How to Hire a Great Virtual Assistant (2021)

Dennis VAs 1

You Don’t Have to Build Your Business Alone!

Learn in this article the basics on how to hire a virtual assistant, and use the free email templates we give you to make sure you hire the very best VAs for your business.

Virtual Assistants are ideal for business owners who want to hire out tasks that take up too much of their time and keep them away from focusing on the core of their business, their goals, content, and targeting.

At Content Factory, we’re grateful for our VAs, many of them from the Philippines. Their diligence to their work and faithfulness to our company as we reach our goals to create thousands of new jobs around the world is extraordinary.

Digital marketing can be tough and many of our VAs need to commit to training themselves more so they can become even better in their skills and expertise. For many of these skills, we use our own Content Factory’s Academy to train our VAs, so they benefit from the same training that our agency and business customers benefit from.

Many of them take on new responsibilities and tasks to stretch their limits, and some of them even bow out before too long.

But for those who stick with it and continue to learn our systems and processes, they play an integral part in our content factory and work themselves forward into more responsibility and better pay.

And the benefits of virtual assistants to a growing business can be profound. To understand that further check out this video we did last year with the CEO of Rocket Station, Robert Nickell.

Finding Virtual Assistants and the Pre-Screening Process

Still, we need to back up a bit.

The process doesn’t just start with our training. Though our training works. It’s the same training we have used to help thousands of agencies and business owners grow throughout the years.

No, the process begins way before that.

First you need a great place to find solid virtual assistants to hire. For this, we use onlinejobs.ph.

onlinejobs.ph helps business owners to understand how to hire a virtual assistant, but to find the best quality candidate, you still a bit more.

This is one of the first and largest virtual assistant hiring websites online. Throughout all the years we have used it to find our virtual assistants, onlinejobs.ph has provided us with a trustworthy source of employees to hire. It remains one of the most recommended virtual assistant sites to find dependable VAs.

But, even once you have found several virtual assistants that might work well with your organization, you’re job is not entirely done. Then you need a great pre-screening program to find the very best of that pool of potential candidates.

That’s why we created these email templates, to seek and find some of the best VA candidates out there, those who are going to stick with our company long term, and work hard to become better at digital marketing fundamentals

Our VA Hiring Course is now live!

Email Templates for Hiring VAs

You can use these email templates in a variety of situations related to the hiring process–making job posts, sending polite declines and more. You can copy and paste text in-between quotation marks without including the quotation marks.

We use these two templates to help us sort through our potential candidates. The first asks the applicant to do something in our initial job posting, and they’ve forgotten to do this task. We give this to people we are interested in but have not completed the “attentive” task we’ve given them to do in our original job posting.

The second is the email that we send out to VA’s that didn’t make the cut. We know that those who don’t have the skills now could have the skills in the future, and we’ve found that offering them a course to improve is one of the best things we can do to provide a better pool of credentialed, skilled, and competent VA’s for the future. So we give them a course and wish them success.

Feel free to use any of these in your candidate screening process.

Email Hiring Template #1: Look Back At The Job Post

“Hey, [Name]

We’ve sprinkled a couple of little details in our job post to automatically disqualify those that didn’t include them.

We do this because we receive hundreds of applicants and we want people to stand out!

How will YOU stand out among the rest? You have potential and I want to see you succeed.

Can you look back at the job post and see what details you missed?

We’re a family here and we want YOU to be part of it.

Want to give it another look?

Thank you!

Email Hiring #2: Disqualification Email

Hello [Applicant Name],

As you already know, we’ve had countless applicants. You are one of the amazing candidates and we wish we could hire everyone.

We’re a family at Content Factory and we want to include as many people as possible but our training program isn’t at the level where we’ll be able to help you get to the level of success we both want you to achieve.

You don’t meet the qualifications right now, but if you study up and complete the requirements, you could be employed by us later. 

Want to keep training up, so you can get work now as a freelancer, start your agency, or join us when you’re qualified? Let us know which course in the Content Factory Academy you would like to take that’s $200 or less and we’ll give it to you for free.

I want you to succeed. We want you to succeed!

Thank you!

 Email Hiring Template #3: Qualifying To The Next Round

Hey, [Applicant Name].

[Personalized note]

Congratulations on qualifying to the next round.

First, for you to understand what we do as a company, please go to yourcontentfactory.com and understand what we do.

Make a video recording of yourself that’s no more than 4 minutes about your insights on what we do and on how you can make the website better with your role.

Second, for you to get a better understanding of your role, please watch a video based on the position that you are applying for and create a 1-page summary.

We’re only looking to seek your understanding of the role and to see your English comprehension and writing skills.

Place your summary in a viewable Google Document or any type of document such as a PDF, jpeg or even a screenshot. You can place water marks if you want to make sure the document is not transferable.

Interested in going deeper into the Virtual Assistant Hiring Process?

Our VA Hiring Course is now live!

We built our new VA Hiring course to give business owners an easy method to vet and hire quality VAs for their online business. In this course you will learn our battle-hardened process of VA hiring that has allowed us to generate added income, reduce our workloads, and push forward toward our business goals. Knowing how to hire a virtual assistant is within your reach.

Dennis Yu

About the Author

Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads.  He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.