Get my free Virtual Assistant Jumpstart Kit!<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n5 Places to Avoid in Hiring a Virtual Assistant<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Now let’s jump into the five places that I would avoid if I were hiring my next virtual assistant. As a full disclaimer, if you found success hiring in these next five places or are affiliated with these next five places, take everything that I’m about to say with a grain of salt, they simply reflect my own personal experiences in hiring virtual assistants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Freelancer and Guru<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The first and second places to not hire a virtual assistant are Freelancer and Guru. The reason why I don’t like hiring from either of these sites is honestly because I’ve never had success hiring from either of these sites. Whenever I posted on these platforms and I’ve tried three or four times on both these sites consistently, I would always get a ton of spam applications. People would either fall into the bucket of not having read anything in my listing or after giving them an actual test task, and then passing that test task, not being able to follow instructions, to save the life of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That being said, the merits of both of these sites is that they do offer free accounts, which means you can list for free. If you happen to find a great virtual assistant from either of these sites, good job for you, props to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s something that I just never was able to pull off in several years of trying it. I actually waited a few years before trying Guru again, and I believe my last attempt was in 2019 and I still wasn’t able to get any good talent from that site. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next few are ones that I considered to be part of the VC crew. In my opinion, these companies have raised way too much venture capital money. And as a result, they have to charge exorbitant fees for the actual value they’re providing in order to please their investors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Magic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The first one of the VC crew is Magic. They pitch themselves as a remote based crew of college educated workers that can help your business 24\/7. They target, CEOs and executives where they bill $35 an hour weekly, which allows you to have no weekly limit to the chat or tasks that you give your worker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My challenge with Magic is that if you’re pitching something as having unlimited chat or unlimited tasks, that’s just marketing. You have that same feature with all four of the platforms that I outlined earlier in this article as a places to go to hire a virtual assistant. As long as you have some way to communicate with your virtual assistant, you have the same feature set that Magic is pitching here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do you know how easy it is to make a free Slack account and just start talking with your virtual assistant? It’s not hard at all, and it’s not worth $35 an hour weekly for this sort of service. But look, if you just raised big round or you have a ton of money to burn, be my guest in trying Magic. I just don’t think that you get all that much value for the $35 an hour when you could actually use that $35 an hour and hire five to seven virtual assistants on Upwork to do five times or seven times the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And as a fun fact, according to Crunchbase, Magic has raised $12.1 million. So if you’re wondering why it’s $35 an hour, it might be because they’ve raised all that much money and they need their margins to work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zirtual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The next place to avoid when hiring a virtual assistant is Zirtual. If you thought that magic was expensive, you’re going to hate Zirtual. The pitch for Zirtual is very comparable to magic. You get somebody that’s college educated as well as lives in the US. You’re also going to have what they call direct contact with the virtual assistant. And you also get set up help when you’re setting up tasks for the first time. You’re also promised two hour response times within your business hours, whenever you’re working with somebody from Zirtual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s get into why Zirtual is not budget friendly. Their Entrepreneur plan is $449 for 12 hours of work. That is the equivalent of $37 an hour. If you’re willing to pay somebody $37 an hour for 12 hours of work a month, you might as well just hire somebody part-time. Or if you don’t want to do that, go on TaskRabbit, look at the marketplace there for something more competitive and set up the tasks that way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are so many better ways that you can spend $37 an hour for 12 hours with your business. Also, I don’t know about you, but when I was starting out my small businesses, having $449 lying around was not exactly easy to find. So this isn’t super friendly for those that have a limited budget, but still want to be scaling a virtual assistant to help them out with their business. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other thing to consider is that Zirtual had issues in the past in terms of how they treat they’re employees. I’ll let you Google that for yourself. And also they’ve raised $5.5 million when I looked at Crunchbase. Again, high correlation between those companies that have raised a ton of money, and their necessity for raising prices in order to meet the expectations of those investors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fancy Hands<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The last place to avoid when it comes to hiring a VA is FancyHands. It’s very similar to the prior two places in that their pitch is that they are virtual US-based workers. FancyHands is actually one of the original requests a month or tasks month companies dating back to 2010 and an impressive feat of theirs is that they’re actually bootstrapped, which means they’ve never taken outside funding. In terms of pricing, five requests a month is priced at $29.99, as of the time of this recording and it scales upwards to $149.99 for 30 requests. On their site,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can see examples of requests that people make. They’re typically things that are one off tasks that you don’t typically do on a schedule, such as calling store to see if an item is in place or trying to find an item. Honestly, I don’t have that much against these guys. The only thing is that I just think that you can better spend your time building a working relationship with a longterm virtual assistant that doesn’t require you to be restricted by the number of requests that you can make with that particular assistant. It’s just not conducive to have an artificial quota of requests that you can make with a service. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead, you should have a fixed price or an hourly option that allows you to fully scale a virtual assistant with your business. Similar to Zirtual, FancyHands have had their issues in the past in terms of how they treated their virtual assistants. I’ll let you Google that for yourself and form your own opinion here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A couple of bottom line thoughts that I have when it comes to these services. The first one is if you really value having US-based talent that much, then by all means go for one of these services. I can completely respect that. However, to me, these companies are simply charging an arbitrary premium because they’re pitching themselves as US-based talent. And in many cases, they’re not passing along this premium to their virtual workers. I think there’s a lot more value pulling from a global talent pool because you can create a win, win situation in which your VA can get paid their normal rates, and also save a lot of money. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Big takeaways<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
There are two things that I want you to remember when it comes to your virtual assistant and your virtual assistant’s success. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
- The first one is that their success starts and stops with you. If they fail. It’s typically because your SOP is not clear enough. So make sure that you are setting them up for success. <\/li>
- The second thing that I’d like you to remember is to be open-minded about the global VA talent pool. You can find a lot of value in a lot of great work from those who learned English as their second language, and it doesn’t have to inhibit the ability to get the job done. <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel<\/a> to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from these nine places to find your next VA.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThat’s it for this time. In my next article, I’m going to go over how to manage and train your virtual assistants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n