Upwork vs. OnlineJobs.ph

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.

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.

Quick Upwork vs. OnlineJobs Comparison Chart

Upwork OnlineJobs.ph
Established 1999 2008
Customer Rating
Number of Workers 12 million 250,000
Platform Fee 5-20% $69 per month
Self-Service Hiring
Worker Tracking
No Ongoing Markup
Recruiting Service?
($500 one-time fee)
Escrow Protection /
Dispute Resolution
Best For One-off projects Long-term hires
Learn More Learn More

What kind of roles can you hire for?

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.

How Upwork works

Click here to visit Upwork to learn more.

How OnlineJobs works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCuE3bkP4PU

Click here to visit OnlineJobs to learn more.

Employer protections in place

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.
  • Super affordable labor pool.
  • Optional recruiting service.
  • Best for ongoing virtual employees.

Pricing comparison

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.

Which should you choose?

For project work, probably Upwork.

For ongoing work, probably OnlineJobs.

Your Turn

What do you think? When hiring virtual assistants, do you prefer to work through Upwork or OnlineJobs? Or another platform entirely?

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Elance

Update: Elance has merged with oDesk to form Upwork, the world’s largest freelance marketplace. Be sure to check out our full Upwork review or this post for a big list of Upwork alternatives.

Elance.com is one of the world’s largest communities of freelance employees and people looking to hire them. Since their beginning in 1999, Elance has grown to a network of over 2,000,000 contract professionals.

elance reviewThe company is based in Mountain View, California, but connects workers and employees from every corner of the globe. For virtually any kind of job you need done, you can find someone to do it on Elance.

Among the service providers are a growing number of virtual assistants. You’ll find a wide selection in this category, including full-service virtual assistant companies overseas, independent contractors, and even stay-at-home moms in the US earning a part-time income online.

elance reviewIf you don’t have an Elance.com account, it is easy to create one. When I signed up, there was a one-time $10 fee. After that, Elance is free for employers. (They make money by taking a fee from your payments to contractors.)

There are several benefits of using Elance to find a virtual assistant:

  1. You can post your exact job requirements, interview candidates, and hire someone with a good expectation of what you’ll get. This is not always possible with other virtual assistant companies.
  2. You can use the built-in Elance feedback system to read reviews about virtual assistant service providers, and leave feedback of your own once the job is done.
  3. You can use their conflict resolution process if there are ever any disputes over the quality or delivery of the work contracted. If you hire a freelance virtual assistant outside the Elance community, you don’t have this recourse.

Elance Review

Elance.com is primarily known for one-time projects, but is also a good resource for ongoing work like virtual assistance. If you find a provider you like, you can hire them again and again, or set up a longer-term arrangement, but it’s nice that you don’t have any long-term obligation upfront.

elance headquarters
Hanging out at Elance headquarters

The quality and cost of virtual assistants can vary greatly, so be sure to check out the feedback of each provider and see what other employers are saying about them. You’ll want to look for someone with a long history of positive reviews. Does their reputation justify their price?

I’ve had some success googling the provider as well, because sometimes their Elance portfolio doesn’t tell the whole story. Since many VAs maintain accounts on multiple sites under the same name, you can check their profiles on oDesk and other sites too.

Have you had any experience with Elance in general, or with Elance virtual assistants specifically? If so, please share it here.

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6 Glaring Signs It’s Time to Hire a Virtual Assistant

Deena Anreise, the Marketing Manager for Prialto, contributed this post.

Take it away, Deena!

**********

Everyone needs help from time to time, especially small business owners. But how do you know when it’s time to hire help from a virtual assistant?

Nick’s Notes: My answer: “When the pain of inaction becomes too great.” 

1.“I Got This.”

Have you fallen into the trap of similarly ambitious entrepreneurs and small business owners who believe that they, and they alone, hold the keys to getting everything done well and on time? Most likely, your thought process swings back-and-forth between “If I work hard enough and fast enough, I can get it all done,” and “No one can get it done better or faster than I can.”

Nick’s Notes: Guilty. Chris Ducker calls this “Superhero Syndrome.”

Typically, you find yourself at a stalemate with yourself and your business’s forward progress. And somewhere in the back of your mind is a voice telling you that ending the stalemate is not only crucial to the growth and success of your business, but essential for your health and the health of your business.

2. More Admin Than Agile

How often do you deal with emails, phone calls, expense reports, invoicing, travel arrangements, scheduling, data entry, client prospecting, and other routine administrative tasks yourself?

If the answer is “more than I’d like to” or “more than I handle high-value business growth tasks” then it’s time to outsource your repeatable, ongoing admin needs to a virtual assistant.

Doing so is inherently growth-oriented, since when entrepreneurs spend the majority of their time doing repetitive tasks, they fail to grow their business. All the best minds in business and statistics report that 80% of your time should be spent on high-value business growth tasks.

Nick’s Notes: That would be an interesting metric to track during my next time audit. I’m probably not anywhere close to that 80% mark, but getting better all the time.

3. Ain’t No Rest For The…Executive

Do you regularly put in 10 to 16 hour days in an effort to keep up with all the work on your plate, yet still fall behind? Do you consistently work weekends and nights? Are you stressed out about your lack of work-life balance?

Nick’s Notes: Hmm, editing this post on a Saturday afternoon…

At this point, it’s not even necessary to explain why answering “yes” to any of the above questions is a sure sign that you are in desperate need of cost-effective administrative help. It should be obvious that you need to spend more time on your core business instead of dealing with admin tasks and putting out fires all week long.

4. Big Ideas Never See The Light Of Day

What ever happened to that exciting new project or that big idea you were so jazzed about several months ago? Wait…has it already been a year since you swore you’d put that plan into motion?

Your valuable, limited time goes up in smoke when you’re buried in busy work. Ambitious small business owners are a goldmine of great ideas. Don’t put off projects that could dramatically impact your business because you’re overwhelmed by administrative tasks.

Nick’s Notes: This is the biggest one for me. It’s the realization that no one else is going to move these new projects and ideas forward except for me. And sometimes that means freeing up some hours to get ’em rolling.

5. No New Revenue

It’s a terrible feeling to know that you are missing out on sales opportunities because your client and prospect database isn’t up-to-date. You likely kick yourself on a daily basis thinking about all the lead nurturing you could be doing if only your email lists were current and segmented properly according to where contacts fall in your sales pipeline.

Data entry into your CRM is a painstaking task, so many of us “accidentally” keep forgetting to sit down and hack away at it. But the next time you miss a deadline to follow-up with a lead, remember this article…and get busy finding a virtual assistant that can help you pull your business forward by consistently getting you in front of the right prospects at the right time.

6. Small Budget With Huge Ambitions

Hiring a virtual assistant beats hiring an in-house administrative assistant when you’re on a small budget, because it’s cost-effective.

There’s no (or low) overhead associated with hiring a virtual assistant due to the fact that there’s no need to provide them with employer wage deductions, vacation pay, health insurance, office space, furnishings, or equipment. Those savings alone are incredibly appealing. What’s more, you won’t need to deal with daunting HR paperwork or training and management.

Nick’s Notes: You’re probably still going to spent some time on training. 

Most small businesses can’t afford to pay the necessary costs associated with hiring an in-house administrative assistant. If you live in a metropolitan area like the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ll quickly find that virtual assistants cost significantly less than a regular employee. Plus, it can be very difficult to find an in-house assistant who can afford to work just a few hours a day for you.

Summary

OK, be honest. Are you guilty of any of the “tell-tale signs” above?

Instead of asking yourself “why hire a virtual assistant,” maybe the better question to answer is “why not hire a virtual assistant?”

Check out this cool decision-tree infographic at the Prialto blog for more on how to choose the right virtual assistant for your needs.

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Contemporary VA

Contemporary VA is a (primarily) American virtual assistant company, based in Pittsburgh, PA. The company was founded in 2002 and has grown to provide remote administrative support for clients across the US, Canada, and now the UK as well.

ContemporaryVA (CVA) uses a diverse team of qualified work-from-home VAs to support their clients. Customers trend toward coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs, but CVA is serving a growing number offline businesses as well.

Hiring

contemporary va reviewOne thing that sets the company apart is their rigorous screening process. As you might imagine, any legitimate job that allows the freedom and flexibility to work from home is in high demand.

Beyond the detailed application, prospective VAs are asked to complete a skills test and several sample tasks that might be common in their job. The company can monitor the results of these tasks, along with how long they took to complete and the tools the candidate employed.

Once hired, Contemporary VA virtual assistants are essentially in apprentice-mode for a minimum of 60 days. That means they are assisting with work behind the scenes, but aren’t yet directly interacting with clients. During this time, the new hires are receiving ongoing training and their deliverables are constantly evaluated by senior team members to ensure quality.

For prospective clients, the benefit is not being assigned to a rookie VA on her first day on the job.

Contemporary VAs also sign exclusivity agreements, meaning even if they’re part-time employees, they won’t be off on Elance or trying to get other VA clients on the side.

Service Plans

I had the opportunity to speak with Jennifer, the General Manager of CVA, and she was gracious enough to explain to me how it all worked. The company assigns VAs based the skills required and time zone proximity to the client.

ContemporaryVA has two levels of client service: Gold and Platinum.

Gold

The CVA Gold plan is a pre-paid plan with no minimums and no commitments. It is best for ad hoc projects and for customers who aren’t ready to commit to a VA on an ongoing basis. As a good intro to outsourcing, the rate for this plan is a flat $35 an hour.

Gold clients are assigned a dedicated project manager, but the actual work may be carried out by another VA, depending on availability.

Platinum

The Contemporary VA Platinum plan is an ongoing “retainer” service, where clients have a minimum of 20 hours a month worth of work to outsource. The rates for this plan range from $21 to $25 an hour, depending on how many hours a month you need.

For example, a 20-hour plan would be $500 a month ($25/hr), and a full-time VA would be $3360 a month ($21/hr). Obviously the rates are higher than what you’d find in India or the Philippines, but are quite competitive among similar US virtual assistant companies.

Platinum clients have a dedicated virtual assistant, and after 3 months, the company will even train a backup at their expense for when your primary VA is out sick or on vacation.

Delegation Education

I recently went through their free 21-day email course on how to delegate effectively. It’s super detailed but definitely worth the read if you’re new to outsourcing and working with virtual assistants.

I just signed up via the opt-in box on their homepage.

Have you worked with Contemporary VA? If so, please leave a quick review of your experience below to help others with their decision-making process.

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TaskUs

TaskUs is a “boutique” outsourcing company in the Philippines, with a sales office in Los Angeles. The company has grown from 5 employees in 2008, to over 400 today, all working out of a dedicated office space in Manila.

The story goes that co-founders Bryce Maddock and Jaspar Weir tested virtual staff from several countries around the world before concluding that workers from the Philippines were the best. Impressed by the passion and high level of service, they decided to set up shop for their new company there.

Services

TaskUs is aimed at mid-sized companies looking to leverage the cost benefits of outsourcing. The primary clients are start-ups, tech companies, and ecommerce stores.

TaskUs allows firms to scale up rapidly, bringing on dedicated teams of workers in a short time, who embed themselves in your company’s culture like virtual employees. The focus is skilled computer-based work, like photo-editing or product feed management, but outsourced team members can also perform customer support functions, data verification, and even content creation.

TaskUs Intro Video

This made laugh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjG1IbHU7iI

The company will bid on project-based work, but the majority of clients opt for full-time workers on a long-term engagement.

The facility in the Philippines is staffed with on-site management and company directors, so you know your employees are being kept accountable. And unlike the home-based VAs who may disappear for days on end when there’s a power outage, TaskUs has backup generators and transportation in place so your business stays online.

Plans and Pricing

When I spoke with TaskUs, I couldn’t nail down a price range for their services, only that their rates vary by the skills you require and the number of employees you need. I interpreted that as if you’re looking for the absolute bargain basement virtual employee, this is not the place. But then, the $2.50/hr people you might find on oDesk often come with hidden costs as well.

Ultimately the value comes from getting consistent quality work done at an affordable price, and not having to deal with the headaches of the hiring process yourself. Here’s an excellent write-up on PandoDaily about how TaskUs has kind of become Silicon Valley’s secret weapon for growth.

TaskUs Alternatives

Check out Prialto or VA Staffer for a couple alternatives to TaskUs in the Philippines.

Your Turn

Have you worked with TaskUs? If so, please share a quick review of your experience below and help others with their decision.

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Outsourcing Things Done

Outsourcing Things Done is a virtual assistant company in the Philippines. Founded in 2009, the company has positioned themselves as a premium entry in the market.

Outsourcing Things Done VAs are available in a few different areas of expertise including general administrative skills, customer service, and real estate. In fact, the parent company of Outsourcing Things Done specializes in creating websites for real estate agents so it makes sense they would have virtual assistants familiar with business.

outsourcing things done reviewAnother company that focuses on real estate virtual assistants is My OutDesk.

One thing that sets OTD apart from the competition is that their VAs work from a professional office environment rather than from their homes. The downside, as you might expect, is this increases the cost substantially. (But it looks like a very nice office based on the video below!)

Services

Outsourcing Things Done offers three levels of VA service, imaginatively called Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3. There’s not much information I could find on what exactly these three levels mean, but they get more expensive the higher you go so I’ll assume it pertains to the VA’s experience and expertise.

Outsourcing Things Done Intro Video

Plans and Pricing

The rates start at $1200 a month and go up from there, which is definitely on the high side for virtual assistant companies in the Philippines. Every plan is a for a full-time virtual employee; there doesn’t appear to be any on-demand or part-time options available.

This is also known as a “staff leasing” business model. Based on your job description, the company will actively recruit a team member that fits your needs. They rely heavily on videos, both from you and the candidates, to ensure a good professional fit.

Beyond the monthly fee, OTD charges a $995 set up fee. There are a few companies charging these kinds of fees but not many.

If your VA requires special software — even Microsoft Office — there’s an additional charge for that. Do you need them to print and scan documents? There’s an extra charge for that. Do you need them to work during US business hours? There’s an extra charge for that.

I understand every business has certain costs and needs to make a profit but reading through their pricing menu just seems like a nickle-and-dime upcharge frenzy.

To help you monitor productivity, Outsourcing Things Done has installed special seat and screen cams. This will help you verify your virtual assistant is present and working when they say they are.

Outsourcing Things Done Alternatives

Take a look at VA Staffer or Prialto as potential considerations in addition to OTD.

Your Turn

Have you worked with Outsourcing Things Done? If so, please share a quick review of your experience below to help others with their decision.

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dailyPA

DailyPA is a task-based virtual assistant company serving the UK and European markets. The business was founded in London in  2012, and utilizes an all-UK staff of professionally trained virtual assistants.

dailypa reviewWhen you lead a busy life as most people do, dailyPA.co.uk can help with the things on your to-do list. The DailyPA team has a wealth of administrative, business, and technical experience. They specialize in tasks like reservations, events, scheduling, diary management, entertainment bookings, client research and more.

DailyPA is a monthly subscription service that starts at £89 pounds per month for 3 hours worth of tasks. A 9 hour plan is £259 a month, while the “Pro” plan clocks in at £499 for 18 hours. The mid-tier, “Exec” plan is the most popular.

A general guideline is that the tasks should take around 15 minutes, but dailyPA does afford you the flexibility to offload more in-depth tasks. The time will simply be accrued and charged against your total for the month.

At these rates, dailyPA is quite expensive relative to other services on the market. If you want to go overseas, Efficise currently offers 30 tasks for $45, and in the US, Fancy Hands will do 15 for $45. For that reason, their rates seem pretty high. On an hourly basis, they’re charging approximately £30 an hour across all plans (roughly $48/hour at today’s exchange rate!).

In the UK, the nearest alternative would be Time etc, although they operate more on a “virtual employee” model rather than this team-based by-the-task model.

The site is beautifully designed and they make sure to tout the UK regulations they abide by when it comes to privacy and data security. From an employer’s perspective, you’re not liable for any additional payroll tax burden or paperwork when you contract with dailyPA.

With dailyPA.co.uk you can cancel your agreement with them any time you want. There are no joining fees, commitment fees and no long term contracts. Plus, they guarantee the quality of each task that they complete for you, and if you feel they could have done a better job, they will address the issue free of charge.

Each plan comes with a dedicated point of contact. Clients delegate tasks to dailyPA via telephone, email, text, or Skype.

Have you worked with dailyPA? If so, please leave a quick review below to help others with their decision.

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My Biggest Outsourcing “Wins” of the Year

Happy New Year!

This is a weird time of year for me.

On the one hand, I know New Year’s Resolutions are dumb. I mean, if something is worth changing, it’s worth changing now — not waiting for some arbitrary flip of the calendar, right?

But it’s hard not to get caught up in all the “fresh start” talk, and at the very least reflect on what went well for the last 12 months and where you might have opportunities for improvement.

In that spirit, I want to share few things that went well for me last year outsourcing-wise, and a few areas I’m still struggling with.

First up, the wins.

My dedicated assistant Karla from OkayRelax has been doing a great job with the research, data entry, and even website updating tasks I send her way.

One example was when the Virtual Assistant Assistant site switched over from http to https last year, I had to go through and update all of the images to https. It wasn’t the most difficult task in the world, but it was time-consuming, and she nailed it.

Another company that helped during that transition was Zen WP, which offers 24/7 WordPress maintenance and support. They also helped clean up a lot of the pesky little bugs that had been floating around the site.

My freelance writer has been a huge help this year, producing content for this site, summarizing my podcast episodes, and now even writing the accompanying blog posts for those episodes.

And while I still go through and do my own final round of edits, I think the PodcastFasttrack podcast editing service I’ve been working with has still been a net time saver.

For my book project last fall, I used the crowdsourced design service DesignCrowd.com. To be fair, some of the designs were pretty awful, but I really liked the end result.

And finally, I’ve been loving the results and automation behind the robo-investing service called Betterment.

It’s not direct business outsourcing in the traditional sense, but with each dollar I invest, I’m essentially “hiring” thousands of workers — and getting to share in the fruits of their labor.

So what flopped? And what’s next?

There were a couple things that didn’t go so well. For example, I wanted to hire a freelance marketing specialist to help me drive more traffic to my sites, but haven’t heard from him in months. Back to the drawing board on that one.

On the horizon, I have some more website technical stuff I could use help with, and perhaps some graphic design, video creation, and even advertising sales as well.

But mostly I’m the bottleneck. There are a ton of projects I’d love to tackle but am stuck in “maintenance mode” and have a hard time finding time for “growth mode.”

For the new year, I haven’t set any resolutions or 12-month goals. Instead, I’m trying to focus on shorter-term “sprint” goals and mini-habits.

For example, a shorter term goal I have is to add a subnavigation menu to one of my sites to make it easier to access relevant archive content.

An example of a mini-habit would be doing at least one proactive thing in my business before checking email or social media.

Another mini-habit I like is doing 1 push-up. It’s super easy to check the box, and once you’re down on the floor, you’ll probably do a few more.

Your Turn

What about you? What worked well last year?

What’s on the top of your list to delegate this year?

Cheers to working ON your business rather than IN it in 2017!

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Team Double-Click

Team Double-Click is a remote staffing agency, specializing in American “cloud-based” virtual assistants. The Colorado-based company was founded by Jim and Gayle Buske way back in 2000. (I believe “cloud-based” is the new preferred way to say the VAs work from their homes, rather than from a centralized office.)

team doubleclick reviewYour virtual administrative assistant is an off-site resource for your business. He or she can help with a broad range of computer-related tasks such as proofreading, bookkeeping, article writing, and data entry. Team Double-Click VAs also can make travel arrangements, assist with real estate transactions, prepare newsletters, and help with your customer service.

Team Double-Click offers two levels of service: Hourly Hire and Direct Placement.

With Hourly Hire, you contract with Team Double-Click on an on-demand hourly basis. They help monitor and manage your virtual assistant for you. In theory it makes sense to leverage their expertise in this way, but my guess is you’ll end up paying a higher rate and possibly have an extra layer of complexity in your relationship with your VA.

With Direct Placement, the company matches you up with one of their virtual assistants for free. Maybe the VAs are the ones paying for this matchmaking service?

Either way, this arrangement works similar to Virtual Staff Finder and some of the other recruiting services, except for US virtual assistants. From a network of nearly 100,000 VAs, they pre-screen the candidates and present a short list for you to interview. Then you select the winner and begin working with them and paying them directly as an independent contractor.

If you want to learn more about Team Double-Click, be sure to mention referral code VAA247 to take advantage of any special offers that might be available.

The only mention of pricing I could find gives only a range of $15 to $75 an hour. Quite a spread!

I’m generally not a fan of having to download, print, sign, fax/scan any pdf document, but that appears to be the only way to sign up for the service. They also want to collect your credit card information from the very onset.

In the Hourly Hire agreement pdf, a rate table is included. An entry level VA is quoted at $29.81 an hour, which definitely puts them on the higher end of the spectrum globally, but on par with other US-based virtual assistant companies.

As an alternative, you might try your hand at finding a freelance VA to meet your needs.

Have you worked with Team Double-Click? If so, please share your experience below and help others make with their research.

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Workaholics4Hire

Workaholics4Hire is a private outsourcing marketplace, “staffed” by more than 25,000 work-from-home freelancers. The Ottawa, Canada company was founded by Sylvie Fortin in 1999. Any business that’s been around that long must be doing something right.

Fortin explains that the site began as a way to connect small businesses who needed to outsource work with qualified telecommuting contractors. The work-from-home space was filled with scam artists, so there was a unique opportunity to build a network for legitimate home-based freelance work.

workaholics4hire reviewAnd the name? I guess if you had to choose between a lazy freelancer and a workaholic one, you’d probably choose the workaholic, right?

Outsourcing with Workaholics4Hire.com could be a little more straightforward. The company offers three levels of service:

  1. Self Serve
  2. Project Management
  3. Full Service

Self Serve

Self Serve is similar to what you would find on other freelance sites such as oDesk or Elance. You post your job, get bids, interview candidates and select the winner. The difference is that Workaholics4Hire charges $50 per ad, where the other sites are free.

Project Management

With the Project Management service, a Workaholics4Hire Project Facilitator acts as a manager and liaison between you and your outsourced workers.

This is a more hands-off solution, and could be a good alternative for first-time outsourcers. You get a Facilitator who helps plan your projects, recruit the best talent, and manage the process start to finish.

For this service Workaholics4Hire charges a monthly fee, ranging from $500 a month to $3500 a month on top of whatever contractor fees are incurred, depending on how many hours a day you need your Project Manager to work. Again, it’s not cheap, but it relieves you from having to perform these duties (although now you’ll have to manage the Project Manager), and it’s definitely more affordable than bringing someone in in-house to do the same job.

Full Service

Workaholics4Hire “Full Service” option is the consulting arm of the business. For $500 you get an hour long strategy session with Fortin, a recording of the session, and a detailed written action plan report.

Customer Support

They also offer outsourced customer support, where they essentially become your customer service department for a flat monthly fee. It can be a cost-effective solution when compared with an in-house team, and certainly cheaper in the long run than neglecting customer service altogether.

Conclusions

I’m a bit of a cheapskate and a control-freak, so the pricing models and the idea of adding another layer of management don’t really appeal to me. But then again, I’ve been outsourcing for many years and have developed a certain comfort with it. I can definitely see where Workaholics4Hire’s services would be valuable for first-timers, especially larger companies with larger budgets.

What do you think? If you have worked with Workaholics4Hire, please share a quick review of your experience here and help others with their decision.

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