120: How to Hire a Virtual Assistant

1. Put your money where your mouth is. The first thing you should think about doing is establishing a budget around sourcing. What do you want your costs per hire, and maybe even applicants to be. Strategically manage your budget across various platforms to help attract a diverse pool of quality and quantity applicants. You have to put your money out there and wait on the data to show you where you’re getting the most ROI and which job platforms perform best for your industry or the job you’re trying to fill. 

2. If you want to truly identify the best talent, a resume and interview alone isn’t gonna get you there. You’ve got to have varying approaches to seeing what this candidate is bringing to the table. Think about it in three parts —  the briefcase, the heart and the head. The briefcase is going to be the resume, the application, previous experience. The heart is the interview. You’re getting to hear about who they are and what makes them tick, what’s their why, why do they wanna be at your company, why do they want to be in this role? The head is the assessments that give you good insight to their intelligence and their ability to produce good work.

3. Focus on soft skills over hard skills. Who are the people in your organization that you would consider to be the rock stars? Who are those people that are performing, not because of the experience they brought to the play, but because of their desire to roll their sleeves up, to get in there, to be resourceful, to find answers, to be a team player. Those are all soft skills. Make sure when you’re looking for a candidate that you don’t forget that you don’t wanna hire the person who on paper looked great, but they aren’t a team player. They’re just there to get a paycheck. They’re in and they’re out. They aren’t going above and beyond.

Madison Morgan:

We wanna see the whole picture. I say the head, the heart, and the briefcase. So we’ve got our briefcase with our resume and our application. We’ve got the heart through the interview, but the head, that’s really important for seeing how a candidate might show up on the other side and serving our clients. So we love the behavioral assessment that we use. It really shows us how that candidate’s gonna show up on the job, how they’ll hit the ground running, and how great of a fit they might be for the role. It’s really fantastic. It’s a big part of our process in identifying the right talent.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Welcome to One Next Step, the most practical business podcast in the world. You’re now one simple tip, practical tool, and small step away from growing your business. One Next Step is brought to you by BELAY, the incredible 100% remote organization, revolutionizing productivity with Virtual Assistants, Bookkeepers and Social Media Managers. Accomplish more, juggle less. Modern staffing from BELAY. And now to your hosts. 

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Welcome to One Next Step, the practical business podcast that helps you run your business so it stops running you. I’m Ryan, and today I’m so excited about our conversation. We have the opportunity to speak with BELAY’s Director of Talent, Madison Morgan. Madison is going to give us an inside look at the process BELAY uses, defined, and hire the best Virtual Assistants. She’ll explain the thought process behind the assessments we use, the questions we ask, and the traits we prioritize to make sure we’re hiring VAs who can meet our clients’ needs at the highest level. Whether you’re interested in partnering with BELAY or you’re looking to hire a VA on your own and you don’t really know where to start, this episode should serve as a great starting point. This conversation is a really great one, so let’s jump into it.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Madison, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m so excited about our conversation.

Madison Morgan:

Same, Ryan, same. Thank you so much for having me.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Yeah. Well, you are an expert on all things hiring, and I just think before we jump in on the conversation about how to hire a Virtual Assistant, I would love to know, like when you thought about what job you would be hired for later in life as a kid, like what was your dream job? What, what were you hoping?

Madison Morgan:

Right. You know, I’ll say I’m lucky that I’ve ended up being the talent director here at BELAY, but it definitely was not that. it’s easy. I wanted to be the next big country music superstar, so I sang everywhere I could, whether it’s a grocery store, the county fair church, you name it. I really thought I was gonna be the next Shania Twain, Ryan.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Well, it’s never too late. I will just throw that out there. Like you could still do it. And if you need a manager, I’m just, let’s talk, we can talk offline.

Madison Morgan:

Good to know. Let’s connect.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Let’s connect, let’s connect. Well, hey, this conversation today is gonna be awesome because I think a question a lot of people are asking is like, how do I hire a Virtual Assistant? That’s the question we get all the time. And I guess I’d just love know from like a high level, can you walk us through kind of BELAYs proven process for hiring a VA and kind of how, basically how could that help other people as well? So what is our kind of secret sauce, our proven process for hiring VAs?

Madison Morgan:

Yeah, absolutely. So at a high level, it all is gonna start with sourcing. So we consistently have paid jobs on various job sites or platforms that we use to increase the number of qualified applicants we get applying to our jobs. So first and foremost, that’s where you’ve gotta start. From there, you’ve gotta develop a process to qualify applicants. So just because someone applies doesn’t mean they’re actually gonna be a fit for the role that you have. So, here at BELAY, we have multiple steps in order for an applica to complete their application. So they have your basic questions, you know, where you live, what’s your experience, but then it goes a step further and we have a one-way video assessment. They complete a behavioral assessment and they also have a skills assessment where they upload examples of their work. From there, you can finally move forward to the interview process.

Madison Morgan:

And I wanna make sure to emphasize that because I think a lot of people in the industry think you just get an application in the interview, but if you wanna identify great talent, there truly is so much more to it. So once we’ve had all of these steps completed, our team of recruiters here at BELAY vet through thousands of applications to find the cream of the crop to interview, then they interview them and determine who really has the qualifications to succeed here at BELAY. Again, that was a high level overview. There is so much more that goes into hiring the best of the best each month. That’s gonna fill our open roles here at BELAY.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

And so many people need VAs. But one of the unique things that BELAY does offer is like, we’re an expert in the industry. We’ve been doing this for over a decade, and we’ve really learned the most efficient way to find the best talent. But like, how does BELAY source its applicants to make sure we’re getting the best possible candidates?

Madison Morgan:

Yeah, that’s a good question. The first thing we have to do is establish a budget around sourcing. So what do we want our costs per hire to be, or even our costs per applicant when we’re filling our open role or when we’re hiring our Virtual Assistants that are gonna serve our clients. So from there, you would, or we strategically manage our budget across various platforms to help us attract a diverse pool of quality and quantity applicants. Sourcing truly is an art. So in the beginning, it’s kind of like throwing paint at a canvas or spaghetti at the wall. You truly have to put your money out there and wait on the data to show you where you’re getting the most ROI and which job platforms prefer best for your industry or the job you’re trying to fill. So, for example, at BELAY, some of our top performing jobs are typically gonna gonna be posted on LinkedIn, on Flex Jobs and Indeed. And it really took us trial and error to figure out where our money was best spent to attract that talent that we are looking to hire.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

That’s so fascinating, the fact that we invest money in like the cost per hire than something that we are looking at. As you know, for so many companies, they’ve, you know, they’ve brought in a search firm or for like executive level roles, but for assistant level roles, the idea of investing and finding the best talent isn’t necessarily something people have thought about. Have you seen that? Like there is a correlation between the investment and the quality of the talent even at this level of a hire?

Madison Morgan:

Absolutely. One thing I wanna note is when you’re thinking about hiring a candidate, the salary is not the only thing that you need to take into the equation of what it might cost you to bring someone on board. We have seen in our time sourcing and trying to say, okay, let’s put spend towards this site or not towards this site. There’s a drastic dip in the quality of our applicants when we aren’t posting on those three big platforms that I mentioned earlier for us — LinkedIn, Flex Jobs, and Indeed. The quality goes down drastically because you’re not getting your job in front of the right people who have the right skillset to come in and perform well.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

That’s really interesting. And with a service like BELAY, we’re able to put a lot of expertise and money behind it. but if you’re hiring your own va that’s a practice that you can kind of go out there and potentially, you know hit the ground and find more than people, than just like posting on Facebook. I think for me, in my last job when I were recruited so much, it was just like, ‘Hey, can everybody share this on Facebook?’ But like that leaves you with a really small kind of exposure for your role.

Madison Morgan:

It does, and I don’t wanna discount word of mouth and connections and, and opportunities that could open to getting a good candidate in front of you. But even historically, I’ve worked for smaller companies, we still had to put money behind those postings if we wanted to have a good pool of candidates to evaluate for our roles.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

That’s a huge takeaway, I feel like, and it’s an easy thing to go, ‘Oh, I haven’t thought about that,’ and you can apply. You talked about the thousands of candidates that we kinda walk through in our process at BELAY. and one of those unique steps is kind of the one way video response and like that is like a really key part to our kind of secret sauce. And on today’s kind of episode, we’re gonna give away quite a bit of our secret sauce today. So this is like a, we’re breaking some trade secret rules I think, but would you talk about that kind of one way video and what, how it works and why we use this method?

Madison Morgan:

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So in the past, we have used various tools in order to get this done. And I do mention that because you’re gonna need a tool in order to get your one way video if you decide to implement this in your process. Currently we’re using a native tool within our applicant tracking system to administer this. But essentially we developed a question in-house that we feel truly gets to the heart of what we’re looking for in a Virtual Assistant candidate. And we send them the question, allow them to record their response for us to review. And we do this for several reasons. Number one, it’s really important for us to be able to see how the candidate would show up in a virtual setting. So do they have a professional, distraction free workspace? You know, this is our opportunity to see how they would show up to work for our clients, how they would conduct meetings. So that’s one of the reasons.

Madison Morgan:

A second would be it really provides insight into their soft skills around communication, professionalism, emotional intelligence. I mean, Ryan, you would be shocked at some of the videos that we receive where we can immediately say, ‘Wow, this person is lacking one of those essential skills to be successful here at BELAY’ with the way that they record in the video. We also get a view into their technical skillset. So was the microphone on? Did the camera, was it at a good angle? How was the lighting? it truly just gives us a chance to hear them, let them openly share their response and test it in a little different format than your typical written kind of assessment.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Even for my role at BELAY, we used the kind of one-way video and I remember how nervous I was. Like, I, you know, put on a sports coat and the whole deal. But now being on the other side in the hiring side, often it, it is really interesting how quick that you can like go ‘Oh, that’s interesting the way that people present and engage and are able to, to kind of step in.’

Madison Morgan:

Well, for sure. I mean, we’re talking about professionalism, like, we wanna see you in your home office. We wanna see that you’ve, you know, really taken effort, that you’re taking this seriously, that you’re not just recording a video in your car. Right? So it’s a really, really valuable tool for us to see professionalism in a candidate.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

That’s incredible. What other tools do we use? Are there any personality profiles or anything that we use that kind of play a part in our kind of hiring process?

Madison Morgan:

Yeah, so we have a behavioral assessment that we utilize here at BELAY, and we also have a skills assessment. So about the behavioral assessment. I like to think of this as a tool for us to be able to see inside the head of the applicant. You know, we wanna see the whole picture. I say the head, the heart, and the briefcase. So we’ve got our briefcase with our resume and our application. We’ve got the heart through the interview, but the head, that’s really important for seeing how a candidate might show up on the other side in serving our clients. So we love the behavioral assessment that we use. It really shows us how that candidate’s gonna show up on the job, how they’ll hit the ground running, and how great of a fit they might be for the role. It literally produces a one out of 10 job match score that shows us, you know, out of 10, they’re a six is a fit for your VA role. It’s really fantastic. It’s a big part of our process in identifying the right talent as well.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

That’s awesome. You also talked about the skills test. That’s another part of what we do. Tell us about that. What, how do we use that and how does it play into, into the hiring process?

Madison Morgan:

Yeah, definitely. So we actually developed an in-house skills assessment here at BELAY based off of frequent requests from our clients. So it involves a few parts. we have a portion where the applicant attends a recorded meeting because meeting notes and action items from there is a big request for clients where they have to take detailed notes. From there, they answer a series of questions that correspond with how well they took notes during that call. And they also have to then develop a travel itinerary, a budget email, do some calendaring, and a few questions related to inbox. Again, these are the biggies that we hear over and over again. So inbox, calendar, meeting notes, budget, event management, travel coordination. And so this test helps us to see the proof in the pudding that this candidate’s got, what it takes to serve our clients in the capacity that we need.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

That’s that’s really incredible. I feel like just like the tangible we get to learn and it also, it requires a little bit of work. And so it also shows like our how much do they want it? How hungry are they necessarily?

Madison Morgan:

For sure. If you are an applicant and you go start our application process, you get a special pop-up that says this application process is not for the faint of heart. Like here at BELAY we just do it a little bit different, but it’s proven to produce the talent, the caliber of talent that we’re looking for.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

A few minutes ago you talked about the head, the heart and the briefcase is kind of the, was that, was that the three? Is that what you said?

Madison Morgan:

Yes, yes. You got it.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

All right. Well, you if you’re hiring, let me know, but starting to get it, but the I guess I would love for you to just kinda expand upon that. That’s a really interesting filter to look at candidates. Could you talk about that just like in a little more detail?

Madison Morgan:

Yeah. We really intentionally try to get a holistic picture of the candidate. If you want to truly identify the best talent, a resume and an interview isn’t gonna get you there. You’ve got to have varying approaches to seeing what this candidate is bringing to the table. So when I talk about the briefcase, that’s gonna be the resume, the application, their previous experience. When I’m talking about the, the heart, that’s the interview. You know, that’s when you’re face-to-face with this candidate or eyeball-to-eyeball virtually via Zoom, and you’re getting to hear about who they are and what makes them tick, what’s their why, why do they wanna be here at BELAY, why do they wanna be a Virtual Assistant? And then lastly, the head. So there’s different assessments that we’ve put into place that really give us insights into their intelligence and their ability to get in here and produce great work. Quality work is important to us, and so we love our process because it truly gives us that holistic picture of the candidate.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

That’s awesome. I feel like we’ve talked about sourcing, like where do you find the talent? We’ve talked about then kind of the interview process and the assessment process. These are all things that whether you use a service like BELAY or you do it on your own, that people could apply. But I do think that the, the level of service that BELAY offers in these areas is pretty remarkable. How much time do we save clients on, like, by doing the hiring on, on their behalf and kind of walking them through this process? Is there any information around that?

Madison Morgan:

Yeah, gosh, we could give you a good estimate. I think it’s important to remember that BELAY is a high volume staffing firm. So we are employing four full-time recruiters here to sift through these thousands and thousands of applicants that we have each month and go through the process of hiring on the, the, the level that we do. But if I had to break it down per candidate, I’d say we are saving about three to four hours per candidate. Maybe one of those hours could be kind of said that was spent sourcing, getting your post on all the right job sites so it could attract a few more. But again, that’s one candidate and that’s assuming that you interview and hire the first person that comes across your desk, which is rarely the case. Like I said, they sift through thousands of candidates and so you’re probably gonna go through a handful, if not more, before you find the right talent. So you can go ahead and do that math based on how many people you anticipate that you have to interview in order to hire for your role. But I’d say about three to four hours per candidate. Again, this is solely focused on what it takes to source, assess, interview, and hire, but you’re also forgetting about the onboarding piece. that’s another big part and lift that BELAY takes on that you would have to do on your own if you were out there spearheading this for your organization or yourself.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

And I think another thing to think about for leaders potentially, and I just went through this, I hired a new assistant that started last week. The more unique, maybe that’s a nice way to say it. Persnickety might be a more, you know, clear way that your, the type of work you do are, or your personality as a leader is, the harder it is to find that right match. And when you have the volume that we have at BELAY, we’re able to to match up people more uniquely. Have you seen that?

Madison Morgan:

Yeah, absolutely. That’s our secret sauce. I think that fit is so important in a relationship with an admin. They are gonna be your right hand. They are gonna be running so many of your initiatives to the finish line and working so closely with you that you are gonna have to go through, I would anticipate quite a few people to find that person that you just know, oh yeah, this is my one, this is the home run. Versus if you come somewhere like BELAY, we’ve done all of that hard work on the front end, then we do the matchmaking, our secret sauce, right, and introduce you to that person and you’re ready to hit the ground running. You had to do none of that lift. So it’s a wonderful model and way to save yourself time and get exactly what you need to really be able to elevate your business to the next level and not have had to put that time in on the front end to do so.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Madison, this has been so helpful. as we kind of wrap up this conversation, I guess I would just love to know if someone is hiring a VA on their own, what advice can you give them to make sure they hire the right person?

Madison Morgan:

Ooh, there’s so many things I can think of, and we really went through a lot of the more technical pieces before, so I think I wanna make sure and take the time to emphasize that. I would say the heart is equally, if not more important than the briefcase. So if you’re out there doing this on your own, experience matters, hard skills matter, but don’t forget about soft skills because they really do. I think so many people get focused on the hard skills when hiring and they don’t stop to think about, you know, who, who are the people in your organization that you would consider to be the rock stars? Who are those people that are performing not because of the experience they brought to the play, but because of their desire to roll their sleeves up, to get in there, to be resourceful, to find answers, to be a team player.

Madison Morgan:

That’s all soft skills, guys. And so make sure when you’re looking for a candidate that you don’t forget that, you know, you don’t wanna hire the person who on paper looked great, but they aren’t a team player. They’re just there to get a paycheck. They’re in and they’re out. They aren’t going above and beyond. So that’s probably the most important thing is that soft skills match. I also wanna say, I know that this, this question is about someone that is going it alone, but why do that? Why not turn it over to professionals like us here at the BELAY where we’re trained to dig into both the hard skills and the soft skills and find that perfect balance is gonna be a great culture fit for your organization and really help free you up to do what you do best.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Having hired a assistant on my own many times before and then having gone through the process kind of getting done on the inside, I’m like, whoa, this is way easier and more fun and better. And so I, I totally agree with you. And to our listeners, gosh, I hope this episode has been helpful because we often talk about really high level leadership things and then have like one or two granular kinda helpful approaches. But I think what you just gave Madison was a step-by-step process of how to hire a great VA. And I think that’s incredibly helpful for so many of our listeners and and we would love to help you do that. But, Madison, thank you so, so much for joining us on this conversation today. I think this was unbelievably helpful.

Madison Morgan:

Absolutely, Ryan, happy to help. Thank you for having me.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Madison, thank you so much for this conversation. It was unbelievably helpful and Madison has so much more to insight to share. So she’s agreed to hang around and answer one last question about what to listen for when interviewing for a new Virtual Assistant. You don’t wanna miss it. To hear that clip, subscribe to our email list and we will send you a link to our bonus content or visit onenextsteppodcast.com where you can find a link in our show notes. 

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Thank you so much to Madison for taking the time to share her experience. Whether you want to hire a VA on your own or you want to use someone like BELAY to help you find the very best talent there is, the insights she gave really do help us know the best way to move forward as business owners. And I really hope that you found something really valuable in that conversation. To our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in for this week’s One Next Step. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe on Apple Podcast or follow us on Spotify. And if you’re ready to start accomplishing more and juggling less, go to belaysolutions.com. For more episodes, show notes and helpful resources, visit onenextsteppodcast.com.