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.
My employer pays me well but they’re unaware that Remote Staff deducts my salary every payout, they double dip in having my employer pay them and getting commissions from my salary payouts regularly. Plus the fact that there are no benefits granted. All they want is to recruit talents for their monetary gain.
I don’t recommend RemoteStaff.com or Think Innovations – its Australian entity. It is only great for those who wants to work as an administrative assistant or VA. Other than that, you’ll find yourself working for companies who really cannot afford skilled employees in Australia. So expect the rates to be substandard and so-so clients and co-workers.
They also use a screen monitoring software called the RSSC which can remotely access your laptop or PC. It is quite invasive and distracting with prompts every 3 minutes.
It will not appear in your Control Panel because obviously it is not compliant with software standards.
Note that as a freelancer they will require to use your personal laptop so you should add that to your expenses.
They also did not send the agreed government contribution payments via Paymaya as discussed in the contract.
It is a month-to-month contract without job security which preys on Filipino freelancers. It is better than nothing. The way they manage freelancers is more than micromanaging an employee. You’ll have a project management tool + account manager + your client. They expect you to work more than 8 hours without pay because the setup will not allow you to work creatively without so much distractions.
Agreed on Jomar’s comments that their recruiters or account managers are sarcastic and rude. They will sell you a job description that has nothing to do with what the job really entails.
For example, your digital marketing manager will be just barking orders to colleagues as if they are kids and your senior marketing associate will just copy and paste articles.
One time they had to do a 2 hour useless onboarding on a Saturday with so much needless information that could have been cut short to just 30 minutes. At the back of my mind, maybe the account manager wants to have an overtime pay as their rate is per hour.
Basically, if they don’t see you fit, they will just go ahead and call you, remove all your work access immediately and not honor the contract. If you are a skilled employee, they will copy your process and ideas. Once you’ve set things up, they will let you go and replace you with a cheaper copycat. So always be mindful of your asking rates!
I would recommend applying directly to clients or go to certified freelancing websites such as Upwork and Fiverr than work with. Remote Staff aka Think Innovations.
I applied directly at their Remostaff office and they were accommodating. It just so happened that it took me a year to make me land my first job with them but worth it. The agency takes care of its clients and freelancers. Good job!
Remotestaff may be a good agency if you want to find work. Sadly, some of their recruiters are sarcastic and insulting. If you have experienced being interviewed by their recruiters you know what I am saying here. Remotestaff Recruiters, you might be tired doing your routines but you better change the way you handle your applicants, it could backfire on you, someday.