How to Assess the Skills of Virtual Assistants
More and more people are transferring to the remote world, and what does that mean? Virtual assistants are on the rise and removing a remote model, so there is no mistake in hiring one.
However, it’s important to know how to assess a virtual assistant’s skills. Besides going through their profile, you need to be good at interviewing them and seeing what kind of uniqueness they have. By testing candidates between each other, you can find out which one comes out on top.
What else should you do? What kind of tests should you use? Don’t go anywhere because, in this article, we will find out more about how to assess a virtual assistant’s skills.
How to assess a Virtual Assistant’s skills
Communication skills
Communication is one of the essential skills you need to have when being a virtual assistant. Since they won’t be beside you, it’s more challenging to determine if they are getting tasks done. After all, fast responses are the key to getting tasks done and are a sign of professionalism.
You can try to test for communication skills before hiring by doing the following:
- Identifying how fast they reply to emails during the interview process
- Their level of accuracy and tone when replying
It’ll assess candidates both verbally and in written form. After, try a Zoom interview to find out more about the candidate and ask questions based on how they’ll manage their time and stay organized without anyone over their head.
Social media managing
Social media management is part of any company’s marketing strategy. If you want to see how good a virtual assistant is, see how well they use social media. Having advanced social media management skills is necessary if you’re hiring a great virtual assistant. This involves knowing how to use the required social media platforms, creating content on social media, engaging with users, and knowing how to schedule posts.
English level
Unless you are going to hire a virtual assistant in another language, it’s important to assess their level of knowledge. You can’t risk hiring candidates who have average English skills and may not understand every word clients say. However, even if English isn’t their native language, many virtual assistants still speak English fluently.
The best way to test their level of English is during an interview. Try listening to the way they speak and their words, and even consider asking them to transcribe an audio file. Additionally, you could send them a document full of grammatical errors and ask them to correct them. This way, you professionally ensure their skill levels and see how well they actually speak the language.
Software knowledge
If you are someone who has any specific software for use in your company, you can see if your virtual assistants have previous experience with the software your company is using.
Standard software virtual assistants need to know of are Google Docs, Slack, Skype, and much more. Try setting up tests for using this type of software. Include tasks that include setting up equations on Excel, using particular features on Google Docs, and more.
Moreover, if you want them to type fast, you can consider using an online typing test to see their typing levels.
Customer service
If a virtual assistant is dealing with customers and clients, they will need a decent level of customer service skills. In addition, they’ll need to remain calm in each situation, work under pressure, and effectively communicate via phone or email to deliver an outstanding welcoming experience.
After all, excellent customer service for your customers allows you to enhance your brand reputation, so ensure that your virtual assistant understands this as well.
A desire to learn
Being a virtual assistant doesn’t mean you will never continue to learn. On the contrary, it’s a never-ending process, and having a desire to develop your skills and learn new things is always advantageous. In addition, every day is a new opportunity, so the virtual assistant should always be open to receiving feedback and finding new ways to achieve KPIs and company goals.
Data entry
Data entry is a common task virtual assistants go through and an elementary word processing skill. A virtual assistant may have to format documents, do extensive research, transcribe audio files, and organize files to perform data entry duties.
Overall, a virtual assistant will gather and update the information you will need for easy reference and to promote operational efficiency, such as:
- Key dates
- Competitors data
- Industry & government requirements
- Prospect name, contact numbers, website URL, Facebook, IG, and more
- Distribution points
Data presentation
Winning proposals and presenting reports are important to running a successful business. Virtual assistants can help business owners by preparing content via presentation form through PowerPoint or by proposals:
- Audio or visual clips
- Converting tables into graphs
- Encode data in Excel tables
- Meeting or bullet points
Discipline and self-motivation
Motivation and discipline are essential across all tasks that virtual assistants complete. However, there can often be non-related work cases that will distract virtual assistants from completing their tasks, resulting in employees falling behind on many important project schedules.
So, what is important to know? First, virtual assistants need to stick to deadlines and ensure they are entirely concentrated, so they don’t miss any deadlines, which harms the businesses they work for.
For example, some distractions include browsing on your phone, watching your favorite TV shows, answering non-important calls, and more. Since the job’s nature offers so much freedom, it requires just as much dedication and discipline from the virtual assistant’s side.
Success requires dedication and delivering quality work at all times.
Email management
The more emails a business owner or manager receives, the more important it’ll be for an assistant to screen them continuously. This is important, especially in the morning, since time zones differ worldwide. If virtual assistants can screen an email box, it can save lots of time for clients that start work early in the morning.
The screening should include the categories chosen carefully from the screening, where mailing list emails get filtered out, and the emails that remain are segmented based on their importance level.
Moreover, while doing this, you’ll have emails requesting appointments, and the virtual assistant must see which dates are available for meetings.
Word processing skills
Word processing is an essential virtual assistant administrative task. If you take some time to see what clients are doing daily, you’ll realize that everything is reliant on being able to format the text correctly.
Many might see word processing as the ability to type fast, but rather, it’s structuring text properly and including data entry.
What do we mean?
You can type up to 80 words per minute, but if all of your words are filled with errors and complex text, it’ll do more harm than good. That’s why it’s important to find a balance between accuracy, speed, and the structure of the text so that the business requires less supervision.
Online research
Virtual assistants might have to do extensive research while they are gathering information and create reports that business owners can utilize for their marketing strategies:
- Trending blogs
- Trending products in each industry
- Client websites and competitors
- Popular apps
- Background check of suppliers, business contacts, and more
Travel research
If you are running a travel business, then your travel team will have to travel frequently, and when this happens, the workload might get out of control. Of course, this isn’t something you can do on your own. Hiring a virtual assistant can help you execute travel research, booking, and the handling of large workloads by doing the following:
- Booking hotels
- Informing you of visa and passport requirements
- Package tours
- Package destinations
- Total travel costs and more
Conclusion
These were our top tips on how you can assess a virtual assistant’s skills. Virtual assistants are an excellent hand when you have to complete large workloads. They can do many things, but each have their own niche in which they perform best.
However, the most important skill to assess in a virtual assistant is for them to be able to speak English at a high level and to conduct extensive research whenever they are working. Of course, let’s not forget that it’s great to hire a virtual assistant who is good at managing social media channels as well, but of course, you generally want to hire one who can communicate and organize their work.
Carefully screen your candidates, make them go through the communication test, and even give them an online typing test. Other than that, you should do just fine.