How To Hire Your VA Using Effective Interviewing Techniques
When you have been looking for, and interviewed, prospective members for your team and reach a place where you might have two people who make it through, then I might give them a trial. I’ll pay them for twenty hours work each and then I’ll give them both a go. That is part of effective interviewing techniques that I do to hire virtual assistants today.
If they’re two really good stars, then I might want to add to my virtual bench and I’ll tell them, opportunities come up, our business is growing, we’re looking for people like you. Sit tight, we’ll give you some one off tasks related to SEO services and when an opportunity presents itself, we’ll let you know. That’s what happened with one person who we were giving some one off tasks to and then I found she was not able to be consistent in delivering some blog posts. She’d been sitting on the virtual bench, and I’m going whew, I’m glad I didn’t hire her because that would have been frustrating.
What I also do is to give some underarm throws as well. This means that in the first week of having that person do a trial work with you, just give them some really easy work to accomplish, simply to see consistency in the way they do these little tasks, you just want to be sure that they are able to communicate well as they complete these small tasks. Don’t ask them to work on a brilliant, really high caliber task yet. Many people do this, however I would rather let them work with a couple of underarm passes as part of these best interview tips that you can do just to make sure that they are able to get the drift and do the job well.
I’ve got an evolving system in hiring staff for my SEO company. Unlike other employers, my Mum does an initial screening of resumes coming in and so the applicants have to complete a pre interview questionnaire. What we’re planning to do in the next few days is, we’re likely to shift that method. So before Mum does her pre screen, I want to shift the questionnaire for these applicants. That will save time for Mum in terms of flipping through all these resumes if they’re not going answer these questions correctly. This also applies to knowing if we can afford them or not. For example, if their wage expectation is more than the $15 mark but I am only willing to pay $5 for that particular task, then that goes wasted time on your end.
The reason I’m telling you this for the evolution and this is just part of my learning. Personality testing is another thing that we’re looking to do in hiring SEO specialists. We might look at DISC or Wealth Dynamics or something like that, where part of the early process will be to find out what type of individual they are which I’m finding out more about.
There’s a website worth looking into, ExpertRating. What ExpertRating does is they’ve got a whole lot of job tasks almost like trial jobs and you can get someone to go over to ExpertRating and you set up the trial job and it’s managed through ExpertRating. They might have a series or questions that they have to answer and it’s good competency testing in terms of using effective interviewing techniques. So if someone says, yes, I know CSS, ok, go take this CSS test and then we’ll see how well you know it.
So real life example, we placed an ad on JobStreet, we got one hundred and twenty-one resumes, we prescreened them, did the questionnaire. We got it down to fourteen. Of those, eleven returned that questionnaire. From there we picked out the best five who returned the questionnaire, we assigned five tasks. From there we found the best three, so we were down to having three golden players. Then we interviewed them. I came out with two people and we added them to the virtual bench.
Here’s what you need to think about in terms of recruiting for your small business office: Hire Mums because they certainly have a great starting point. Personally, I believe a lot of people, sometimes when you are going through this hiring process, you almost get yourself thinking, oh, like I’ve taken all of them in this way, so it is best to bring them up to speed in the next few days. But there are so many individuals, there are many A players that you will encounter in this phase, just relax and take your time in hiring the best player for your company.
In the end, you have to remember that you are only as strong as your weakest link. Therefore, make sure that you only get the best staff using effective interviewing techniques. Do not waste time hiring B players who slack and might affect the working habits of your A players.