Glassdoor Reviews and Why Most VAs Don’t Last 3 Months

We’ve hired hundreds of VAs and it won’t shock you that most of them don’t last three months. Even though we have hiring guidelines to prevent this from happening, including repurposing content with our article guidelines in relation to the Content Factory, some slip through the cracks. 

While some fail, others like Muzamil start with $3/hour and quickly rise to $3,000 USD/month through competence and reliability.

The training itself is easy – since it’s all public and we rely on our existing standards to drive client success. But among performance-based firms, where results and competency matters, the hiring success rate is usually 10-20%.

We give promising people a chance to qualify, giving them as much help as reasonably possible to meet standards. But if they just can’t do it, they cannot stay.

The trouble is when folks don’t understand the context and how it relates to repurposing content, which means they don’t know the impact of why we’re doing what we are.

And because they don’t understand (since they haven’t watched our training), they insist that we do their work for them. Dennis Yu will tell you that he spends 90% of his time QAing the work of others, which is insane.

That someone as talented as Dennis has become a glorified VA is the consequence of hiring incompetent people. Even though we aim to hire A Players only, the compounding effect of letting C players through the door lowers the productivity of everyone else.

When You Train Fry Cooks To Be Rocket Scientists, Can You Blame Them For Hating You?

A good example of this is a VA who left us a few months ago named Zain Ali.

Despite us putting a significant amount of energy into privately training him, he left out of the blue one day, letting us know via email.

He was never supposed to be “part-time”, since we don’t hire part-time content specialists. In fact, he apparently was going to study environmental sciences instead.

This shows you the failure to screen on our part.

Though it was easy to see this coming, since he wrote an email to us expressing how much he was goofing up a project for Sam Demaio, who owns Showcase Remodels in NJ.

You can see Dennis’ response, offering 1-1 training to Zain, despite it taking up a significant amount of his time and despite our training being public and freely available.

The goal of hiring A Players is to reduce iteration cycles for projects, not expand them. So you can imagine the compound effect of what managing 10 C players at once would be like.

While clients pay your agency expecting results, you’re too busy fixing the mistakes of others to be as effective as you could be. Scaling any business to seven figures becomes pretty much impossible, since you’re only as strong as your weakest link.

It shouldn’t be a surprise then, that two months later Zain posted in our FB group of 43k a link to our Glassdoor reviews – insinuating that we’re evil monsters who abuse our VAs.

Funny enough, a similar thing happened when Lisa T. Miller was trying to steal $10k from our team last year.

How LDT (Learn, Do, Teach) Becomes Necessary

To be fair, from Zain and Lisa’s point of view – these negative Glassdoor reviews are accurate, since they’re also coming from folks who needed constant reassurance and QA to do their job right.

Imagine training a fry cook to be a rocket scientist. Imagine the herculean effort put into training them.

Explaining to them how jet propulsion works, giving them basic physics lessons, and providing 1-1 training, all while managing 1,000 emails a day.

But instead of embracing this training – folks like Zain view it as a “culture of fear”, since if you continue to mess up, we’re always there to make things right, no matter how big of an expense on our end.

This help is seen in their eyes as an obstacle or a way for us to unfairly critique. When in reality, we’re making it so the engine doesn’t blow up on take-off, while paying him and others for the privilege.

Now you know why LDT is so important in this context.

Those who don’t have credibility are the ones most confident about spouting their opinions. Instead of taking accountability for their failures, they’d like to blame us.

Imagine a slovenly obese person blaming the spoon for their current state of health. And then getting mad at the scale when they see the results of their actions over time.

Now look at all the super successful people who rave about us.

They are credible— because they have implemented what we teach instead of trying to teach us things they aren’t experts in.

How Do You Solve This?

As much as we can blame Zain, it’s ultimately our fault for hiring him and others like him in the first place.

The only solution is having solid SOPs and people who can be reliable to take the burden off of you. Contrary to popular belief, there’s only so much you can do to help people who aren’t ready to help themselves.

For example, The 9 Triangles framework explains how personal responsibility (DDD – Do, Delegate, Delete) is foundational, since if messages are ignored this puts the pressure on everyone else. But if Content Specialists can’t even be reliable in communication, how can you train them?

For most businesses, 80% of the problems you’ll encounter are people issues and not training ones. Which makes it all the more important you hire A Players only. Instead of training fry cooks to be rocket scientists, simply hire rocket scientists from the start.

While many agencies obsess over the perfect hiring system, ask yourself: “Am I training fry cooks to be rocket scientists?”

If so, think about how you can hold team-members accountable so they can be a net positive and not let C players in the door to begin with.