwork – It’s too expensive. I’ve hired salespeople before in a real estate business and it fell quite flat. I haven’t hired virtual assistants from this platform, but if my past experience is any indication it’s probably: 1) too expensive for 2) mediocore labor.
• Onlinejobs.ph has gotten great praise from peers. However, the last I checked, they’re too expensive for me.

Ultimately, what platform you use is up to you. Please note that in my case, I’m cheap. I normally hire virtual assistants to train them up to suit my business needs. I almost never hire online labor with the expectation that they’ll come in with a strong set of skills without much training.

So, if your plan is to hire someone that can start contributing to your life/business right away and already have a proven track record of skills, you might want to consider the other platforms I’ve touched upon in this section.

The Best Process When Hiring Your VA

Most virtual assistants resides in India, Pakistan, or the Philippines. There’s a few things to keep in mind with your candidates:

• Their language skills – you’ll do a Skype interview with them so this is easy to gauge.
• Their internet speed.
• Their attention to detail.
• Their ability to communicate and/or their experience.

You should have 2, or 3 rounds of interviews. And in each layer of interview, you should be able to eliminate a lot of candidates. If you have any candidates left after the interviews, pick one of them to hire. Here are the interview rounds that you should have:

1. Have them respond to your job post.
2. First Skype call to talk about what you do for your business and gauge interest (optional).
3. Another Skype call to talk about their experience and gauge their ability to communicate.

The Internet Speed Test

This part of the interview is easily done, and can be done at any time between rounds 1-3 of the interview.

Simply tell your candidate to go to: https://www.speedtest.net/ and have them screenshot you their internet speed.

• Have them do this at 4 separate times during the day to make sure that the speed is consistent. Make sure that they give you the entire screen as a screenshot so you can see the dates of when the screenshots are taken.
• You should pick 4 separate times where it’s most crucial for your business. As an example: if you have a business that’s open 9AM-5PM PST, you might want them to send you screenshots of their internet speed at 9AM, 11AM, 2PM, and 4PM.
• The times should be to the minute, and you need to make it clear to the candidate they need to give you a screenshot at 9:00AM. Not 9:01AM. The reason for this is if their internet is unreliable, and they send you a nice screenshot at 9:03AM, you won’t know if it’s because they’re just late (bad), or if their internet is unreliable (also bad).

Anyway, once their internet speed meets your requirements, tick off this checkbox and you’re ready for the next step.

Note: Keep in mind for Philippines, they get hit with monsoons a lot, especially during summers. So you should seasonally expect your VA to be absent, or have intermittent connection. This isn’t something that’s within their control. If you’re using VAs for something mission critical, consider hiring from multiple geographies to diversify against natural disasters.

Trip Them Up With Their Favorite Food

Bury the following phrase in the middle of your job description so it’s not easily found:

“To be considered for this position, you must send a cover letter where you put your favorite food in the first sentence. If you do not send a cover letter, or if you send a cover letter but don’t tell us your favorite food in the first sentence, you’ll be automatically rejected.”

This will save you a lot of pain.

The reason’s because there could be hundreds of candidates applying. But probably only the top 5-10% would bother reading the job description. You never want to hire someone who’s just spam applying, because they’ll be strictly less qualified than the candidates that are applying because they actually find the gig interesting.

This “test” allows you to gauge whether the virtual assistant you’ll hire can pay attention to details. If they can’t, they are not qualified to help out in your business and/or in your life.

The “test” also gauges the candidate’s determination to find a job (and thus their willingness to work hard). Someone lazy will just copy and paste and apply to every job. Someone who’s serious about the job hunt will bother with actually reading the job description, doing a cover letter, and personalizing their application to each job.

• Think about which candidate you’d rather have.
• Candidate A who’s looking for a job so they can feed their family, but can’t even summon up enough motivation to read the job description. OR
• Candiate B who’s also desperately looking for a job but goes the extra mile even during the interview process, when they’re not guaranteed an income yet.

Be Very Specific On Meeting Times

For Skype meeting times with candidates, get very specific.

Have them meet at 5:47PM, for example.

You’re doing 3 things by having a ridiculously specific meeting time:

1. You’re auditing their internet connection at a random time.
2. You’re also auditing their ability to follow your instructions to a T.
3. You’re testing their discipline and their ability to be on time.

For point #3: make sure they aren’t late, as this shows a lack of discipline. For remote work, the worst virtual assistants are the ones that lack discipline, because they’re the most likely to lie about their hours worked.

Paying Them By Results

Speaking of “hours worked” – most people are dishonest.

And this isn’t a nihilistic thing. Think about it: if you were the VA and you’re working remote, wouldn’t it serve you the best if you just lied about how much you worked so that you get paid more money? I mean, you’d be fully incentivized (and rational) to lie about your hours.

As such, I recommend you pay your virtual assistants per task, as opposed to per hour. For example, you might pay them $3 for every 5 customer ticket they close. In other words, you pay for their tangible results, not their time.

If you pay your VA per task, you’ll know where exactly your money is going since the results are measurable. If you pay your VA by the hour, you might never know where your money is going because they might only respond to 5 emails but tell you it took them 5 hours to do it.

Well, that’s fine if they want to waste 5 hours of their time responding to 5 emails, they’re getting $3 either way if you pay them by results only.

The Final Interview To Decide Whether You Hire A Virtual Assistant

Once everything checks out – their internet is good, they show up on time, and they’ve demonstrated an ability to pay attention to details – you interview them one last time.

In this final interview, you’ll talk to your candidate about their experience. If they have experience that’s relevant to the position you’re hiring for, great. Go ahead and dig deep on their relevant experience.

If the candidate doesn’t have any relevant experience to your field, you still want to dig deep on the experience they put down their resume. This’ll test 2 things:

1. Whether or not they’re dishonest and just lied about stuff they did on the resume.
2. Their ability to communicate complex ideas clearly (i.e. it’s a cognitive test and a language test).

So how do you “dig deep”? Simple. Just ask who/what/when/where/how questions at least 5 layers deep. This just consists of you asking a question, waiting for a reply, and then asking for more clarification on that answer, 5+ times. As an example:

• Candidate: “I did customer service for my previous job!”
• You: “What did you do in customer service?” (1^st layer)
• Candidate: “I talked customers into not refunding the products.”
• You: “How did you talk customers into not refunding the products?” (2^nd layer)
• Candidate: “We’d offer them discounts on their next purchase.”
• You: “How much discount would you give them?” (3^rd layer)
• Candidate: “15%”
• You: “And how well did that discount work? I’d imagine it wouldn’t work that well since a customer wanting to return product isn’t looking to buy another product.” (4^th discount)
• Candidate: “Yes, it worked out terribly.”
• You: “If you owned the business yourself, what do you think is a better way to convince customers to not refund?” (5^th layer)
• Candidate: <gives you either a mediocore or impressive answer>

You can “dig deep” with a bunch of other types of questions as well. The above is only if you’re testing for competence for example. You can go down the same line of detailed questioning if you were wanting to “dig deep” on their motivations to join your company. Yes, of course they’re joining for money. But why do they need money? What are their dreams with the money? Do they have a sick parent? Or do they not even know what they want?

The Most Important Tip When You Try To Hire A Virtual Assistant

You’ll have to kiss a lot of frogs when you want to hire a virtual assistant.

This post helps you reduce the number of frogs you need to kiss by eliminating the vast majority of useless people right off the bat.

The most important tip I can give you while you’re on your hiring journey: don’t let your desperation to hire convince you that someone’s a good candidate.

Just because you want to be finished with the process doesn’t mean the candidate is good. Hiring someone based on stress and desperation is kind of like getting married to the first person you meet because you’re afraid of running out of time.

You’ll end up firing them anyway, so what’s the point?

It’s OK to take much more time than necessary when hiring a virtual assistant.