Virtual Staff Finder is more of headhunting service than a true virtual assistant company. Founded in 2010 by entrepreneur Chris Ducker, the firm promises to match you up with qualified workers in the Philippines.
In my mind, Chris is right up there with Tim Ferriss when it comes to lifestyle design and using virtual assistants to help achieve your goals. He’s been in the outsourcing arena for 10 years and he and his staff know the Philippines very well.
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How it Works
Virtual Staff Finder is a simple process which works like this. After you sign up, you complete your Job Description requirements, listing all the skills you’d like your virtual assistant to have and what kind of tasks they may be doing for you. Then, for your viewing pleasure, Chris has put together a series of helpful training videos on how best to select and work with your new VA.
Meanwhile, the team at Virtual Staff Finder is hunting for the best candidates. All their virtual assistants are screened, tested, interviewed, and background checked – all before you’re even involved.
Then, the company presents you with the 3 best candidates, and you can do your own interviews and make your selection from there. If you’ve ever tried to find a VA on Upwork, you’ll appreciate all the screening work Virtual Staff Finder does for you.
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Over the years, VSF has helped place over 1000 virtual assistants with new employers so they definitely have their systems down.
Virtual Staff Finder Intro Video
This video is a little dated, but still explains their general process well. Just know that they now only recruit General Virtual Assistants.
Services
Virtual Staff Finder specializes in matching entrepreneurs with general virtual assistants. These are administrative professionals who generally have good English skills, a college education, and some prior experience in working for overseas clients.
You will have the freedom to train your VA on whatever role you need them to fill, but if you’re looking for specialized skillsets in web development, content writing, SEO, or other areas, VSF may not be the best fit. (See below for alternatives.)
Virtual Staff Finder Review
Plans and Pricing
For this, they charge a one-time $495 fee. After that, you and your new virtual assistant agree on a salary and you pay them directly. Because there is no more company overhead, you can expect to pay market rates for your VA, which typically range from $400 a month for full time general administrative help up to $750 a month for more skilled work.
If that price seems steep, consider the average referral bonus given for full-time hires is $1200 (according to Inc. Magazine), and that doesn’t even include the recruiting expenses.
The company offers a 10-day guarantee, which means if you don’t end up hiring any of the 3 candidates they selected for you, or if you did hire one and they didn’t work out without the first 10 days, Virtual Staff Finder will source you another 3 candidates for free.
Virtual Staff Finder Alternatives
Aside from the big freelance marketplaces, you have a couple alternatives to consider when trying to find an awesome VA in the Philippines.
The first is the “DIY method,” which involves posting your job on OnlineJobs.ph, the largest job board for virtual work in the country. Here you’ll cast a wide net but spend more time narrowing down your candidate pool to the few “diamonds in the rough.”
The second option is a competing “matchmaking service” called Zen Virtual Assistants Finder. For a similar price point, they’ll source 3-5 qualified VA candidates for you. They also do free one-on-one consulting calls and an extensive needs assessment before you fork over your cash.
Your Turn
Have you worked with Virtual Staff Finder? We’d love to get your feedback below.
We hired a web dev through VSF. Highly skilled and affordable. We were extremely particular in what we were looking for, but VSF still delivered. Of the three they presented, one matched our criteria very well, one fairly well, and one not so much.
VSF is only a one-time fee of $500, and is great if you don’t have the time or experience to hunt down who you’re looking for. Their process (boy, do Filipinos and VSF love processes) and communication were super-smooth. Our manager Richard kept us informed and moved things along .
The owner, Chris Ducker, is a big name in outsourcing. If you can, try to find his OTTP – Outsourcing to the Philippines – book as a PDF. If not, you can see him all over Youtube. He and Jon Jonas were what got us started hiring awesome, affordable remote staff.
Extremely impressed with the work the provide. For 500USD, you’ll get 3 high quality profiles. They really do an awesome job. It’s smooth and so easy for us to choose. Richard is particularly great 😉
I wasn’t impressed although they did honor the refund, which i guess is ok.
Working with VSF has saved an immense amount of time. We’ve tried hiring on oDesk and eLance, though there were some high quality applicants, the amount of time it took for our team and the back and forth process involved in the hiring process was very time-consuming and tedious.
VSF definitely simplifies the process, and likewise the applicants sourced were of higher quality if not more responsible and reliable applicants that are looking to work solely with you.
For a little less than $400, the amount of time saved and the quality of the applicants definitely is a worthy investment, especially if you’re looking for a long term hire.
I would highly recommend to give it a shot! We needed 2 hires, and we’ve confirmed the 2 hires through VSF. Everything has been going great so far.
Overall, I love working with my new assistant Glori.
Initially I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to come up with 40 hours of work each week to keep her busy — I mean sometimes I’m not even working that much!
But so far that hasn’t been a problem and I’ve been on a major delegating kick and feeling more productive and strategic than ever.
She handles a lot of projects that I’ve been meaning to tackle. Specifically she builds a database of other books in my market that I can use to reverse-engineer and then she identifies 5-star reviewers who I can contact for a potential book review.
She’s also doing some social media and reporting tasks. We’re only a couple months in, but so far so good!
I think VSF did a great job with hiring here. The one thing I looked for is someone with excellent writing skills. I think that was the key to locating a VA who can handle a lot of projects and immediately understands my instructions.
It went great!
They gave me 3 candidates. One I didn’t even bother to interview. The second was also not a big hit. But the last one is fantastic!
She knows almost everything and the rest she learns fast:)
Now it is up to me, how to get the best of her in the areas that I need the most.
UPDATE March 19th 2014:
The talented girl I wrote about was missing without notice 2 weeks out of the first month. Even VSF recommended to hire someone else.
Again they found 3 candidates – one that you don’t want to interview, one that was medium and the third one stood out mainly because she wasn’t the first 2. We hired her but release her after less than 2 weeks.
I didn’t like the trick of giving 3 candidates but without a real choice. The idea was to hire VSF to filter and get us 3 great candidates, not resumes that you wouldn’t give them second look when found on Elance or Odesk.
I used VSF because I needed a full time employee for my WordPress plugin company UberWP. And it was actually a pretty great experience.
After trying to hire someone through oDesk on my own and getting frustrated I used VSF. The process was really smooth. I gave them details about what I needed and what I was looking for and in a week they had 3 candidates for me and lists of their strengths and experiences and their resumes.
I interviewed all 3 on a skype call and hired my best choice.
VSF did a really good job though of finding 3 candidates who’s skillsets matched what I needed pretty closely. So, I was really happy with the quality of candidates they found.
All in all, I think the fee I paid was completely worth having them find the candidates for me and the turnaround time was great. My VA has been amazing too.
She is doing blog post topic research and writing first drafts of blog posts, doing social media posts to facebook/twitter, and overall managing online content and social media.
She’s exactly what I needed and I couldn’t be happier right now.
Virtual Staff Finder came with very high recommendations from several friends, and it definitely did not disappoint.
I didn’t have much experience with Virtual Assistants and none with the hiring process. The VSF service was super helpful for the process. The video tutorials helped me easily write up the initial criteria for who I was looking for (responsible, part-time general virtual assistant).
From there, VSF handles all of the searching & screening of candidates. 14 days later, they presented me with three of their top choices, with whom they helped me set up 3 Skype interviews. I ended up hiring a virtual assistant after the interviews.
VSF saved me money on the front end, from not having to do all the research and vetting, but more importantly the quality of candidate was high, which is invaluable in the long-run!
I tried another staff finding company and had a terrible experience, so it was a blessing to use VSF. I was focused too much on price, not on quality.
If you’re concerned about the price – don’t be. You will get your money back tenfold in the quality of staff they find for you.
Once I submitted my needs, the turnaround was quick and the three candidates all were highly qualified for what I was looking for.
I found Virtual Staff Finder through a few mutual friends of Chris, the CEO, and didn’t really know what to expect. I had minimal experience with outsourcing and absolutely none with virtual assistants. I was blown away by how efficiently they operated and how well they coached me to choose the best candidate. It’s the little things in business that make a big difference. Other than the highly personal support, after I chose who I was going to hire I received an email with a written guide about “what to expect” and was able to learn a great deal about the local culture and how to work with my new virtual assistant.
Is was an absolute pleasure to work with the Virtual Staff Finder team and their results were beyond impressive. Their staff, interview training, and network of candidates made the process effortless. I was able to fill the position with the perfect candidate and look forward to working with their team again in the near future. I cannot possibly recommend their service or their results more highly.
After working with A LOT of part time VA’s, full time VA’s and project base VA’s when I was working for corporate, I knew that the recruitment process when using websites like Elance or oDesk is absolutely horrific. It takes for ages and ages, skimming through hundreds of candidates that all seem the same on the paper, with no way or time to perform any due diligence and weed out the week candidates.
I often had disappointing results with these websites, so for my personal brand I tried working with two professional VA service companies, one of which was AskSunday and the other I can’t remember already. That was 100% horrific.
Then I heard about Virtual Staff Finder. The idea of a matchmaker that will search through the endless sea of candidates and bring me 3 suitable candidates to choose from was a no brainer. The $400 charge is nothing compared to the amount of time and stress that they take away.
So I signed up, sent in me very specific and detailed requirements and waited. Even though it was Xmas time, they got working, and kept communicating and updating me all along the way. Finally, and within the promised time frame (again, even though it was Xmas) I received my line up. It blew my mind: Not only they have found 3 suitable candidates out of all the people that must have applied, but they also made a personalized summary of their CVs and commented on how each item on the CV applies (or not) to my needs.
Then Chlea from VSF set all the Skype interviews for me. When one of the interviews took longer than planned, she took care of the rescheduling process. Before the interviews, I received free videos on recommended questions and tools to use, that where a goldmine on their own.
The 3 candidates I received were all able to perform my tasks, but I can gladly say that VSF sent me 3 very different people. This was great, because it guaranteed that one of these personalities will “click” with mine. The decision was easy, and Chlea took on herself the work of letting down the two candidates that didn’t get the job.
Next, Chlea sent me a contract template for me to use, and was available for all the questions I had during the setup period. Oh, and have I mentioned they give you a 10-days guarantee starting the day your new VA starts working? Not that I needed it.
Anyway, it’s been a month and a half since I hired my VA. I’m very, very pleased that I chose VSF to ease this process for me, and have no doubts that my next VA will be found through their services. It would be crazy to look anywhere else!
When my longtime VA told me she was leaving the company, I was eager to test out the waters in the Philippines given the massive shift there in the virtual assistant marketplace.
Virtual Staff Finder had several glowing reviews here and tons of other positive testimonials, so I thought I would give them a try. If nothing else, it would be an interesting experiment right?
Right after I placed my order I had an email explaining the process and asking for my detailed job description. The staff did a good job of clarifying my needs and trying to figure out the best recruiting approach to find the right person.
Now here’s the thing. VSF specializes in finding VAs in 4 areas: general admin, SEO, copywriting, and web development. If the job you need done doesn’t fall neatly into one of those categories you might have some issues.
In my case I was looking for someone with excellent English writing skills, who I could then train to do pay-per-click, excel work, and customer service.
So very quickly I had a list of 3 candidates. They say it can take up to 14 days but I had my list very quickly, no more than 2 days.
Each candidate had their positives and negatives, which I’m sure is true for every hiring decision, but I was really hoping for one stand-out no-brainer VA. I asked for a couple short trial tasks and a writing sample from each, and conducted skype interviews. Again, none really stood out as the clear winner. In fact, at various points in the process, each of the 3 took turns as the “frontrunner”.
But the wages these women (they were all women) were asking for were between $450 and $500 a month for full-time, less than half what I was paying my previous VA. So I figured I could well afford to get started, even though none were slam-dunk candidates. I found myself with an extra 30+ hours of work back on my plate and I think I was eager to offload some of that as well.
So we got started on a trial basis and did some on-the-job training. But within the first 2 weeks, it became evident it just wasn’t a good fit. It’s hard to pinpoint any one area that was lacking, but we had difficulties in setting a consistent work schedule, in problem solving, in communication, and in following instructions.
It was a really difficult and painful decision (I hate firing people), but ultimately I had to let her go.
For their part, Virtual Staff Finder was really gracious and offered to find some new candidates for me, even as I was pushing the limit on their 14-day satisfaction guarantee.
But it took much longer to source the new applicants, and by the time I got the new list, I’d already found an awesome VA on Elance. She’s way more expensive than the Philippines, but I’m happy with the hire. I didn’t even end up interviewing anyone from the 2nd Virtual Staff Finder list.
To sum up, for my investment in VSF I got some very valuable experience, but no VA. I’m not going to rule out the company or Filipino VAs in general for when the need arises again in the future, but I’ll definitely be more targeted, patient and selective in my hiring process.
Really good experience with VSF. I was searching for a senior programmer and they offered me 3 candidates with good qualities. Also the information on the websites is good. You know what to expect and they even helped me to setup the contract with the VA.
I really would recommend them when searching for a VA.
I had a pleasant experience with VSF. The staff was very helpful in finding me a great VA. I would use them again when the time comes.
My experience was generally the same as everyone else. After trying one of those VA “companies” that really only specializes in booking vacations and setting appointments, I made the leap to get a dedicated VA.
I was looking for a part-time general VA, and I found a gem. It’s only been a month, but I can already feel the relief of letting go of a lot of the repetitive tasks and focusing more on the things I do best.
My VA even helped me find someone in the Philippines to help me with web development work, which was unexpected. I assumed I’d go back to VSF for that, but when I told her I was thinking about it, she used her contacts to find me a candidate really quickly. We’ll see how it works out.
Either way, I would never have found my VA without VSF. Great service.
My experience with Virtual Staff Finder was a huge help as it was my first time working with any type of virtual assistant. Steph did an awesome job in a short time. Keep up the good work!
Thanks to their quick and professional service and great recruitment selection, I found the perfect VA I was looking for. I’ll definitely be taking advantage of their services again when I need another virtual assistant.
I’ll admit, when I first thought about hiring a VA I was really concerned about the time it would take to source candidates, interview them, select the right one, and then train them. I knew I needed help but I was so swamped with work it was almost like I couldn’t step back long enough to make it happen.
I was really impressed with Chris Ducker and the Virtual Staff Finder service. I sent in all my requirements and within a couple weeks had 3 candidates to interview. All three were great, but one really stood out and has been working out really well so far. I’m so grateful.
Quick, easy, painless, and supportive. Thank you so much!
As a nationally awarded business advisor, to rural and regional Australian businesses, it is very important that I have the best staff in my business but also be able to help my clients get the best possible staff for their businesses.
Many times business owners complain they don’t have enough time because they are tied up in the day to day low value stuff in their business. One of the first things I do is get them a VA so they can get back the time they need to focus on the important things that bring in the money.
At this time I have two VA’s in my business who Virtual Staff Finder found for me. Their service offers the best of both worlds in having someone on the ground in the Philippines to screen suitable people while not having expensive on-going fees to pay.
The service has been just wonderful, smooth, super simple and hassle free. And if I ever need advice in this area they are just a Skype chat or Facebook message away to help with staff issues, even after I have employed someone.
Virtual Staff Finder will get more business from me, and the many happy business owners I point in their direction 🙂 Jump in! The water is warm in the Philippines!
I have used Chris Ducker’s Virtual Staff Finder to find two Virtual Assistants for me. The process was simple and professional. After filling in a form with describing what I wanted my VA to do (I have to say this was a bit vague for my first one as I knew I needed help but not sure in what fields) I was given three potential candidates.
In both cases the quality of the people put forward by Virtual Staff Finder was excellent. The hardest decision I had to make was which one to choose. I know that if I was not happy with their selection they would have supplied more candidates for me, however, in my case this was certainly not necessary. I now have two reliable, professional employees gained with no stress or worry on my behalf.
Hi. I think what virtual staff finder does is really great. It saves you time looking and screening for a virtual assistant to hire. Since you will be presented with 3 candidates, you are sure you will be screening already qualified candidates. What’s left for you to do is decide who to pick. With others, you will be screening a lot of candidates, making it more taxing and most of the applicants don’t even have the qualifications or the experience yet.
Hi There!
Just wanted to say thanks for the cool write-up. Very nice of you. And if any of your readers have any questions, etc., they can feel free to comment here, or simply tweet me through @chriscducker.
Thanks again!
Best,
Chris