First off, let's be clear. We are not a staffing company or a recruiting agency. Our team uses LOTS of overseas virtual assistants, and we're constantly attracting high-quality candidates that we simply don't have room for or can't give them a full-time workload.

Through this service, we'll connect you with high-quality VAs who we've either worked with in the past or who at least made it to the final rounds of our review process.

Our priority is to match you with an entry-level, general administrative VA who you can train and develop in-house.

Within 1-2 weeks of signing up with us, we'll send you our top candidates for you to review and choose who you'd like to interview. Our goal is to send you 5 candidates to interview, but we prioritize quality over quantity so it may be a bit more or less. If you'd like we'll even assist you in conducting those interviews.

You'll get a copy of our attorney-approved VA agreement template for your new hire(s) to sign in case you don't already have such a contract in place. We highly recommend that you hire two VAs and put them on a 90-day onboarding/testing phase to confirm they're a good fit for you and vice versa.

Any employee/contractor relationship with your new VA(s) will be 100% between you and them (AKA my team will not be involved at all in that team relationship, giving you full control).

That depends largely on your ability to interview our top candidates, but in general it takes about 2-3 weeks. Note that, if you'd like, our team can interview those final candidates on your behalf.

Most of the high-quality VAs we attract are from the Philippines.

We can also source excellent administrative assistants in Central America.

We believe in hiring based on culture fits, not skill sets. For that reason, we highly that your first VAs be generalists, not specialists.

We understand that you may be looking for a VA with a particular set of skills or experience. However, we've found that there is such a missed opportunity if you don't have at least one VA on your team who is more of a generalist. Plus, highly skilled hires are more of a flight risk.

In order to build a solid foundation in your overseas project management, we believe that your first VA hire should be a more general admin. This way you can develop and train them in-house, which keeps your systems sustainable in the future.

Great question! There’s always a chance that a VA won’t work out, especially if it’s your first hire. For that reason, we highly recommend that you hire two VAs at once for the same role. (Don't worry, we won't charge you extra if you hire 2 of our top picks.)

Hiring two at once helps mitigate that risk AND sets you up to specialize your VAs to certain tasks after you’ve had some time to onboard, train, and see where their talents and interests are.

Plus, it’s great to build coverage into your VA team. If one person goes on vacation or maternity leave or something, the other VA can take over for them instead of it falling back on your plate.

There are several options for paying your new VAs, depending on your situation and preferences. 

That said, many business owners are already using a service like Gusto to pay their team. If you already have a software like that, and they allow for payments to overseas contractors, we highly recommend that option.

Our research and experience indicates that full-time beginner-level VAs in the Philippines average about $400/mo while expert VAs average about $2000/mo USD. That breaks down to a range from about $3/hour to about $15/hour.

We tend to aim in the middle of that range because, while our top candidates all have solid experience as VAs, we recommend having them fill a pretty "general admin" level — not specialists. Our default is a starting payment of $6/hour for entry-level positions that increases to $8/hour after a 90-day onboarding and training period. We also start out at 20 hours a month and raise that to 40, 80, 100, 140, etc. as we fill up their capacity with recurring work.

(Also, if you use a payment provider that takes a cut of the payment, we recommend increasing the hourly rate so that they RECEIVE the listed rate.)

It's been our experience that most payroll platforms (such as Gusto) make it very easy to pay teammates overseas. However, there are a few countries that make sending payments difficult. One such country is Venezuela.

Because of the state of Venezuela's economy and difficult currency system, it is not uncommon for payment processor platforms like Gusto to not have the ability to easily pay employees/contractors in Venezuela.

That said, we have also found that there tends to be particularly strong candidates in Venezuela that have very low costs of living, which makes them very attractive candidates for a small budget. Our team itself has explored payment options for Venezuelan VAs, and we are currently paying them through PayPal and would recommend that approach for others.

Once you find and hire your dream VA, the real work begins.

If you'd like, and depending on our availability, you can secure a spot on our VIP Onboarding Consulting list. We will support you during the first 90 days with your new VA. During that time, we can guide you through an onboarding process that we recommend, we can assist you through any challenges or issues you face with your new hire, and we can even communicate with that new hire directly on your team's behalf as a kind of VA/brand ambassador.

No worries! We will keep working with you at no additional cost until we find you good fits that you'd confidently hire.