Everything You Need To Know About Virtual Assistants in 2022!

In the wake of COVID-19, more and more companies have started outsourcing administrative tasks to remote workers and digital nomads. This trend has caught on, and most serious businesses nowadays have started leveraging remote workers or have at least considered hiring a Virtual Assistant.

This is because Virtual Assistants provide invaluable technical and administrative support to organizations whose executives are getting swamped by too many tedious office duties. Many of these tasks can easily be performed remotely, and don’t require someone to invest a full day’s work.

Given that many companies were forced to switch to a remote work environment as a result of the pandemic, business owners and entrepreneurs around the globe inadvertently experienced the advantages of remote work first-hand. While asynchronous work inevitably posed various challenges at first, it’s evident that the pros far outweigh the cons. 

Having your team working from their home offices means you’re saving a ton of money on office space, electricity, equipment, and office supplies and other commodities. With a Virtual Assistant, the cost-effectiveness only multiplies. Namely, you can hire a VA from anywhere in the world, at extremely affordable rates. Plus, VAs are only paid for the hours worked and you don’t have to provide any benefits such as PTO, sick leave, or insurance. 

Virtual Assistants can fill a niche position in most organizations, regardless of their size and industry. In this article, we’ll help you get familiar with the concept of a Virtual Assistant by teaching you:

1. What a Virtual Assistant is
2. What tasks they can perform
3. How the cost of hiring a Virtual Assistant is

We’ll also show you a selection of 10 of our favorite job boards to use. More importantly—you’ll learn how to set up a fully automated hiring funnel with Workello, so you can hire a talented VA faster, at half the cost.

What Is a Virtual Assistant?

A Virtual Assistant is an independent contractor who offers professional technical and administrative support to small startups and large companies alike.

They aren’t employees in the strict sense, as the companies contracting them aren’t responsible for paying their payroll taxes, nor providing them with office space, work equipment, or other supplies. In fact, a VA is expected to be entirely self-reliant when it comes to how they perform their services.

VAs typically work from a home office, and communicate with their employers through various platforms, such as Zoom, Skype, or Slack. They mostly handle repetitive administrative tasks in the background, leaving you or your executives with more time to focus on other business-critical tasks.

The exact functions a VA performs vary from organization to organization, but they usually include managing schedules, replying to emails, answering phone calls, keeping account records, and so on.

There are, however, more specialized VAs that can perform a variety of demanding, business-critical tasks in various professions. This includes lead generation, email marketing, copywriting, content creation, SEO, and so on.

These responsibilities take time and require attention that would be better devoted to promoting your brand, expanding operations, and increasing profits. A VA helps you do precisely that—while simultaneously being more cost-effective in comparison with a traditional full-time employee!

What Can a Virtual Assistant Do?

A Virtual Assistant can provide a variety of services that heavily depend on the company they work for, as well as the type of arrangement they have with a given employer.

The following list shows you common tasks that VAs usually perform in most organizations:

• Managing your calendar—One of a Virtual Assistant’s primary duties is to keep track of planned meetings, schedule and confirm appointments, manage timetables, and inform attendees of upcoming events to reduce the number of no-shows
• Handling correspondence—They are also responsible for sorting your inbox, deleting spam, replying to emails, answering phone calls, drafting memos, updating contact information, and ensuring the right message reaches the right person on your team

• Bookkeeping—A VA can also be in charge of handling your accounts by tracking expenses, recording transactions, reviewing invoices, and making sure that all spending is within budget 

• Maintaining positive client relations—A Virtual Assistant can additionally be tasked with answering clients’ concerns by providing them with information on your products, services, or contractual terms. For more complex issues, VAs will redirect clients to senior staff members

• Carrying out personal errands—Lastly, a VA can also be charged with performing various miscellaneous duties for their employer, ranging from reserving restaurant tables, making retail purchases, and paying personal bills to booking flight tickets and tracking down problematic online orders

Can Virtual Assistants Help Out With More Specific Tasks?

Virtual Assistants can also support your business by carrying out various industry-specific tasks which require a certain level of knowledge and experience in a particular field. Based on their skills, experience, and tool proficiency, they can take up a number of these tasks as per your agreement with them. 

The table below shows you some additional business-specific VA responsibilities according to the industry they specialize in:

How Are Virtual Assistants Paid?

One of the key benefits to hiring a Virtual Personal Assistant is that you pay them either by the hour or pay an agreed-upon sum upon their finishing a specific project. This is much more cost-efficient in comparison to having a full-time employee, especially for one-off projects or recurring tasks that don’t require the full 8 hours per day to complete.

There are also several methods of conducting payment transactions. You may have to pay the Virtual Assistant via the platform you’ve used to find them, as is the case when using Upwork. If you’ve got the VA through an agency, you either “subscribe” to their VA services by paying for a certain number of hours each month, or you’ll receive an invoice from the agency on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. 

If you’re working with independent freelancers, you could pay them directly on PayPal or Payoneer, depending on the nature of your contract or your mutual agreement. 

Regardless of how you end up paying the VA, a major advantage Virtual Assistants have over full-time workers is that VA’s don’t have to be paid any of the expensive benefits that regular employees are entitled to. You don’t need to provide them with PTO days, vacation time, health insurance, maternity leave, a retirement plan, nor pay them any monthly/yearly bonuses.

What Is Their Average Salary?

The typical yearly payout for a VA can differ dramatically according to numerous factors, such as their previous work experience, level of education, and geographic location, as well the scope of work they’ll have to perform, the complexity of the job itself, and the current market rate.

In the United States, the average annual salary of a Virtual Assistant amounts to $52,788 as stated by Glassdoor. Take this information with a grain of salt, given that this is only the average across hundreds of different types of VAs, and it’s based mostly on self-reported income by Virtual Assistants who have profiles on the platform.

That said, the beauty of Virtual Assistants lies in the fact that you can outsource the work to a skilled VA literally anywhere in the world. This access to a global talent pool means you can find a skilled VA in a low cost of living country at a rate several times cheaper than that of a Virtual Assistant in North America.

Where Can I Find a Virtual Assistant?

You can hire your Virtual Assistant from any of the hundreds of job boards on the internet. In this sense, finding them is not much different than looking for a regular employee. The main difference is that, since all the work is done remotely, you can tap into a much larger, international talent pool to hire a suitable professional who ticks all the boxes, and whose services sit comfortably with your budget.

Below is a list of 10 of our favorite hiring platforms that you can use to find the ideal fit for your business:

• ZipRecruiter
• Fiverr
• Indeed
• LinkedIn
• PeoplePerHour
• Upwork
• We Work Remotely
• FlexJobs
• SimplyHired
• Glassdoor

Workello Can Help You Find and Hire a Skilled Virtual Assistant Much Faster!

Having a Virtual Assistant can greatly benefit your business, but finding the right fit isn’t easy. For one, you can’t just hire a VA who offers their services at the lowest possible rates. They may be lacking the crucial competencies necessary to perform well in your organization.

And skill’s not all—you also need someone reliable enough to be entrusted with confidential company information!

The problem is that you can’t determine a candidate’s true qualities based on their portfolio alone. This means you have to carefully test and evaluate each one—and doing so manually can be a complete nightmare.

Tracking applications, rifling through dozens upon dozens of lackluster resumes, sending out tests—all these tasks take a lot of time and attention. And while you perform them, your business stagnates.

That’s why we’ve created a more efficient way to conduct the hiring process—with Workello! By signing up to Workello, you will be able to:

1. Post your job listings across as many job boards as you can handle
2. View all your applications in a single, unified dashboard, no matter the hiring platform they came from
3. Hand out automatic tests that will help you filter out unskilled applicants
4. Move candidates along the hiring funnel by updating their status via the drop-down menu
5. Reduce transactional questions to a minimum by providing candidates with a Candidate Status page where they can find answers to their queries

Register with Workello and review up to 5 Virtual Assistant tests for free!