Latino Virtual Assistants: the Affordable Approach to Hiring a Virtual Assistant
If you’re reading this guide, you’ve likely found – as many business owners eventually do – that you just don’t have enough time in your day to accomplish all the tasks essential to running and growing your business. While you could easily decide to shift your focus from business growth to simply staying above water with your daily operations, this isn’t a long-term solution. In fact, many business owners agree; last year, nearly 40% of small businesses already outsourced at least one business process and over 52% planned to do so by year’s end.
For many of those businesses, outsourcing means hiring virtual assistants – individuals who supply administrative, customer support, tech support, accounting, or other services remotely from a home office. Delegating tasks to an outsourced virtual assistant means you can take some of the administrative, creative, or menial responsibilities off your own plate so you can focus on the essential endeavors that can grow your business. The key is choosing the right virtual assistant, a process our in-house expert has learned well over his years in business.
An Inside Look at Virtual Latinos
Perhaps no one knows the ins and outs of hiring a virtual assistant quite like Jaime Nacach, founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos, one of the top virtual assistant services in North America. After an extremely poor experience with a Philippines-based virtual assistant company when he was beginning his own marketing firm, Jaime learned a great deal about what it takes to hire the best virtual assistants. For Virtual Latinos, he puts a great deal of focus on the skills and proficiencies of potential applicants.
First and foremost, Virtual Latinos assistants must have an excellent grasp of the English language, both spoken and written. As such, most are already familiar with the United States and have either lived here or are generally familiar with the culture – this allows Virtual Latinos to perform tasks like sales calls, customer service, tech support, marketing, content writing and more with ease. To gather this elite pool of assistants, Virtual Latinos utilizes an extensive screening process, selecting only 7.5% of its applicants into its community of pre-vetted virtual assistants, 95% of whom have a college degree in a related field. According to Jaime, all hires must be organized, self-motivated, show technological proficiency, and continue to pass frequent English-language screenings.
Hiring Your Own Virtual Latino Assistant
So, how do you go about learning how to hire a virtual assistant from Virtual Latinos? Utilize these five steps, straight from our in-house expert:
1. Gauge your virtual assistant needs
What tasks do you want to outsource? What skills are non-negotiable when it comes to the responsibilities you’ll give your virtual assistant? Spend some time outlining the tasks you’ll need accomplished and the skills you expect before making the call to Virtual Latinos.
First timer’s hiring tip: The most important first step is for you to make a list of all your needs. Create a simple Google Doc with the 15-30 most common tasks you or your team do on a weekly basis, the rank them from low, medium to high importance.
2. Choose the Virtual Latinos Directory or Agency
Based on your needs and your VA search needs, you can choose between utilizing the Directory or the Agency. The Directory is suggested for individuals with VA hiring experience (Less than 10% of our clients), as you are responsible for locating, interviewing, and hiring an assistant from our broader directory of qualified assistants. For individuals or small businesses without hiring experience (90%+ of our clients), we recommend utilizing the Agency; the Agency’s hiring experts handle all recruitment work, providing you with the top 3% of candidates for your needs.
3. Get the BEST VA for your needs: Let’s get to know you, set up a client interview
After a brief initial call to discuss overall pricing and needs, Virtual Latinos will schedule a more lengthy conversation at your convenience – we call it the “Client interview”. This call really gives us the opportunity to truly get to know you, your needs, goals, and the type of team member virtual assistant that will be the perfect addition to your team.
Depending on your needs, Virtual Latinos’ hiring experts will discuss your ideal virtual assistant with you at length, including your listed qualifications and company needs. Jaime himself will give suggestions based on his extensive experience as the two of you work together to determine exactly the type of virtual assistant you need.
4. Conduct interviews
If you’re experienced at hiring virtual assistants, this is when you’ll utilize the Virtual Latino Directory to locate and interview an assistant. If you’ll hire through the Agency, Virtual Latinos will dedicate hours to interviewing up to ten individuals who meet your initial needs. At the end of this process, the field will be narrowed to two or three finalists.
5. Select your assistant
In this final step, our expert Jaime will again act as your guide and VA hiring consultant, assisting you in conducting your final interview with the finalists. He’ll suggest essential questions to ask, qualifications to highlight, and more. In the end, you’ll select the finalist who most aligns with your brand identity and needs.
Virtual Latinos Can Save You Valuable Time and Money
Whether you’re inexperienced in hiring a virtual assistant or have undertaken the task in the past, the Virtual Latinos process can help you learn how to find the best English-language virtual assistants possible. Better yet, our process is built to help save costs as well as the extensive time necessary to hunt down the right assistant yourself. Contact us today and see the difference a virtual assistant from locations like Costa Rica, Honduras and Cuba can really make for a business like yours.
