Hire a Virtual Assistant to Replace You in One Week

A “How To” from Travis Marziani

Meet Travis Marziani, health enthusiast and creator of Performance Nut Butter, the whole-food paleo, keto, and vegan-friendly snack. Travis’s product was born from his passion – a combination of athletics, biomedical engineering and nutrition. His product ships all over the nation from his website and Amazon.com.

Travis is also the founder of EffectiveeCommerce.com, where he teaches entrepreneurs how to scale their eCommerce businesses using the same tactics he uses to promote Performance Nut Butter.

Travis is passionate about guiding fellow entrepreneurs toward success. In addition to EffectiveeCommerce.com, he’s recently launched a focus group where he teaches other entrepreneurs on how to develop and sell their their own “passion products” – a product created from something they love.

Travis regularly releases videos on his YouTube channel with advice on how to gain freedom and grow eCommerce businesses. One of Travis’s favorite tips? Hire a Filipino virtual assistant.

Travis currently employs 3 full-time VAs. By outsourcing the day-to-day grind to his VAs, Travis is free to grow his business, implement new systems and create new products. Virtual workers also give Travis freedom to do the things he loves – the same way they create freedom for thousands of business owners all over the globe.

In this video, Travis walks through the step-by-step process he uses to hire rockstar virtual workers. He even itemizes the steps in a google doc (available for download in the link below). Travis is a long-time OnlineJobs.ph user and affiliate. He explains some of the benefits of hiring with OnlineJobs.ph in his video. (Most of the below are Travis’s words, found in his YouTube video description.)

In this video, I will give you a step-by-step guide you on how you can hire your own virtual assistant (VA). I will be walking you through a weeklong process of doing this (and explain what happens from Monday to Friday). I will be using Onlinejobs.ph, a personal favorite, in hiring a VA.

From [OnlineJobs.ph], I was able to hire two VAs who are currently with me. They really did revolutionize the game and made managing my business easier. I am on my way to hiring my 3rd one and I will show you how exactly I go through the process.

There are about four steps to get started on this:

1. Post your job – There are other websites for this function but it is Onlinejobs.ph where I have the most success.
2. Message the applicants – Send out a message to those candidates who are qualified for the job. Give them a sample project that they can complete.
3. Interview them – From those candidates that were able to complete the sample project, set up an interview with them.
4. Hire them – Hire the most qualified person and get them up and running with your business.

How to Hire a Filipino Virtual Assistant in One Week:

MONDAY:
As mentioned, the first thing that you need to do is post your job. You can start with this by following the steps below:

1. Sign up for Onlinejobs.ph – First step to posting your product is to create an account. There are paid Pro and Premium accounts. I have a Premium account because I post a lot, but having a Pro account is fine as well.

2. Post a job – Go to the main part of your account and click post a job. Enter the Job Title followed by the Job Description. In the description, you can talk about the task that the VA will be doing and whether you’re looking for a part-time or full-time employee. You may also mention some of the perks and benefits that the VA will get in working with you.

i. Remember; the job posting should be a two-way street. You don’t just talk about what you want from them, but what they could get from you as well.

ii. The most critical portion of the job description is how to apply for the job. Create specific instructions like changing the subject to “ I Want to Work for [insert name of my mom]”. This is to filter out people that are automatically posting and are not a good fit for the job. Through this, you will only spend time on contacting candidates that are qualified for the role.

iii. For the wage/salary, put how much you are willing to spend. (Remember that $400/month is a good salary in the Philippines. Raise the salary if you’re looking for someone with specialized skills.)

3. Select skills – After the description, check all the skills that are important to the position. Once done, just click “Post Job” and wait for about 24 hours for the messages from interested applicants to come in. Keep in mind that they are in a different time zone from you.

TUESDAY:
Since posting the job, I received 25 replies. Go through each application one by one, read what they wrote and see if the applicant is a good fit. If not, you may delete them. This will narrow down your list of who you will be contacting. You can then email the applicants on your list. In my case, I included in my email a spreadsheet of the schedule for interview and a sample project that they need to work on before the interview.

WEDNESDAY:
I received more applications.for the position. I also created SOPs and Google Docs that will be used as training materials for the new VA.

THURSDAY: (Down day. Took a break.)

FRIDAY:
This is the day of my scheduled interview with the VA applicants who submitted the sample projects that I gave them. Some of my interview questions include, “If you could have a conversation with anybody, alive or dead, who would it be and why?,” “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” “What’s your goal 5 or 10 years from now?” “Where did you learn English?” Ultimately, I ended up hiring two new virtual assistants from this process.

You can watch the video for more details on Travis’s hiring week, or check out his step-by-step hiring process here. You can also learn more about hiring Filipino virtual assistants with OnlineJobs.ph.

Are you ready to gain 40 hours in your workweek for as little as $400/month?
Get started! Post a Job or Browse Resumes on OnlineJobs.ph.

You can also read the full transcript here:

How I Hired a New Virtual Assistant – Step By Step

Today, I’m hiring a new virtual assistant and I’m going to show you exactly how to do it.

I’m gonna walk you basically through my week of what it looks like to hire a virtual assistant in real time and I’m gonna use a site called OnlineJobs.ph which is my personal favorite site to find virtual assistants.

I already have two VA’s that I found from there and they’ve absolutely changed the game. They’ve absolutely revolutionized and made it so much easier to run my business. So I’m going back to find a third one and I’m gonna share with you exactly how to do it.

So to get started, there’s basically four or five steps:

First, you’re gonna post your job. You don’t have to post it on OnlineJobs.ph that’s personally where I’ve had the most success, you can post it wherever. There’s other websites out there I’m sure where you can find a good VA.
Step two is send a message to the ones that seem like they’re actually qualified. Send a message with them and give them a sample project that they can complete.

Now of the people that complete the sample project, you’ll interview them and that’s step three.
And then step four is hire the most qualified person and obviously get them up and running with your job.
So I’m going to teach you exactly how I hire a virtual assistant and share with you all the tips I know.

Let’s get into tactics!

I’m really excited to be hiring a new VA and this is gonna be my third virtual assistant. And I’ve been putting this off for a little while mostly because I wasn’t sure if I had enough tasks for my VA to do. But then I started brainstorming. I started thinking of all these things that I wanted to do and I wanted to try out for my business. But I just didn’t have the time to do and I’m like okay it’s time to hire that third virtual assistant.

So for anyone that’s new to the channel, my name is Travis and my main business, my main passion product is performance nut butter. I sell it mostly on Amazon and also on my own Shopify website. There’s a lot of things I could use a new virtual assistant for.

Now, I’m going to start doing a weekly Vlog like this, where I talk about each week what I’m doing to grow that company. And this week I think the most important thing I can do is hiring another person because it’s an extra 40 hours in a week that I get. But of course that’s not the only thing I’m gonna be doing this week.

One big piece of news, one huge thing I haven’t shared with you yet is I’m gonna be going and trying out for Shark Tank. I’m gonna be auditioning, it’s an open call audition; it’s not a big deal. I’m gonna be going for a performance and a putter and Ariana my girlfriend will be going for her passion product Vino cards which I helped her release a few months ago. The auditions are next week and we’re flying to Miami to go audition. So it’ll be a little travel Vlog slash business Vlog.
So this week, I’m gonna be preparing my speech and my presentation for Shark Tank.

I’m also working on the passion product formula. It’s a course that I’m going to be coming out with, soon.
I have a beta group of around 10 people right now that I’m walking through the process of helping them create their own passion product. As I mentioned the first step is to put up your job post. And I have a ton of tips on how to do that.
So let’s cut to a screen share and I’ll show you step-by-step, how to post your job as well as some tips to do it.

The first step to posting your job is you’re gonna have to get an account and as I said it is paid. I usually just I’d go with the pro account. Personally I do have the premium account because I do post a lot but for most people out there the pro account is fine. But after you’ve done that, after you’ve signed up you’re gonna go to the main part of your account and just click post a job.

Now, I created a step-by-step guide on how to hire a virtual assistant. You can get that for free by clicking up over in the corner. It’s basically the document that I follow so obviously you know it has all the different steps and even has a sample job post which I’m gonna straight up copy for the point of this.

So the title is gonna be excellent English Writer for social media coordination….., blah blah blah and then the description will be down below here. And there’s some things in my description that I did very much on purpose that I’d recommend you do as well. So you’ll notice obviously, I talked about what kind of tasks they’re gonna be doing. That I am looking for a full-time employee.

I also recommend if whenever possible, get a full-time employee. I have not had great success with part-time employees but if you can, you only need them part-time than a obviously you know do that.

I mentioned, some of the perks and for me it’s like you can work whenever you want. You can work as much as you want and I’ll pay you the more. The more you work flexible, vacation if you need time off, just let me know. Talk about all the different benefits of working with me because in a job post it’s a two-way street. You don’t want to just talk about what you want from them. You want to talk about what you can offer them.

So I did a little about Me section and then here is the most critical point to apply to the job. I say you got to change the subject line and I want you to change it to “I want to work for you and put the name of my mom who’s also a co-owner of one of my first companies.”

Then I have some further instructions saying you know write a few sentences on why’d be a good fit for this position. And then I do some little other small things like talk about an article you’ve written before. Come up with the description for this photo for my Instagram.

The whole point of this is to filter out people that are just automatically posting or that are bad. I want to make sure that I only spend time contacting people that are a good fit for my job. So that’s why I have them jumped through all these hoops.
For the wage/salary, put whatever you’re willing to spend and remember for the Philippines four and fifty dollars a month is a lot of money. And I put 450 to 750 because I am looking for an excellent English speaker, writer. Someone that I don’t need to check up on a lot and for me that’s worth it a lot of money. As I mentioned I do full time.

And then the last thing is you’re going to go through all these skills and just check all the different skills you want. For instance English writing is important to me so I’m gonna check that skill and I’m gonna go through and check all the other skills I want for this position to have.

Then just click post job and from there it’s just a waiting game and you’re gonna get a ton of messages in your inbox.
So the truth is after you post your job on OnlineJobs.ph or any of the different sites, you’re gonna have to wait 24 hours for the messages to come in. And remember they’re on a different time zone so you’re not gonna get the messages right away usually.

And if I sound a little bit off, a little bit loopy I actually woke up at 2:00 in the morning today. I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep. I’ve been waking up really early. It’s funny because I know I shouldn’t be tired because I only got a few hours of sleep but I seem pretty wide awake and it’s this thing where I feel like I should take a nap. I should go to bed but I just don’t have any desire to. It’s always a little weird when that happens but I’ve got energy and I feel good. So I guess it doesn’t matter how many hours of sleep I got necessarily.

I also blended up a new flavor for a performance nut butter just a test in my kitchen and it is ridiculously good. It’s a regular performance nut butter with a little bit of cacao added and that might be part of the reason why even though I only got four hours of sleep. I feel pretty good and I feel like I have a lot of energy that cacao has some natural energy to it. There’s some big changes, some big things happening with performance nut butter. Actually just signed a document for a deal that I’ll talk about. In future episodes, it’s gonna be huge. It’s gonna be a very…, very good thing but it’s still stressful for me anytime I have to get lawyers to look at a document, sign a document all that kind of stuff. Anytime there’s money on the line it’s a little scary for me.

And in future episodes, I’ll talk about exactly what’s happening but there’s some nerve-wracking things here, so anyways right now it’s pretty much just a waiting game. I have some more random tasks that I need to get done. And I have a few random fun things that I’m gonna be doing tonight to help pass the time.

Every week, I have a Skype meeting with both my VA’s and last night I got some really bad news. One of my VA’s decided to go from full-time to down to part-time which is almost the same as quitting because that means I need to hire two new VA’s. So it’s actually perfect timing that I just put up a job post that means that of the people that apply it I’m gonna need to find two people.

It’s been about 24 hours since I posted my job on OnlineJobs.ph. Now I want to see how many applicants to my jobs, how many messages I’ve got.

In the first 24 hours since last night, I’ve gotten 25 messages. So that’s 25 people that applied within 24 hours which is really cool. And what’s even better is all these people are pretty qualified because they all followed my directions for the most part.
This person well…, yeah, they all pretty much followed my directions and change the subject line which means that they’re not just spamming. They’re not just sending out a ton of applications. So these are 25 people that are pretty decent, then followed the directions.

Now some people take what I said a little too literally, they kept the quotation marks in there which is a little bit of a red flag but I’ll read.., I’ll still read their application and see if it makes sense.

So at this stage, what I do is I go through. And just one by one, read what they wrote. See if they’re a good fit and if they’re not a good fit I delete them.

So right after that, I know this person availability 20 hours a week. I’m looking for a full-time person but I’ll message them and see hey I’m looking for a full-time person are you willing to do it.

So now, I’ll read the messages see if they’re a good fit and like I said if they’re not a good fit I delete them. If they are a good fit I’ll send them a message. So I’m gonna go through really quickly and read all these messages and see who’s a good fit.

This point I’m left with about 10 applicants. So from the initial 25 or so, there’s about 10 people that I actually think are good. A few of them, these two people I had questions. They don’t know in their profile it said that they wanted to work 20 hours a week, I’m looking for someone full-time. So I’m not sure if that’s a good fit but at this point now that I’ve got it narrowed down to the people I want. I starred the ones that I’m in a message with the next step.

What I do is, I go over to the how to hire a virtual assistant that the guide that I talked about earlier. You can get for free, there’s a link down below. And email the applicants that you like, that’s step three.

I’m gonna go down here and I have this new and improved Skype message. And part of what it says to do here is you take this sheet, open it up and this is gonna be so that they can book a time with me. So you’ll see, take the sheet open it up in Google Docs and make a copy and then copy this message. Well change it up however you need to, obviously this message is more for me. And go over here and you send it but before you send that you need to change this link to this link, just change the date actually.

And there’s really two parts of this email. One is having them book an interview time but the other one is this sample project.
So I’m giving them a sample project before I interview them. So I’m guaranteeing, I’m telling them that I want to interview you. You seem good enough but then I give them this sample project which says you know please email me at this certain email. Take screenshots you know do all this different stuff and basically what it does is it test them to see if they’re gonna be a good fit for my company.

Now obviously if you’re doing this sample project on your own, you’re gonna want to make your own sample project and switch out the link. But for me this works, so I’m gonna go ahead and send this message. Let me just copy and make sure I have the correct message. Copy it…, send. I’m gonna send that message to all the different applicants and that’s it.

Now I sent all those messages. I should be in the next few days getting sample projects back from these applicants. I should probably get more applicants within the next 24 hours coming in as well and I’ll just do that same process. I’m planning on doing all my interviews on Friday so by the end of this week I should know who I’m gonna be hiring.

So yesterday, Wednesday I did get a few more applications for the online, you know virtual assistant position. But honestly yesterday I didn’t have that productive a day at least didn’t feel like that to me. I worked on the SOP’s because when you hire a new VA, you gotta train them and I don’t want to have to keep training new VA’s over and over again. So I created a Google Doc with all the steps to do, all the different things that we do.

The other thing I did is I met with my passion, the beta group for my passion product formula. And I’m working on a course teaching people how to create their own passion products like I did with performance nut butter and my girlfriend did the Vino cards. And that’s really cool like there’s some people doing really interesting things in the beta group. I’ll be giving out more information about that.

But honestly yesterday I didn’t feel like I got that much done and it felt like I just felt really lazy not something, not a lot of Vloggers, and stuff, entrepreneur, ecommerce, people talk about is the ups and the downs. So yesterday was definitely a down also so far three people have submitted their sample project and I’ll show you what the sample project looks like.

By the way, was raining earlier this week for the first half this week and now it’s just absolutely a beautiful day. I lived for two years in Chicago and right now Chicago is basically colder than Antarctica. And here in Santa Monica it’s blue skies and sunny weather loving it.

These are our oatmeal scones are in a great job making them. They’re super delicious. They are not glue, well I guess they’re gluten-free. They’re not vegan, they’re not paleo, they’re not keto friendly but they’re absolutely delicious. They look really good.

The one thing that’s been really helpful for me is I’ve actually been writing down what I’m gonna be doing every day, in the morning time. And if you’re interested in what I do every day from like a day to day perspective I do post it on my Instagram like my to Do’s for the day. So you can check out my Instagram to see that.

Today’s Friday and today’s the day I’m doing all the interviews for the VA.

So I’m only gonna be interviewing the VA’s that actually submitted the sample tasks that I gave them. And out of I think the 15 or so VA’s that scheduled an interview only six or so actually submitted the sample project.

One of them actually did a really bad job on the sample project and I’ll probably won’t even interview that person. Will probably see email them and let them know not gonna interview you.

But just to update you yesterday, Thursday I ended up going up to my buddy James in Tommy’s warehouse. They both it was originally I think it was James’s warehouse but Tommy’s also utilizing part of the space and James helped me out a ton yesterday. He looked over my complete like all my Amazon stuff and told me a bunch of different tips on how I can optimize it. So not next week because next week I’m going to Shark Tank but the week after that I’m gonna sit down. I’m gonna do a vlog, a style on everything I’m doing to optimize my Amazon stuff and I really think I can bump up sales by 30 40 50 percent. Like some of the stuff you told me was really good stuff and I’m gonna share pretty much all of it with you guys.

So make sure you hit that subscribe button because you know next week’s Miami’s Shark Tank auditions which will be fun.
The next week after that is gonna be the Amazon episode.

And then a few weeks after that I’m actually going to the Philippines for a month. I’m gonna go meet my VA. My virtual assistant, my whole team in the Philippines which will be I think a really fun blog.

Last night, after James helped me we ended up going to Korean barbecue which have you never been a Korean barbecue. It’s absolutely amazing. You have to go, you basically cook the meat like right at the table and I met up with Tommy was there and another friend of mine Eric who I’ve not done a Vlog or any kind of videos with. But we ate so much that I ended up not getting a very good sleep last night and I woke up again at 3 in the morning or so.

So that’s why I came out here this morning to the park to just get a little bit of Sun, film this video obviously. And I figured I’d take the opportunity to write down some of the tasks that I’m doing for the day and as always follow me on Instagram if you want to see the kind of stuff that I do from a day-to-day perspective.

But today, I’m going to show you what kind of questions you should ask a VA when interviewing. I’ll show you someone like my top secret questions and as always if you want to get access to those questions you can get the VA, you know success pack VA, hiring pack whatever I’d call it. I’ll put a link up here and down below.

But I’ve got an interview scheduled most today. Today I got some other tasks that I’m gonna do as well but I’ll show you some snippets of some of the interviews.

In question for you, if you could have a conversation with anybody alive or dead who would it be and why? So where do you see yourself like in five years, like what do you want to do, like what’s your goal five years from now ten years from now? Like what do you see yourself doing for work or do you want to still be working? Then where’d you learn English I mean obviously in the school system there’s English but your English seems to be a little bit better than most people’s English? What’s your goal in life?

Now that I’m done with my interviews, it’s time to figure out who I want to hire. And ultimately hire them and I’ll show you some quick clips of what it’s like their first day on the job. And some of my comments on how I like to introduce VA’s and start working with them.

I’ll be doing that Sunday night my time because that’s Monday morning their time but first I got to enjoy a little bit of the weekend.

Ultimately, I ended up hiring three new virtual assistants but one of them when I gave him the task he was a little bit overwhelmed and really I was unsure if I wanted to hire him anyways. And so, he quit basically right away.

So I ended up hiring two new virtual assistants and one to replace my old VA which is going to part-time and the new one like I had wanted to. This entire process is made me realize that I need to work on my SOPs. I need to work on the whole workflow of what happens when I hire a virtual assistant.

And next week obviously I’m going to Miami. But the week after that I’m either gonna be working on Amazon like I was planning to do and or working on my virtual assistant SOPs.

Over although I think hiring these new virtual assistants is going to be one of the best things I could possibly do. I’m really excited. I already have a hundred different ideas of all the different tasks I can give these VA’s. So I’m excited for that.
Make sure to comment like and subscribe down below. So you can see what I’m doing next week and the week after that to grow my business and other than that, most importantly remember to enjoy the journey.

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About Shelane
Shelane Tuttle is a full-time mother and part-time writer. She loves music and reading, is a terrible cook, and thrives on learning/teaching others about new things, like outsourcing.

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