What Is a Virtual Personal Assistant?

A Virtual Personal Assistant is a professional who handles your tedious administrative tasks remotely, giving you more time to focus on growing your business.

Some of the most common responsibilities of a Virtual Personal Assistant include answering phone calls, replying to your emails, scheduling appointments, booking flight tickets, managing timetables, and organizing your spreadsheets. The list can include many other duties, as long as you and your Virtual Assistant agree on them before they start working for you.

Hiring a Virtual Personal Assistant bring many benefits, including the ability to:

• Find a skilled and reliable professional at an affordable price point who you won’t have to micromanage
• Pay them by the hour and only for completed tasks
• Have them work holidays and weekends (albeit at a higher rate)

What Does a Virtual Personal Assistant Do?

The scope of a Virtual Personal Assistant’s duties depends on their area of expertise and your needs as an employer. While their exact responsibilities can vary significantly from case to case, you can typically rely on them to perform the following services:

• Manage your calendar—A Virtual Personal Assistant can be tasked with keeping you updated about your business schedule, which may include various appointments, candidate interviews, press meetings, and other significant events
• Book travel arrangements for weekend trips or vacations—Be it a personal vacation or a work-related one, your Virtual Personal Assistant will manage the administrative side of such arrangements in a time-efficient manner
• Answer phone calls and reply to emails—A Virtual Personal Assistant will efficiently maintain your call log, write down caller details, answer inquiries from customers, and manage all other aspects of client correspondence
• Manage social media accounts—If you come to that type of arrangement, your Virtual Personal Assistant can be in charge of replying to comments on your social media accounts and ensuring that the information you share is up-to-date and precise
• Proofread documents—Polished documents are a sign of diligence, and a Personal Virtual Assistant can be in charge of going through your files one last time, detecting potential mistakes, and fixing them before the papers are distributed further within your company

How Much Does It Cost To Hire a Virtual Personal Assistant?

The costs of hiring a Virtual Personal Assistant depend on many factors, such as the candidate’s experience, education, and geographic location. Their average annual salary in the United States is only $28,000, which is much less than what full-time employees make in a year.

The cost-effectiveness of having a Virtual Personal Assistant also comes from having a higher ROI compared to hiring an in-house employee. You can hire a VA only for a specific period and for the work they actually complete. If their performance doesn’t match your standards, you can also find a replacement more easily.

Another great perk of having a Virtual Personal Assistant is that you don’t need to provide them with the benefits your full-time employees enjoy, such as sick leave, vacation days, or bonuses. Virtual Personal Assistants are also relatively low-maintenance—you don’t need to provide them with office space, equipment, or other tools since they usually work from home.

Expert Tips on Hiring a Virtual Personal Assistant

Picking a Virtual Personal Assistant can be demanding since you need to choose someone you can entrust with sensitive information and confidential documents. You also need a professional with the right set of skills and experiences who won’t require constant micromanagement. 

Here are some useful tips you can use when hiring a Virtual Personal Assistant:

1. Customize your job ad—If you want to get the best candidates and eliminate unqualified ones, you must make a super-specific job description. This means that you need to list all the responsibilities of the job you’re offering, as well as the skills required for carrying out every crucial task successfully
2. Test, evaluate, and interview a large number of candidates—Testing and evaluating dozens upon dozens of candidates might seem like a time-consuming task, but it is a must if you want to improve your chances of hiring the most skilled Virtual Personal Assistant on the market
3. Don’t focus solely on the rates—It might be tempting to snatch up a Virtual Personal Assistant at the lowest rate you can find, but this could end up costing you bigtime in the long run. The candidate you choose might be inexperienced, or lack the essential skills for the job. If you have to supervise them all the time, it beats the point of hiring them in the first place. For this reason, you should always look for the most qualified Virtual Personal Assistant, even if they charge slightly higher rates

Is there a way to hire a top-tier candidate but also handle the hiring process faster? Yes—by using Workello! Our applicant tracking system will automate your hiring funnel and single out the best candidates in half the time it would take you to conduct the process manually!

Hire a Reliable Virtual Personal Assistant Faster

You can think of Workello as the perfect virtual hiring assistant. Our fully automated hiring funnel is the product of countless hours, over $100,000, and dozens of iterations. With Workello, you can automate testing, scheduling, and email correspondence with candidates so you can focus on scaling your business and maximizing revenue.

Here’s how Workello makes hiring Virtual Personal Assistants a breeze:

1. Sign up for a free Workello account and launch your automated, pre-configured hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes
2. Post your job ads across LinkedIn, Monster, Facebook, Indeed, and all your other hiring channels and link to your Workello job ad
3. See all your candidates in a single, unified Workello dashboard, regardless of which hiring channel they applied from
4. Reject, test, interview, and send offers to [keyword] Virtual Assistants with a single click
5. Filter out unqualified candidates with Workello’s built-in testing feature
6. Trigger automated emails and move candidates through your hiring funnel simply by changing their status from a drop-down menu
7. Minimize transactional questions by enabling candidates to see a live status page that tells them exactly which stage of your hiring funnel they are in

Don’t waste hundreds of hours looking for a perfect Personal VA that’s supposed to save you valuable time. Set up a fully automated hiring funnel with Workello, cut your hiring costs by 50%, and start accepting ideal candidates today!

Sign up now and review 5 Personal VA tests for free.