7 Tips for Hiring Your First Assistant

If your plate is feeling too full or you're not working in your zone of genius, maybe it's time to consider getting your first assistant. I'm sharing 7 tips that will help you avoid some mistakes and hire right from the start.  

Video Summary

"In this video, I'm going to be sharing with you some tips on hiring a virtual assistant as I have some experience with this. I want to share with you some things I found really helpful and hopefully this will help you too. If you have someone that you're thinking of hiring in the future or maybe you have a team member right now and you're wanting to know what to do if you're in the early stages, these tips are going to help you.

The first thing I want to say is to be slow to hire. Make sure you take your time interviewing plenty of candidates and that you also give them a trial period, where you can make sure that they're a good fit for you and you're a good fit for them.

You can say something like, maybe do a 30 day or 60 or 90 day trial where you are able to give them tasks and see how they respond to the tasks, how efficiently they do the work, the quality of their work. That way you have at least some type of an agreement where you're like, this is great. Let's keep moving forward. Or you can say, you know what, thank you so much for your time. You know, this isn't the best fit for our company at this time. And you can go and look for someone else. It's helpful if you're slow to hire and if you have the expectation with them in the beginning, that way you kind of have yourself covered and they're covered as well. The second thing I want to say is train well. Do not assume that someone knows how to do a task.

Make sure you ask and you communicate what their skill level is, what things they're comfortable with, what things they have experience in. And if they don't have the experience in something, make sure that you properly train them or at least send them to resources where they can get training that is helpful for them to fulfill the tasks that are necessary in your business. So train them well. Number three is divide the tasks into like daily, weekly, monthly recurring tasks so that they can be 100% clear on what their expectations are that they need to deliver, weekly, monthly, daily, etc. Then, in addition to that, if you have a specific project you're working on, you can let them know, this is for a limited time project that we need this assistance with. Communication is super, super important.

Make sure you're communicating what expectations you have and ask them what support they need, if anything.

Because sometimes assistants can be shy in not wanting to come to their new boss or they're not quite sure how to communicate with you in the beginning. So make sure you open that line of communication, so they feel like if they're stuck in something, where they can go for answers.

The next thing I want to talk about is really look at the person's energy. Do they match the type of energy or the company culture that you have? Sometimes I feel like this is more important than hiring the most qualified person on the planet because even if someone is super skilled and knowledgeable in something, if they're not a good fit for the vibe and your style and you're going to be spending time with this person, you want to make sure that you know the person is teachable. If they have a great personality and they kind of fit the vibe and they're like a positive person, then you can always teach that person to be more capable in whatever skill that you need versus someone who might have a lot of skills.

But maybe you're butting heads with personality. Like it's just, it's a headache for both of you. So make sure you really look at the person's vibe, their personality, how they fit into your company culture. And that's a helpful thing too. And lastly is, I like to throw a small curve ball, because sometimes in the beginning you want to see how someone reacts to problems, how they respond to challenges. Like are they someone who's gonna solve problems, look for answers or are they someone who's going to be coming to you every single time there's a bump in the road. You want to find somebody who is a self starter, someone who can figure things out but also communicate with you if there's a significant problem. So it's just really cool if you throw someone a curve ball in the beginning. It's a good opportunity for you to see how they work under pressure or how they work when maybe something's not fully explained.

Do they just keep going and not tell you about it or do they come to you with the issue? It's just really interesting to see how they'll respond and you can decide if that's a way that you want things done in your company or your business. So throw them a small curve ball in the beginning.

Make sure to do like a little bit of testing, especially in those trial periods where you can make sure that it's someone you can trust, someone who can communicate with you really well and that you have great expectations of each other. I hope these tips are helpful for you.

There are places you can go to to look for virtual assistants. There's like upwork.com there's also fivver.com where you can do like short, small little projects and there's a lot of offshore places too with great virtual assistants like online jobs pH and many others. You can just Google virtual assistant and so many places will come up. So hopefully these are helpful tips for you. If you liked this video like it and share, make sure to go to Jessicafillmore.com/subscribe to get my latest content as well as my freebies and exclusive things that I do not share anywhere else. So have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you later."