Outbounders.com is a virtual marketplace for telemarketing professionals. The company was founded in 2010 as an offshoot of Global Sky Inc., a call center operation in the Philippines. Behind the scenes are CEO James Rick Stinson and CTO Rob Rawson (same guy as from Staff.com and the time-tracking software TimeDoctor).
Because of the booming call center industry in the Philippines, many of the professional phone workers you’ll find on the site are from there, but the marketplace of callers on Outbounders is pretty global. When I checked the other day, I found workers in China, India, Central America, and the US.
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How it Works
Workers on Outbounders have the advantage of working from home, instead of commuting to an office. Call monitoring software (and of course your business results) will help determine their productivity.
If you’re looking to hire some outbound customer service or telephone sales staff, the hiring process on Outbounders.com is pretty simple.
You can browse the listings of available professionals, filter based on rate or other criteria, listen to their recordings, and even see if they are online at the moment for an interview.
You can also post your own detailed job description and collect applications, much like you would if you were hiring a freelancer on FreeeUp.
Outbounders callers have been hired by thousands of small business clients and have made over 2.5 million calls on their behalf!
Outbounders Intro Video
Plans and Pricing
If you already have some phone dialing software or internal software you use to track calls, your Outbounders hire can plug right into your system. Alternatively, Outbounders.com has their own dialer you can use for a small additional fee ($1 per hour).
Outbounders.com keeps the lights on by taking a 10% fee on top of the caller’s hourly rate. It’s free to post a standard job listing, and performance-based jobs carry a $25 fee.
Your agent will use unlimited free VOIP calling to the US and Canada, and discounted rates to other destinations around the world.
The rates seem to start around $5 an hour, and go up from there depending on experience, geography, and level of English skills. It seems to be an affordable way to get your outbound calling campaign started. At that rate, your rep doesn’t have to make many sales to deliver a huge ROI.
This home-based model means less overhead and significant cost savings over a traditional call center set-up.
Then, when you’re ready to scale up and add more seats, or move to an in-office call center environment, you can engage Outbounder’s parent company, GlobalSky.com.
The company provides training in their dialer software, but as with any other hire, any job-specific training is on you to provide.
Why Outbounders?
Targeting entrepreneurs, Outbounders aims to woo customers away from other job sites like Elance, oDesk, and Guru.com. The gameplan for doing so is to focus on just one area of specialization — to become THE marketplace for outbound phone support.
If you find yourself in the position that getting on the phone and dialing for dollars helps drive new business, but then you get caught in the cycle of actually delivering the work for those clients and not feeding the funnel, maybe a dedicated outbound sales rep could help.
The advantage may be the speed of hiring and the quality of applicants. Have you hired any callers from Outbounders? If so, please share a quick review of your experience below to help others with their decision.
Remote Staff, or remotestaff.com.au, is an Australia-based staff leasing company that specializes in virtual employee recruitment. The company was founded in 2007, and has placed nearly 4000 workers in remote jobs since then.
Remote Staff will find you a home-based worker in India or the Philippines, and then you can work directly with them. Despite the workers not punching the clock at a traditional office, the company maintains a pretty substantial brick-and-mortar presence, with more than 60 full-time employees in their Philippines home office.
How it works is you submit your job details and detailed requirements, and Remote Staff hunts through their talent pool of thousands of jobseekers to present you with qualified applicants for you to interview. Then, you can hire them and train them as needed, and Remote Staff will handle all the payments and paperwork.
Because this recruitment service is free, unlike Virtual Staff Finder, for example, you can expect to be paying slightly more on a monthly basis than you would without a middleman because the company has to make some margin somewhere. Still, the rates are likely to be attractive compared to those of an office-based virtual assistant company.
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If you don’t want to take advantage of Remote Staff’s in-house recruiters, you can do the candidate search on your own on their site. You can filter by skills, availability, and hourly rate. One cool feature they’ve added is an audio snippet of each candidate, so you can hear them in their own words and get an idea of their English language skills too.
With Remote Staff, you’re looking at one-month minimum commitment, but the aim is for long-term mutually beneficial relationships. In fact, if you’re not happy with your worker, they have a 6-month staff replacement guarantee.
One downside is you have to pre-pay for the month’s work, which is the opposite of traditional hiring. But in this case, you still have some protection in place if your virtual employee flakes on you. Plus, you don’t have to worry about paying for holidays or sick time; only accountable for the hours actually worked.
In exchange for their handling fees (a minimum of $1 an hour), Remote Staff moderates any disputes that come up, and logs all working hours in their system to ensure the workers are putting in the time they say they are.
The closest competitors that comes to mind are Staff.com and Virtual Coworker. If this model is appealing to you, you might want to check out those guys too.
Have you worked with Remote Staff (remotestaff.net)? If so, please share a quick review of your experience below to help others with their decision.
Taskbarge is a virtual assistant company in Bangalore, India. They were founded in 2011 by CEO Chaitanya Krishna, who assembled a small team to start serving clients on their own.
Taskbarge has grown slowly over the last couple years, investing in training their people rather than expensive marketing campaigns and unneeded costly infrastructure.
I had the chance to speak with Krishna, a former employee of a well-known outsourcing giant, about his new company. He explained that Taskbarge is focused on a small and medium-sized entrepreneurial client-base.
So far, they’ve been able to achieve impressive client retention — “no one has left us yet,” by delivering timely and high-quality service at low prices. Taskbarge clients typically rely on them for outsourced business process support, but the capabilities are there to handle of variety of virtual assistant tasks, including scheduling, online research, travel arrangements, and more.
The only limitation at the moment is on the technical side of things, as Taskbarge doesn’t have any web development or IT support talent in-house.
The company offers an array of pricing plans to fit anyone’s needs and budget. Plans start at $55 for a 5 hour block of virtual assistant time. These are perhaps mislabeled as “monthly” plans, but you actually have two months to use up your 5 hours, and won’t be billed again until you want or need a “refill.”
For larger plans, you have even more time to use up your hours. Krishna explained that the TB-40, or 40-hour plan, is their most popular option at $320 ($8/hr). In this case, you can spread the 40 hours out over the course of 3 months. That gives some flexibility in the event of an inconsistent outsourcing workload.
Naturally, the rates improve as you buy bigger blocks of time, with a 150-hour block going for $825, or just $5.50 an hour. Overall, the prices are quite competitive with other virtual assistant companies in India.
Exclusive Offer: Mention referral code VAA10 in “Message” box in the Taskbarge contact form for 10% off your first plan!
Once your hours are gone, you can renew at the same level, or jump around to any other suitable plan.
With each option, Taskbarge assigns a dedicated virtual assistant to be your sole point of contact with the company. This VA is assigned based on their expertise relative to your anticipated tasks, as well as the working time zone required.
They offer a 7-day free trial on all their plans, so you can test out the service risk-free. For alternatives, My Tasker or 24/7 Virtual Assistant might also be worthy of your consideration.
Have you worked with Taskbarge? If so, please leave a quick review using the comment form below to help others with their decision.
Mint Lifestyle Partners is a virtual concierge service aimed at high-powered high-lifestyle individuals. The UK-based company was founded in 2010, and also maintains an office in Dubai.
Mint specializes in lifestyle assistance, originally created to serve the needs of the growing expatriate community in the Middle East. They’ve since expanded and accept clients globally.
This is kind of a white-glove service for people with a lot of money to spend. Mint will take good care of you social calendar, domestic arrangement, and corporate needs, all with a quiet diligence and discretion.
Mint clients are assigned a dedicated “lifestyle manager” who acts as their well-connected virtual concierge for any need that arises.
They’ll do all the traditional virtual assistant tasks — I love how I say “traditional” for a job that’s been around for only 10 years — from making reservations and managing your calendar, to online research, to event planning, and more.
Mint has several different pricing levels. An ad hoc membership is available without any ongoing monthly commitment, and concierge time is billed out at £39 per hour.
Users can buy blocks of time in 5 and 15 hour increments to enjoy a discount on the standard hourly rates. A 5-hour block is £175 and a 15-hour block is £465. The nice thing about these plans is the hours are good for a full-year from the purchase date.
Heavy users who can commit to a minimum of 30-hours a week of Mint usage qualify for the “Creme de Menthe” plan, which further discounts the hourly rate to £25. Standard VAT tax applies on all plans.
As you can see, Mint Lifestyle Partners is not cheap by any means. The closest competitor in the US I can think of would be Red Butler, which positions itself as a premium service but is still priced within reach in terms of their monthly plans.
In the UK, DailyPA offers a competing service with a lower entry price point. Time Etc would be another one to consider.
Have you worked with Mint Lifestyle Partners? If so, please leave a quick review using the comment form below to help others with their decision.
Virtuworx is a virtual assistant and outsourcing company in Bangladesh, with a sales office in Southern California. The company has been in business since 2007, and has served clients of all shapes and sizes from all around the world.
The company owns and operates their own building so you don’t have to worry about subcontractors or infrastructure issues. I like how they’ve made some investments in making sure their own web presence looks professional and appealing.
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Services
In terms of services, Virtuworx offers an array of capabilities including data entry, bookkeeping, website maintenance, social media, online research, general administrative tasks and more.
If you need some more technical help, like programming or software development, they’ve got you covered there too.
Virtuworx Intro Video
Virtuworx operates on a virtual employee model in which you’re assigned a dedicated VA and can train and manage them directly. One advantage of hiring a company over a freelancer is they’re in charge of finding a suitable replacement if your VA is out of the office for any reason.
Plans and Pricing
Of course, there’s a price premium for that extra level of service, and Virtuworx is priced slightly higher than some of their competitors in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
A 10-hour per week plan with an entry-level VA is $378 per month, or $9.45 an hour. Half time plans (20 hrs/week at $597/mo) and full-time plans (40 hrs/week at $997/mo) are also available. That full time plan is the equates to an hourly rate of $6.23. Obviously these rates are still a great value for any quality staff.
Note: the rate of $5.60 mentioned in their intro video is available when you pre-pay for 3 months of service in advance.
Senior level workers with more experience are available for approximately 35-40% more for each of the above plans, and technically advanced virtual staff can be had for around $1200 a month half-time and $2000 a month full-time.
Virtuworx offers a 30-day money back guarantee to minimize your risk in signing up. There are no set-up fees or long-term commitments, but obviously the company hopes to keep you happy long-term and develop a lasting outsourcing partnership.
Virtuworx Alternatives
In addition to Virtuworx, you might consider long-time VirtualAssistantAssistant.com partner A to Z Tasks (also in Bangladesh). In neighboring India, My Tasker and 24/7 Virtual Assistant have earned positive reviews from clients.
Have you worked with Virtuworx? If so, please leave a quick review of your experience below to help others with their decision. Many thanks!
Zylun is an outsourcing center in the Philippines, catering to small and medium-sized businesses. The company opened their doors in 2010, and now employs more than 150 programmers, content writers, Internet marketing specialists, and virtual assistants.
Where many other Filipino VA companies use a work-from-home model, everyone at Zylun works from the company’s modern facility in Cebu. Zylun also maintains a US-sales office near Salt Lake City, Utah.
The specialty here is for clients looking to outsource some of their operations on a long-term basis to realize the cost savings. Zylun’s rates are quite high relative to other VA companies because they’re targeting customers who are deciding between an on-site person or an offshore person, vs. the typical VA customer, who’s deciding between an offshore person or no one at all.
And of course relative to hiring an in-house employee, a dedicated full-time Zylun team member is a more affordable option. Virtual assistants for administrative and non-technical roles start at $1200 a month. Your VA will be a college graduate with solid written and spoken English skills, that you can train on any specific tasks needed for your business.
Zylun also provides customer service reps from $1500 a month and programmers from $2000 a month. While these rates are significantly higher than you’d find with a home-based VA, you do have the benefit of a modern office with a reliable connection, on-site support, and US-based leadership.
Most of Zylun’s clients start with between 1 and 3 employees to staff their outsourced office operation, and some customers have built large teams of 20 or more. As you can imagine, the ability to quickly scale up staff without minimal recruiting expenses if pretty attractive.
There are no hourly or part-time plans, but strictly full-time dedicated workers on demand. Zylun requires a 2-month minimum engagement, and offers price breaks for longer contracts and larger teams. For each position filled, there is a one-time $500 set-up fee.
Virtual Assistant Assistant exclusive:
Want to try them out? Mention referral code VAA for 10% off your first month of Zylun service.
If you’re a smaller company or a one-person shop interested in outsourcing, you might consider Virtual Staff Finder. The company is also based in Cebu but acts a virtual headhunter. You’ll face a similar one-time fee, but have substantial savings each month if you’re comfortable with a home-based VA and paying them directly.
Wondering about the Zylun name? Co-founder Brigham Tomco explains it has no meaning, but just happened to be a pronounceable and available 5-letter domain name!
Have you worked with Zylun? If so, please share a quick review of your experience below to help others with their decision.
YourRemoteAssistant is a virtual assistant company in the Philippines. The company maintains a sales office near San Francisco, but all the work is done overseas. They’ve got their start in 2008.
YourRemoteAssistant specializes in administrative tasks such as calendar management, data entry, and transcription. Their virtual assistants can also do web research, event planning, customer support, and more.
The rates are competitive, with a 20 hour a month package starting at just $209, and a full-time 160-hour package running $1149. The company gives a discount on your first month of service for some of the higher hourly plans, and there are no set-up fees or long-term contracts.
YourRemoteAssistant.com will also quote one-time projects on an a la carte basis.
Sponsored Link:
How it works is the company assigns you a VA based on your job description and requirements. In a way, it’s nice not to have to do any interviewing, but in another way, you might not be getting the best fit candidate.
You’ll get to work primarily with a dedicated virtual assistant, but the team environment allows for a backup at no additional charge.
Initially I thought the company might have been out of business because I didn’t hear anything back after contacting them via email, but it looks like the response just got lost in the ether; I just got a note from the founder Alex Brutin saying they are indeed alive and kicking!
Have you worked with YourRemoteAssistant? If so, please share your experience below and help others with their decision.
VAhut is a newer virtual assistant company in China, but they may not have survived their first year. I reached out to them on two occasions and never got a response.
The company is based out of Hangzhou, a city with a metro population over 20 million — a city that in typical ignorant-American fashion I’d never even heard of. They maintain a US-presence and sales office in South Carolina. VAhut.com began operations in 2012.
It was really only a matter of time until some entrepreneurial Chinese began a VA company to compete on an international level. At the moment, the only other one I’m aware of with any significant market presence is BPOVIA, but they seem to be aimed at larger corporate clients.
Naturally, the environment in China makes it a great place to build a virtual assistant firm catering both to the massive and growing domestic market as well as the mature worldwide VA market. The workforce is young, educated, and still has relatively low wages compared with more developed countries. The only real obstacle to international success is the language barrier.
VAhut offers the familiar administrative virtual assistant services, but much of their work is China-specific. For instance, they really specialize in travel assistance to China, sourcing and managing the relationships with manufacturers and suppliers, factory audits, and helping clients enter the Chinese market.
The company offers three levels of service: pay as you go, a monthly subscription, or project-based engagement.
The Pay as You Go plan allows you to pay an hourly rate for services on-demand. As I mentioned, when I inquired about what their hourly rates might be, I was greeted with silence.
Monthly subscriptions are available in 10, 20, 40, 80, and 160-hour packages. Again, prices are unknown at this time.
VA Hut will also quote one-off projects, and could be a good resource perhaps for initial research into the Chinese market or some other job that requires local expertise on the ground.
For most cases, VAhut uses a team-based approach where tasks are handled by different VAs on an as-available basis.
I wish these guys success because they have a well-designed site and seem poised to tackle to the giant opportunity of being the first real Chinese virtual assistant company aimed at small businesses and individuals. But until they figure out how to respond to customer inquiries I’m afraid we’ll have to keep looking for a better solution.
Have you worked with VAhut? If so, please share a review of your experience below so others can make an informed decision.
SG Solutions is a virtual assistant company that connects you with a growing global network of VAs. This modern, cloud-based set up utilizes primarily home-based virtual assistants in the Philippines and India, but also some North American staff in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
Although the company is decentralized, they maintain a US presence from their Philadelphia, Pennsylvania sales office. SG Solutions has been in business since 2007 and supports a number of entrepreneurial and small business clients.
Aside from the basic virtual assistant services, SG also offers graphic design, content writing, customer service phone agents and virtual receptionists, along with bookkeeping and social media marketing services.
New clients who sign up for SG Solutions are assigned a dedicated team leader, but have access to their entire network of talented professionals in case there are specialized tasks that need to be done. If you have a repetitive process to outsource on a predictable and ongoing basis, a dedicated VA will be assigned to handle that job and report directly to you.
I had the chance to speak with Troy McCauley, the Director of Business Development at SG Solutions, and I appreciated his straightforward approach to outsourcing. Like Elance and oDesk, he believes the best combination of talent and affordability you need for your business is not always located near your office.
But unlike those freelance sites, he explained, SG Solutions offers a more hands-on management and oversight when it comes to the performance of your virtual team members.
Rates for SG virtual assistants begin at $255 for 30 hours a month ($8.50/hour). A half-time plan of 20 hours a week is just $600 a month ($7.50/hour), and a 30-hour per week plan is priced at $1120, or just $7 an hour. No full-time plan is listed, but my guess is you could negotiate one if you wanted to engage their services on a full-time basis.
Virtual Assistant Assistant Exclusive: Mention referral code VAA for 10% off your first month!
One cool thing about SG Solutions VA plans is that for all but the lowest option, a portion of the hours roll over the next month if you don’t use them all. Since most virtual assistant companies operate on a use-it-or-lose-it system, that can be a nice feature to have if you don’t anticipate having a consistent workflow.
The company also sells graphic design and web development work at the bargain rate of just $12 per hour. In addition, they’ll quote 1-time project-based work for you as well.
Have you worked with SG Solutions? If so, please take a minute to drop in a quick review below and help others make an informed decision.
If you’re looking to hire a freelance virtual assistant, you might be wondering the best place to find a rockstar VA.
Two of the largest platforms for online workers are Upwork and OnlineJobs.ph. Both of these sites have a deep talent pool and your diamond-in-the-rough virtual assistant is probably out there somewhere — it’s just a matter of finding them, or them finding you.
Note: This article focuses on the employer’s perspective. If you’re a freelancer looking for work, the information below will give you some insight into the hiring process, fees, and protections on each of the platforms, but doesn’t speak to how difficult securing work is or the types of clients you might encounter on either Upwork or OnlineJobs.
For disclosure, links to OnlineJobs are affiliate links.
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Intro to Upwork and OnlineJobs.ph
While the two platforms share some similarities, there are a few key differences you should know about.
Upwork is the love child of Elance and oDesk, two Silicon Valley startups that helped pioneer the virtual freelance marketplace model.
When these one-time competitors combined forces in 2015, they rebranded as “Upwork” and created the world’s largest freelance marketplace, with more than 12 million registered freelancers.
OnlineJobs is the largest job board in the Philippines, with more than 250,000 members. What started as a side project for founder John Jonas in 2008 has turned into a massively successful platform that connects Filipino workers with employers all around the world.
On both sites, you might be surprised at the breadth of skills and workers available for hire. If the role you’ve envisioned for your virtual assistant can be done remotely, you can find someone to do it on Upwork.
The site has several broad-strokes categories of remote work, including design and creative work, programming and development work, administrative support, marketing and sales work, and more. And of course beneath each of those are dozens of highly specialized areas of expertise.
For example, here are some of the skills listed under Sales and Marketing:
Once you click on any one of those skills, you’ll be presented with a pretty-looking grid of freelancers in that category. For example, when I click on SEO Specialists, this is what I see next:
These little profile previews will show you how many hours the freelancer has completed on Upwork, their hourly rate, where they’re located in the world, and an indicator of how well they’ve performed for past clients.
Once you create a free Upwork account, you can contact these professionals directly, or post your own job to see what kind of bids you get back.
OnlineJobs has a similar array of skills listed, but I think their upfront filtering is a little better.
As with Upwork, you can narrow your search by skill, but you can also select whether you’re looking for someone part-time or full-time, their expected salary range, and their ID Proof score (more on that below).
You can use Google to find out the current exchange rate and filter by budget accordingly. When starting out, I’ll usually leave the salary pretty open to see what comes back. For reference, at the time of this writing, 20,000 pesos is around $400.
Perhaps the biggest advantage is being able to filter by more than one skill at a time, like to find someone who’s great at English AND SEO, or someone who knows both Android AND iOS development.
For example here’s what comes back when I search for people with 5-stars in both English writing and SEO:
Out of those 250,000 resumes, only 225 meet that criteria. See, you can narrow this down in a hurry!
Note: OnlineJobs has an important “throttle” in place here as well, and that’s that workers are limited to giving themselves 5 stars in only 3 different categories, and 4 stars in 6 different categories. So don’t blanket your filter looking for that 5-star across-the-board unicorn, because your search will turn up empty-handed.
For that reason, you can prioritize your most important skill requirement with the one you assign 5 stars. Because you know those 5 star skills are a really hot commodity!
Rating themselves 5 stars also requires an additional explanation. I mentioned to one candidate that his skills looked pretty weak, and he explained he didn’t want to be bothered with writing the justification for the 5-star rating.
Just a heads up to any aspiring freelancers or virtual assistants—if you’re too lazy to spend 2 minutes explaining why you’re “the best in the world,” why would anyone take the risk of hiring you full time?
The Date filter refers to the length of time since the candidate was last active on OnlineJobs. It stands to reason someone who hasn’t been on the site in 3 months has probably already been hired and isn’t actively looking for work, so you can use that to narrow down your pool a little further.
If you’re constantly on the hunt for new hires, you can use this filter to find a fresh batch of profiles each time.
In the case of OnlineJobs, you’ll need to register for a paid membership (starting at $49/month) before you can contact any workers or post a job of your own.
Both platforms have a number of “safeguards” in place to protect both workers and employers. I’ll go through them below and show you why they’re important.
Ratings System
The hallmark of many peer-to-peer platforms is a two-sided rating system, in which buyers rate sellers and sellers rate buyers — popularized by ebay in the mid-90s.
Upwork and OnlineJobs have similar systems in place so as an employer, you can see the feedback each worker has received from past clients.
This is much more robust on Upwork than it is on OnlineJobs, in part due to the nature of the platform. Because workers tend to be hired for shorter-term projects, there is a lot more client turnover, which amounts to more opportunity to collect positive (or negative) feedback.
One thing to be aware of, beyond the cumulative 5-star score, is the number of jobs completed with no feedback given. Many employers (myself included sometimes) subscribe to your mom’s old adage of “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
(A $66 job still “in progress” from 2012 probably isn’t a good sign either.)
Upwork also shows you the “job success rate” of each freelancer, which measures the percentage of gigs they’ve done resulting in “a great client experience.” Naturally, the higher the percentage, the better.
Although I had a successful project with the developer shown, a 59% job success rate is pretty poor and I’d be hesitant to hire someone with that kind of track record.
On each freelancer’s profile page, you’ll also find a summary of their work history on the platform, which is meant to give you an indication of the “safety in numbers” of how many other people have hired them and how experienced they are.
In contrast, here’s an example of an excellent profile page. Her “in progress” jobs are hourly and have hundreds or thousands of hours completed, and she has a 99% job success rate:
Take all these metrics with a grain of salt. They’re there to help you with your hiring decision, but I’ve found great workers with almost no feedback or work history, and had horribly painful projects with contractors with glowing reviews. Past performance is no guarantee of future results and every job is different.
On Upwork, freelancers also have the opportunity to review you, the employer. These metrics aren’t visible to you in aggregate, but you can view your client feedback on each contract and when you post new jobs, potential candidates can see some of your employer metrics.
For example, before people bid on your job or project, they’ll be able to see what previous hires said about you as well as how much money you’ve spent on the platform and the percentage of job postings you’ve made that have resulted in a hire.
These are safety metrics for the freelancers; if you only hire for 1 out of every 4 job postings, it might not be worth their time to submit their application because it looks like you’re not that serious. On the flip-side, if you’ve spent thousands of dollars on Upwork and each posting results in a hire, you’re a very attractive employer to apply with.
On OnlineJobs, there is a feedback system but it isn’t nearly as prominent as Upwork’s. The vast majority of workers have no feedback ratings, and you shouldn’t let that deter you from hiring them.
Since the platform is more geared toward long-term relationships, there is less opportunity for great workers to collect positive feedback — because they’re still working and not looking for new gigs. In that way, the system may be unfairly skewed to negative reviews, since happy employers have little incentive to leave a review and only unhappy ones will feel the need to vent.
Still, if you find an assistant with one or more negative reviews, that’s probably a red flag and something to at least question during your screening or pre-interview phase.
The OnlineJobs rating system is one-directional, meaning workers can’t rate you as the employer.
Pro Tip: If you’re hiring for a long-term position on either platform, ask for references and actually call them.
Freelancer Tests and Self-Ratings
The bread-and-butter of OnlineJobs is in their filtering system, but what’s driving those filters? At the end of the day, the star-ratings given are self-selected. (Though the throttle mentioned above prevents someone from 5-starring themselves for every skill on the list.)
Beyond these self-ratings, OnlineJobs has added a layer of testing to give some objective measure of intelligence, English skills, and even personality traits.
For example, here’s a candidate with an excellent virtual assistant profile:
She measures an impressive 138 on the IQ test, and at the mastery level on English, as “administered by a credentialed language academy in North America.”
The DISC scoring system is designed to help you gauge the compatibility fit with your company and the role you’re hiring for. As you might imagine, a “good” score will depend on the role you had in mind.
If you’re trying to hire a persuasive copywriter, I’d look for a high Influence score. For a web developer, a high Compliance score may indicate a detail-oriented nature and adherence to W3C standards.
Upwork also gives workers a chance to beef up their profile by taking certain skills tests. For instance, here are the test scores of Marjorie above:
If you click on the Details link, it will show what specific subcategories were included on the test and how they performed on each of those.
As someone who was “an A-student” and a good test-taker in school, these tests and their results appeal to me as an employer, even though I know from real life I didn’t always make the best employee.
On both platforms, I might use these tests as a “tiebreaker” between two equally talented candidates, but would hesitate to completely rule someone out on the basis of their test result or their lack of taking the test in the first place.
Like some of the other metrics mentioned, it’s almost more of an indicator of how much effort they’re putting toward their online job search. The platforms are giving them this as an extra opportunity to showcase their skills so it’s only natural the “hungriest” candidates will use that to their advantage.
ID Proof on OnlineJobs
You might be wondering about the ID Proof metric on OnlineJobs. Every member of the site is assigned an ID Proof score, which is basically a measure of confidence the candidate is who they say they are.
It doesn’t measure skill or talent in any way, but I DO use it as a filter because I think it shows a candidate is serious enough to jump through a few hoops to make their profile look more attractive.
To me, it’s an indicator the candidate is making an honest representation of themselves online and is taking the virtual assistant career path seriously.
Work Monitoring
Both platforms provide a “Big Brother” work monitoring solution in the form of a screen capture software tool.
Upwork calls this Work Diary, which takes screenshots of your virtual assistant’s screen at roughly 10 minute intervals while they’re on the clock.
The OnlineJobs version of this is called TimeProof, which is free to use even if you don’t maintain a paid OnlineJobs.ph account.
Both systems allow to look “over the shoulder” of your virtual assistant and get an idea of how they’re using their time — or if they’re goofing off.
In practice, you probably have better things to do than pore over these screenshots every day or every week, but they’re nice to have if you notice a dip in productivity or if things are just taking longer than you think they should.
Escrow Payments
Upwork offers escrow payments as a way to protect both you and the virtual assistant in the deal. For fixed-price projects, you’ll deposit the funds into an escrow account controlled by Upwork, and release payment to your freelancer when certain milestones are completed.
This shows the freelancer you’re serious about putting up the money and paying them, while still giving you some protection if they flake and don’t deliver the goods.
Dispute Resolution
One advantage of Upwork is their dispute resolution service. With OnlineJobs, if your virtual assistant disappears or doesn’t perform, you’re pretty much on your own. (Which is another reason it doesn’t make sense to pre-pay.)
If you and your freelancer can’t come to terms on a particular project or you think they may be fudging their hours, you can file a dispute through the Upwork platform.
A mediator will review both sides of the story and potentially help you get some of your money back or stop payment altogether. One thing to note though is the mediator isn’t necessarily going to be a judge of the quality of the work, especially for hourly jobs. Instead, they’ll look at the Work Diary logs and make a decision accordingly.
What happens after you hire?
When you hire a virtual assistant through Upwork, you pay them through the Upwork platform, and Upwork takes a cut for facilitating the connection. See below for more information on pricing.
With OnlineJobs, you hire the assistant directly, and OnlineJobs is no longer in the picture. You’ll pay your worker directly via PayPal or via Payments.ph (a money transfer tool owned by OnlineJobs) according to the terms you mutually agree to.
For project-based work on Upwork, it’s standard to pre-pay a portion of the total project into an escrow account. With OnlineJobs, I’d caution against pre-paying for any work as that’s a common way to scam you out of your money.
Think about your day job; you don’t collect your paycheck until you’ve already put in the time. The same rule is generally true for virtual work.
To reduce risk for the assistant, you can set up weekly or bi-weekly payment cycles.
My interview with OnlineJobs founder, John Jonas
Advantages of Upwork
No membership fee; free to get started.
Global talent pool, not just the Philippines.
Escrow protection and dispute resolution.
Best for one-time projects.
Advantages of OnlineJobs
The company doesn’t take a percentage of your worker’s salary.
Both sites represent huge talent pools, and earn money by playing matchmaker, though they go about this in different ways.
Upwork makes the bulk of its money by charging a fee on every project completed on its site. This fee ranges from 5-20%, depending on how much work (in dollars) a particular freelancer has done for you. This fee is baked into the price you pay, but comes out of your virtual assistant’s pocket.
Theoretically, they pass that cost on to you, the employee.
For instance, if you sign on for a $1000 engagement, the first $500 will have a 20% Upwork platform fee, netting the freelancer $400, and the next $500 will carry a 10% platform fee, leaving them with $450. In total, they’d earn $850 and Upwork would earn $150.
This graduated pricing structure makes sense, as it rewards Upwork early on in the relationship for making the connection, and rewards the freelancer with lower rates for continuing to run work through the platform (vs. “going rogue” and taking the relationship offline).
On top of your $1000 payment, Upwork will charge you 2.75% as a payment processing fee.
In contrast, OnlineJobs.ph operates on a membership model, charging you, the employer, and not the virtual assistants. You have 3 pricing tiers to choose from:
The only point of the free plan is to see if anyone responds to your listing. That’s pretty much it, since you can’t even see those applications or contact potential workers.
Where the magic happens, at least for me, is at the $69/month Pro level, where you can post jobs instantly, view the applications, and contact candidates directly.
If you really have a ton of positions to fill, the $99/month Premium membership might be worth a look. It allows you up to 10 job posts per month and adds on some cool features like OnlineJobs’ background data check, video training course, and worker coaching service.
The background data check is a smart “big data” way to protect yourself from fraud. It looks at the worker’s data on the site and other publicly available information online to try and detect if they’re a scammer or not.
The worker coaching service is something of a new-hire mentoring program, where your new virtual assistant is paired with an OnlineJobs-vetted mentor to help them understand the rules of engagement for a successful remote work relationship.
If you don’t want to do the posting, screening, and vetting yourself, OnlineJobs also offers a done-for-you recruiting service for $500. They’ll screen candidates per your requirements, run potential hires through a skills test to verify they can do what they say they can, and conduct background checks.
Then, they’ll present you with the top choices to interview and you select your favorite as your next virtual assistant. Considering the time it can take to do all that work yourself, it’s not a bad option if you’re super busy. And if you’re thinking about hiring a VA, my guess is you are!
The recruiting service comes with a one month guarantee. If something doesn’t work out with your new hire, the company will help find you a suitable replacement at no charge.
In terms of what rates you can expect to pay your worker, OnlineJobs gives this graphic as a benchmark (in U.S. Dollars):
Full-time virtual assistant support for as little as $350 per month is pretty tough to beat!
Naturally, the more specialized the skills, the more you can expect to pay. For instance, top-end developers, designers, and SEO experts will earn over $1000 a month for full-time work.
My experience w/ Upwork
My most successful Upwork project hire was actually for the late-2012 redesign of this site. If you go to the Wayback Machine and check out the old version you’ll get an appreciation for how big an improvement it was.
The developer was awesome – super responsive on Skype, hammered out the changes really fast for what I thought was a very good price.
I re-hired him later for another small project, which was also very well done, but when I needed something else done a few months after that, I couldn’t find him. He’d disappeared. Poof.
I’ve also used Upwork for some low-cost web research, which was OK, nothing like mind-blowingly amazing or anything.
For ongoing work, some of my best hires have come from Upwork (actually back when it was Elance). Even though it’s primarily a project-based platform, I found a couple long-term hires that worked out really well for almost full-time employment, including one virtual assistant I ended up working with for more than 2 years.
On the flip-side, I’ve also been burned for north of $10,000 on this platform on web development projects that never got fully completed. It was an incredibly painful, stressful, and expensive experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
In the first case, the dispute resolution safeguards didn’t apply because I foolishly agreed to work with the developer “off-platform.” In the second case, we agreed to end the contract after a few of the milestones were met but technical incompetence prevented the development company from finishing the job. It sucked.
My experience w/ OnlineJobs
I used OnlineJobs to source a couple senior level web developers and also a VA. Since technical skills like web development are in such high demand, it was a bigger challenge than I’d anticipated.
My interpretation of “senior level” and the candidates’ often was not on the same page!
One of the developers we hired was someone I had initially singled out and contacted proactively during my search filters because of his impressive profile.
Like Upwork, you’ll get a lot of unqualified applicants with every posting.
You want someone with at least 4 years of experience? Well, I only have 1 but I guess I’ll apply anyway.
On the one hand, I admire your optimism and proactiveness, but on the other hand, it adds up to a waste of time in filtering out the irrelevant responses.
For the VA posting, I didn’t do any proactive outreach, but listed some requirements in my job descriptions — among them, being detail-oriented. In the posting I asked applicants to make sure to start their cover letter with “Hey Nick, you’d be dumb not to hire me because…”
And as you might guess, about half of these “detail-oriented” applicants missed it entirely. I guess it makes it easy to thin down the crowd!
I’m not sure if this is the smart way to do it, but I reasoned I could also get a general idea of a person’s experience based on their requested salary. I understand there will always be exceptions to the rule, but if someone is quoting a salary that’s half the going the rate, to me that’s a sign of desperation or a scam.
Another thing I learned – If someone replies to your job listing but does not include a link to their profile, it’s probably because they have a bad review or incriminating comment. Sometimes you can find their profile by searching on your own using the Specific Jobseeker Search.
Using the platform can definitely feel like a needle-in-the-haystack search at times, but I’ve found several excellent “needles” and will continue to come back to source new hires as the needs arise.
Overall, I really like the OnlineJobs resource and have definitely gotten more than my money’s worth out of it over the years.
Note: To check out what other OnlineJobs users have to say, check out the reviews here.
Because of the booming call center industry in the Philippines, many of the professional phone workers you’ll find on the site are from there, but the marketplace of callers on Outbounders is pretty global. When I checked the other day, I found workers in China, India, Central America, and the US. 
Remote Staff will find you a home-based worker in 
I had the chance to speak with Krishna, a former employee of a well-known outsourcing giant, about his new company. He explained that Taskbarge is focused on a small and medium-sized entrepreneurial client-base.
This is kind of a white-glove service for people with a lot of money to spend. Mint will take good care of you social calendar, domestic arrangement, and corporate needs, all with a quiet diligence and discretion.
In terms of services, Virtuworx offers an array of capabilities including data entry, bookkeeping, website maintenance, 
The specialty here is for clients looking to outsource some of their operations on a long-term basis to realize the cost savings. Zylun’s rates are quite high relative to other VA companies because they’re targeting customers who are deciding between an on-site person or an offshore person, vs. the typical VA customer, who’s deciding between an offshore person or no one at all.
The rates are competitive, with a 20 hour a month package starting at just $209, and a full-time 160-hour package running $1149. The company gives a discount on your first month of service for some of the higher hourly plans, and there are no set-up fees or long-term contracts.
It was really only a matter of time until some entrepreneurial Chinese began a VA company to compete on an international level. At the moment, the only other one I’m aware of with any significant market presence is 
Although the company is decentralized, they maintain a US presence from their Philadelphia, Pennsylvania sales office. SG Solutions has been in business since 2007 and supports a number of entrepreneurial and small business clients.
