How to Find and Hire Virtual Assistants Ethically & Intelligently

Hannah Dixon: Hi, everyone. I’m Hannah Dixon. I’m very excited to be speaking here at the Neurodiverse Entrepreneur Summit. I’ve been checking in, watching some of the other presenters, and it’s been fantastic so far. If you want to engage me in the comments, I will be here. I’m excited to get to know you. Let’s jump into my topic here today. We’re talking all about how to hire virtual assistants or VAs for short and freelancers ethically and intelligently. Before we do that, I want to give you a brief introduction to who I am. I am, as I said, Hannah. I’m a VA and freelancer coach. I’ve trained over 30,000 people over a decade now to become virtual assistants. I’m all about ethical recruitment and I offer consulting and services to those who want to hire from our trained VA pool.

I am a digital nomad of over 16 years, living and working in over 60 countries, and I’m currently in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, which, if you know anything about it, is the queer capital of Mexico. We’re having a good time down here. I’m all about digital skills for social change. I partner with a lot of NGOs and government organizations to bring digital skills to vulnerable youths in various areas around the world. I am a dog mom of two rescue pups that I got here in Mexico, which is part of the reason that I landed here in the first place and for so long.

Fun fact about me, I once escaped a dangerous nudist camp, not because they were nudists, but it was dangerous for other reasons, by descending a snowy Slovenian mountain at 4 AM. If you want to know more about that, ask me afterwards. Here’s the agenda for today. We’re going to talk about the basics. Now, even if what a VA is, we’re going to make sure we just cover these essentials so that everybody here is on board. We’re going to talk about what VAs are, what they can do, and what they can’t do. We’re going to talk about what fair payment looks like for VAs.

We’re going to talk about how to figure out if you’re ready to hire. Then we’re going to talk about innovators, executors, and the delegation tree. Don’t worry if these terms are new to you. These are just things that I’ve dubbed to help you navigate this process better. If you see this little yellow clipboard icon here, it means that I have a task for you. There’s a couple of tasks throughout this that you can implement as we’re doing this or later. Then I’m going to give you four strategies to find great talent. We’re going to end with giving you some tips to conduct neurodiverse, inclusive “interviews.”

I call them interviews with the– What do you call these things? The bunny is, because they’re more like discovery calls, but for the sake of understanding exactly the purpose, I’ve put interviews here. To basics, what is a virtual assistant? A virtual assistant, in short, is a self-employed individual who works remotely to support entrepreneurs and businesses with professional admin, tech, and/or creative work.

Now, I’ve got this little umbrella here because I use the term virtual assistant as an umbrella term. If people can assist someone virtually, any type of freelancer we’re talking about here, we’re talking about web designers, copywriters, any kind of freelancer can be considered a virtual assistant for the purposes of this session here today. What are they? They are business owners. They are business owners in their own right. While they are providing you services, they are not employees. It’s important to keep that in mind. They often will specialize in their service set. Not always, but oftentimes they will have areas that they work in more heavily.

They work completely asynchronously. That’s something to be said for– We’ll get into this a bit later as well. As neurodivergent entrepreneurs ourselves, what you may find is that a lot of VAs too, neurodiverse in some fashion. It is because this type of work offers them a lot of flexibility. They will most of the time pay their own taxes. I say most of the time because there are some W-2 roles for VAs these days, but that’s less common. They are fully remote, so you can work with VAs from anywhere in the world, and they come incredibly diverse.

What are they not? Just to be super clear again, they are not employees. You don’t have to worry about things like payroll in the traditional sense, benefits, office space, anything like that. They are not to be confined to 9:00 to 5:00 hours. They often will be determining their own hours based on what needs to be done. They are not unicorns to make your business work. What do I mean by that? I mean that when you hire a VA, you shouldn’t be hiring for them to make your business work. If the foundational core of your business is not working, that’s not a VA’s problem to solve. That is the problem of the business at large.

A VA should really be taken on to enhance what you have going on, to make better, to improve, to grow, not necessarily to make it work on a foundational level. I think that’s really important to know. Again, they’re not subject to tax withholding. They’re paying their own taxes as self-employed business owners, and they’re not in-house workers. What are the benefits of hiring VAs? While we’re at this, I also want to ask everybody here, who already works with a VA, and what’s the biggest benefit you have experienced? Here are a couple of the ones that are the most typical ones.

Cost efficiency Again, you’re not paying for their office space. You don’t have to worry about all kinds of insurances and whatever it may be in the country that you’re in. You can also hire for particular things and for short periods of time. If you only need five hours a week or something, that’s obviously more cost-effective than hiring even a part-time employee. They can offer you specialized skills. We talked about that before, and we will talk about that more here today. They can offer you exactly what you want instead of an employee who maybe has to wear a lot of hats.

You can hire specifically somebody to manage your funnels or specifically somebody to manage your email marketing. You can really get to the core of what you need when you need it. There’s flexibility in how you work with them. Like I said, you can work five hours a week, 50 hours a week. It is up for you and your VA or team of VAs to decide what works best for each of those individual working relationships.

Increased productivity. While I don’t always see productivity as the goal or any marker of success, ultimately, if you consider your business separate to you, it allows your business to be more productive in the sense that it can do more, make more money, have more impact, or whatever it is that is important to you. It gives you access to a global talent pool, which can be really beneficial if you’re trying to target particular markets. You need some cultural insights. You need people who may be working hours that you are not able to work. If you have really intense customer support needs, for example, this can be a really big benefit.

Finally, personalized support, which I feel is really beneficial, especially for neurodiverse folks, because we work in different ways. You can really work with people who can be flexible. Likewise, you can do the same for them as well. What do they even do? The scope of what a VA can help you with is very, very wide. Like I said, with that umbrella term, if you assist people virtually, you could be considered a virtual assistant. That’s why it’s really important to be discerning about what to delegate in the first place. There are three main task areas. Most VAs have a service stack that falls more heavily into one or two of these.

There’s admin, which, as you can see on the screen here, can be any number of these things. This is obviously not exhaustive. This is just to give you an idea. Admin, inbox management, bookkeeping, invoicing, travel booking, digital organization, et cetera, et cetera. Then we’ve got technical tasks. Nowadays, a lot of that looks like AI solutions and implementation, automations, integrations, video editing, email marketing, podcast management, SEO, that kind of stuff. Creative could be graphic design, web design, branding, copywriting. I think I said that already.

Like I said, VAs will often fall more heavily into one or more likely two of these fields. There’s a lot of crossover. It’s not going to be completely in these, but it gives you an idea of the types of tasks in those different buckets. How much does it cost to hire? Because I know a lot of people are scared about cost and want to make sure that you’re valuing the people that you’re bringing onto your team. I will start by saying a huge part of ethical hiring for me is making a commitment to not perpetuate economic disparity that can keep people in poverty cycles.

In short, that means pay people right. If you’re wondering what that looks like, here are some benchmarks that you can keep in mind. If you’re hiring for entry-level skills, this might be simple administration, a little bit of calendar management, maybe some basic social media posting, simple camera design, this can run you anywhere from $15 to $30 an hour. I would say under that is probably not appropriate if you want to be paying people fairly.

This can go either side of that, but this is just to give you that benchmark. Intermediate skills. VA’s with intermediate skills like maybe a bit of WordPress maintenance, blog writing, graphic design, they could charge anywhere from $15 to $30 an hour. That would be appropriate. Then when you’re looking at experts, these are very specialized VA’s who do things like advanced web development, SEO, maybe even project management, funnel-building strategy, Facebook ads, et cetera. 45 plus. I’d say 45 is on the low end of that for sure. That can go into the hundreds, quite honestly.

I will make a note here that while you might have a budget in mind, a VA is a business owner and therefore decides their own rates based on what is necessary for their needs while taking into account, of course, their skills and experience, and all those things. You will find that rates will fluctuate a little outside of each of those brackets due to that. There’s no fixed rates and ultimately you’ll have a conversation with the VA and come up with an agreement between the two of you. Are you ready to hire? There are three main reasons that business owners like yourself hire. Number one is you don’t know how to do something.

Number two is you don’t want to do something or you don’t want to learn how to do something, or three, you don’t have time to do something. It could be a combination of all of the above or any of the above. Those are the main three reasons. I’ll give a bonus reason here. It could be that you simply aren’t the person who should be doing a certain thing. I’m going to give you a quick story here. I am actually going to bring myself back on the screen here for this so you can see my face. When I was in school many, many, many, many, many, many years ago, I was really bad at math. I still am really bad at math.

I decided that I was going to study really hard for this important math exam. It was our GCSEs, I believe. It felt really important at the time. I’m not sure that I’ve ever needed that since, but it was important at the time. I was like, “I’m going to study really hard. I’m going to really try and at least get a passing grade, like a D or a C.” So I did. I put my all into it, which was very, very rare of me to have that much focus on anything at that time, but I did. I studied hard. Then in the UK, they have this grading system, which I think is horrendous and really demoralizing, but they have this grading system where, essentially, if you’re not F or higher, that you can get a U. A U stands for ungradable, which is just mean, I think. [laughs]

You can see where this is going. I got my results, I got a U, and I was pretty upset about it because I was like, “I actually studied for this.” I went home to my mom and I said, “Oh, I can’t believe I didn’t get a passing grade. I really thought I got a few questions right.” She said, “You don’t need to be good at math. That’s what other people are for.” I was like, “What? What? What? What?” [laughs] She was like, “Well, you don’t need to be good at math because the people that are good at math, they’re going to be the financial analysts, they’re going to be the bankers, they’re going to be the accountants.”

I was pretty good at the arts back then, and she was like, “You’re going to do something creative and the writers are going to be writers.” People have inherent skills, and if you are trying to work against that, it’s not in your best interest. I wanted to tell that story because I think it’s important and I think that’s bled into a lot of the things I do now, and that sometimes we just aren’t the person to be doing something. Even if we’ve developed a way of doing something, it still might not be our strong suit and it still might not be the best use of our time.

Let’s move on. The biggest questions I would like you to ask yourself are, “Where am I spending or not spending time where I don’t shine?” What do I mean by or not? I mean that sometimes, like me, I’m sure many people have been in this situation, I’m like, “I’ve got this, I can do this,” and I’m staring at my screen for five-plus days trying to do the thing. I’m spending the time, but it’s not getting done. This is what I mean by spending or not spending time where I don’t shine, because the time is still being spent. I want you to be really honest with yourself about this.

I’ll give you a couple of pointers here. If you’ve been in business for a while, but you’re still meddling in tasks that don’t allow you to do your best work, it might be time to hire. If you’re new to business and keep getting bogged down by all the things that need doing, or perhaps you’re in that procrastination space that I just spoke about, providing your budget allows, hiring smart can accelerate your growth. Can you right now identify any tasks in your business that you probably aren’t the best fit for?

Based on this little story I just told you, can you identify any areas where it’s not really something you’re really great at, but you’re doing anyway because you’ve learned to be good at it? I’m curious to see in the comments. I’m going to quickly introduce you to a little concept I’ve dubbed the executors and innovators. I always say there’s two types of VAs, and both are necessary and neither is better than the other. However, what I will say is that innovator-type VAs tend to work better when working directly with neurodiverse entrepreneurs.

Let’s see what the difference is here. Executor VAs are VAs who may be really good at checking off assigned tasks as requested. You give them a list of tasks and they’re going to power through them. An innovator VA would check off those tasks but with an eye for process optimization. They’ll say, “Well, we could do this better next time. “They’re not just doing what you’ve said, they’re doing what you’ve said and offering insights on how to make better that. An executor would respond to immediate challenges and requests, whereas an innovator might analyze future challenges and anticipate needs.

Now, I don’t know if anyone else can identify with this, hands up in the comments, but what I find is I get stuck in areas where I’m like, let me give you a real example, “I need to send the newsletter out.” In order to send the newsletter out, I know that I need to talk about this event that’s upcoming, but I haven’t made the graphic for the event and I haven’t posted the event in the social media channel and I haven’t actually got my affiliate link ready from the person of the event that I’m [unintelligible 00:14:06]. There’s like a long list of stuff and it’s like, “I can’t do this because this hasn’t happened or that hasn’t happened.”

An innovator VA would anticipate the needs. They know I need to write my newsletter and therefore they’re going to help me make sure that all the processes in order to do that are already set up. This is the benefit, like I said before, of neurodiverse entrepreneurs hiring innovator-type VAs. Executor VAs may check in, check out and don’t really have much stake in the business’s success. Like a traditional job where you might check in, check out, and leave it at the door. Whereas an innovator might treat your business as their own, working with growth in mind.

Executor VAs can be very reliable and they can contribute to operational efficiency. Innovator VAs can challenge the status quo and can open new doors for you. Both have their place and both are very, very important hires to make depending on what your needs are. Like I said before, if you’re anything like me when it comes to, “I need to do this, but this, but this, but this, but this, but this,” innovator VAs can be your best friend here. I’m going to introduce this concept to you because knowing what to hire for is really the first step. If you’re looking to hire somebody, what are you hiring them for?

I want you to consider your business as an ecosystem, as a tree specifically. I call this the delegation tree. For ease, you can call these different hires that we’re going to talk about, ground, up, and out hires. The ground hires are people who– These are the roots here. People who manage routine yet highly important tasks, the grounding of a business. Things like customer support, billing, research, calendar management, it could even be podcast editing, blog writing, moderation, things that are routine in your specific business. This will look different for everybody.

For some neurodiverse entrepreneurs, these things may lack the novelty that they seek and may end up dropping the ball in these areas where those other people, other neurodiverse folks may actually find themselves happily in flow with the more repetitive tasks. That is for you to determine, but ground hires are basically the repeat routine processes that always need doing to keep your business moving. They’re very, very important. Canopy hires. These are the people up at the top of the tree here. These people have a good vantage point over an entire organization.

They are visionaries, you could say. They map out and implement strategies and can spot opportunities from afar. They can manage teams, optimize processes, lend insights based on data. They may also engage in system setups and project management and can often be pretty intuitive, I would say. Then you’ve got expansion hires. These are the branches seeking outwards. These hires are focused on branching out to seek and obtain new leads, collaborations, partners, avenues for growth. These people are usually pretty specialized. People like social media managers, affiliate marketers or managers, ad specialists, even community managers.

They tend to be pretty good at peopling, and if not peopling in person, they’re good at the digital networking thing. Those ground hires, those roots are typically the most important and first hires that many people will make. The same is true for neurodiverse entrepreneurs. Sometimes they can be even more important, as I said before, as some of us may find that those repetitive tasks do get neglected. Ultimately this is your grounding. This is the roots of a business. Many neurodivergent people do hop between all areas of the delegation tree, or they might like to hang out in the canopy. Many of us are the visionaries.

Where do you see yourself in your business ecosystem? I would like to hear in the comments here. Are you a canopy dweller? Are you an all-over-the-place person? Are you a ground person? Are you an expansion person? Maybe you can identify in yourself where you’re hanging out first. Now, a quick disclaimer here. No two trees are the same, and that means no two businesses are the same. It’s important to keep in mind that some businesses operate differently. You may have a palm model, for example, where outreach and expansion is less important due to market position and not industry.

In business, it’s really important to remember that a lean palm can always become a banyan at any time. Keeping this structure in mind can help you when it comes to growth in different areas too. Here’s a quick exercise that you can do. I say quick, this could take you as long as you want it to take, but I would spend probably 10 minutes on each of these to discover who you need to hire. When we’re looking at those ground hires, number one, I want you to list the tasks in your business that are routine. Every business is going to look different.

Like I said, if you have a podcast, that would be a routine thing as the podcast editing. If you have a blog, getting the blog out would be a routine thing. If you have a newsletter, if you have a lot of customer service, whatever it may be that is routine in your business, needs doing all the time, no matter what, if you have payroll that needs to be done, that kind of thing. I want you to list all of those tasks out. Then in the second part of this task, I want you to identify if this area is under or overlooked because I feel like sometimes we throw ourselves into one area and one area only.

I’ll give an example of that. I have in the past, for example, put all my efforts into my newsletter, even though there was no one on the list or getting on the list. What I wasn’t doing was focusing on expansion. I wasn’t focusing on getting people to read that newsletter. I was just focusing all my attention on writing it. It could be overlooked. Then that would mean that the expansion area is underlooked. Get really clear with yourself here. Identify, is it under or overlooked? Then number three, I want you to ask yourself the questions that we talked about earlier.

Do how to do this thing? Number one. Two, do you want to know how to do this thing, or do you want to do this thing? Number three, do you have time to do this thing? Then finally, this is the real question that’s going to get into the core of it. Would someone else do this better? I want you to repeat this for the up tasks and the out tasks. To remind you once again, ground tasks are the roots, it’s the routines. The up tasks is the canopy, it’s the visionary, it’s the being able to project manage and have a good overview of everything type tasks. Out tasks are growth tasks. That is social media, ads, marketing, PR, that kind of thing.

When you hire smart, a VA is no longer a cost, they’re an investment. When I was doing my newsletter but not inviting anybody in, if I had hired somebody to help me with designing my newsletter better, that would have been not a smart investment. What would have been a smart investment is someone to help me get leads for that newsletter. It becomes an investment, not a cost. Where to find great VAs? There are plenty of great VAs out there. There’s no shortage of them.

While other people may have you posting jobs in Upwork, the dirty word in my view, hoping to meet your match for the lowest price point, I recommend taking a more tailored approach, especially for us neurodiverse folks. One where you honor not only your own needs but those of your future VAs as well. Number one is referrals. Referrals are the backbone of business in general. Number one would be your super cool network. Being here at an event like this is a great place to connect with people who may be further ahead in their hiring journey.

You can reach out and say, “Who are you hiring with? Where did you find them? Do they have availability? Do they know anyone else?” This event specifically would be really good for that. Other business owners in general and different networking groups you may be in, or programs that you’ve bought, that kind of thing, would be a good place to ask for referrals. Then people you respect. If you see a business owner that’s just doing amazing work, and you’re like, “Their stuff always looks so good,” or “I love their systems,” or whatever it may be, you can ask them, “Hey, who are you working with?” or “Do you have any tips for me?”

This is probably one of the best places you can get advice for this type of thing so you don’t have to just ask anybody. Ask people you trust and respect who are in your network already. Social media. I actually really like this approach because it gives you the power to take ownership of this journey. This is literally going out of your way to research individuals. You can do this by using hashtags. I should have put these the other way around. You can go into Instagram, for example, and you can type in #socialmediava. You’re going to see social media VAs out there marketing themselves, showing up.

You get to see their personality. You get to see the quality of their work without having them have to come to you. You’re actively going out there and discerning who you do and don’t want to reach out to and then going through their system to book in a call or whatnot. Agencies. There are a couple of benefits for this. Going through an agency means you have a fixed fee so you know what you’re paying every month. You can, of course, discern this with the VA you’re working with. You can negotiate retainers, for example. This is an ideal scenario, really.

We didn’t really talk so much about pricing today, but if you do have questions about it– Payment models, because I don’t necessarily always recommend only paying by hour. If you have questions about payment models, how to pay VAs, that kind of thing, please feel free to drop in the comments. I’ll stick around to answer them. You can obviously have a fixed fee with VAs outside of agencies as well. I just want to make that disclaimer. If you’re unsure or just where you want to outsource your outsourcing, as I’ve written here, agencies can be a good model.

There’s less management needed of your VAs. If you’re someone who wants to be really hands-off, this can be good for you. There’s pros and cons to this. The pro is, of course, being hands-off. The con is, and I’ll say it from experience, I work with a lot of people who come to us looking for VAs, and one of the problems they’ve had is that agencies just don’t have that personalized touch or they’ve switched around their VAs, the agency has changed the people working on their team without them knowing, and then they have to learn again and it’s not been like super beneficial, but I’m not saying that that’s the case all the time.

Of course, it works for a lot of people. Agencies are a little bit more hands-off, fixed fee, outsourcing your outsourcing approach. Then finally is matchmaking services. This would be working with someone like myself who offers a headhunting experience for you. In this way, you’re hiring the VAs directly. You would work with someone like me, for example, and I would then connect you with people who would be a good fit for your business, and then you would just hire them directly. I’m not taking a cut off their money. You’re working with a VA. You get to design it from there.

You’re hiring from a trusted source, so you can work with matchmakers or headhunters or recruiters that you trust. Then you can also get support, clarity, and save time on the actual hiring process itself if that’s daunting for you. This is a really good way to do that if you’re like, “I want to work with a VA and design it my own way, but I’d really like help with just those initial stages of getting connected and making sure it’s coming from a trusted source.” A question for you, if you have a great VA on your team, where did you find them? Share in the comments.

Like I said, this is a really good event for connecting with other people who may have resources for you or may even have a VA on the team who wants to pick up some more work. Do drop in the comments if you have a great VA, where did you find them? I’m just going to go over a couple of not-so-great ways to hire VAs. These would be free-for-all posts. These are the posts, we’ve all seen them, where somebody writes on Facebook, for example, “Looking for a VA,” and that’s all they say. Then in the comments, it’s like, “Sent you a DM. Sent you a DM. Sent you a DM. Here’s my link, blah, blah, blah. I’m free. I’m available. Me. me, me.”

There’s absolutely no idea if these people are any good, nobody knows actually what this VA needs to do, which is why, again, it’s important to list out those tasks and in what areas you might want to hire for to help you get a bit clearer. Another way would be to be bargain hunting. This would be looking for the cheapest deal. If you’re looking for the cheapest deal, you might get the cheapest results, let’s just be honest here. Hiring your twin.

If you hire somebody who is very similar to you and procrastinates by talking about their favorite rocks all the time, not saying I do that, then– You can get on a call with someone, and you’re having a great time talking with them, and you’re like, “Wow, we really get on. This was meant to be a 20-minute discovery call, and we’ve been talking for two hours about rocks and our rock tumblers,” and you both get off the call, and you’re feeling elated. You’re like, “Oh, I love this person. Yes, this is the right fit.”

The problem is when push comes to shove and they have to do the work, you might find that they’re more interested in their rock tumbler than the work just like you are. Hiring your twin is not ideal. Hiring on personality alone is also not ideal because you may be hiring again in a similar fashion. You might be like, “I think this person is great,” and ignoring whether or not they have the skills to confidently and competently do the tasks at hand. Then on the flip side of that, is not hiring on skills alone because there needs to be some fit. You’re working with these people. It can be a very intimate relationship working with a VA.

If you have a small team, you really want to make sure that they are equally a personality fit, but equally are bringing skills to the table. Then not vetting candidates. Of course, you want to make sure you’re vetting candidates, you’re not just saying yes on a whim because you had a good vibe. Good vibes are great, but they’re not always long-term the best fit. Do vet your candidates, even if that means giving paid project trials, that kind of thing to make sure that it really is a good fit. I would always recommend going with a five-hour package. That’s a really good way to get started.

What I recommend my VAs who I’ve worked with to offer clients as well is to offer a five-hour paid trial to– It’s low risk and low cost just to see if you really like each other and how much you can get done in that time and in what manner. Then what? Then you are working with the VA ideally, or you’re moving forward with the VA and you want to have an interview/discovery call. I want to give you one tip here. I want you to drop the rules of traditional employment and design your working relationship with your VA. This is really, really important to know because as I said before, a lot of virtual assistants will also be neurodiverse in some fashion.

It comes with the territory. A lot of people seek this kind of work because of the flexibility it provides and the peace that it gives them to design a working life that really does suit their needs. I think it’s important to know that you can design the relationship with your VA to be beneficial for you both so you can both do your best work. Now saying that, a VA cannot know your needs and you cannot know your VA’s needs without getting really clear on your needs first. I think it’s really important that you know that your needs need to come first because this is your business.

If they’re going to be working in your business, your needs definitely need to be accounted for first and foremost. You can take your own time to do this, but I would write down these five points. One, communication. What is your preferred communication style? Are you someone who hates jumping on calls? Are you someone who can’t deal with messenger-type apps? Are you someone who prefers voice messages, emails? Do you like bullet-pointed lists at the end of the day? What is your preferred communication style that’s going to make you feel the best?

Number two is your task management preferences. A lot of entrepreneurs like to use something like Todoist for daily task management and then a project management system. You could use Trello, Asana, Notion. I, for example, really can’t stand Notion. My team loves it and we’re working through that right now, but for me, Notion feels like I’m in the cockpit of a plane and there’s too many options. Whereas Trello on the other hand is really easy on the eye for me. I like that you can color-code it. It seems simpler. That Kanban style works better for me.

You can start determining what works best for you. If you’re unsure, if you haven’t used any of these systems before, write down what you think might work for you. This is something you could design with a VA. Your work environment. This really comes down to your values and the kind of culture that you want to nurture in your organization or your business because I think that values alignment is of course incredibly important here. You can write all about that.

Number four is feedback and support. This can go both ways. Are you somebody who needs feedback on the work that you’re doing? Do you need support? Do you need somebody to body-double with you, for example? I definitely need that. I have a wonderful team member, Alicia, who often helps me with that. She’s actually on the recording of this as I’m recording it because I really struggle to record things when there’s no audience. I stumble on my words, I question myself too much. She often will be my body double and sit in on things that need to be pre-recorded.

Then likewise, do you like giving feedback? How do you like to give feedback? That kind of thing. Then number five, expectations and boundaries. What are your expectations of having a VA on the team or having a team in general? Do you expect them to check in daily. What do you expect from them? Then boundaries as well, and they’re tied into each other. If your VA writes to you on the weekend, when can they expect to hear back from you? What is the boundary around are they allowed to do? If they do, when do you write back?

All these kinds of boundaries, expectations, write them down. It’s really important because then what I want you to do is bake these things into your job ads as non-negotiables, but framed as benefits because they are benefits. When we implement these– I’m going to say accommodations, but I don’t love the word accommodations because it implies that there’s something wrong with people like us, which is not the case. We’re all amazing people who are running businesses and using our wonderful brains for the best outcomes in our lives.

I think that accommodations is not necessarily the best word, but I’ll use it because it’s a commonly used word. When we bake these accommodations into our workflows, our job advertisements, and our culture in our business, it benefits everybody. For example, we prioritize clear and thoughtful communication, preferring the use of Loom videos and Slack messages over phone calls, and here’s the benefit, to allow ample time for reflection and response. Make sure that you’re putting those things into the job ads right away so people are already aware of how it is to work with you.

A quick disclaimer here. Your needs may not be the same as the people you’re looking to hire, and that is okay most of the time. You can work around that and make flexibility where it needs to be. It also needs to be said that reasonable accommodations is where it’s at. If somebody needs accommodations in order to work with you effectively and do their best work and it’s reasonable, great. If it becomes unreasonable and that means they literally cannot do their job, it just means they’re not the right fit for this role and that’s okay as well.

I want to make that disclaimer that you don’t have to be making accommodations that put you in a situation to work in a way that you don’t feel good. Sometimes it’s just not a fit. Like I said, if you’re hiring neurodiverse talent as well, or you just want to make this better on yourself, there are tips here for how to conduct neurodiverse, inclusive interviews, but I’m going to call them discovery calls as well because that’s really what they are. Here’s a few tips.

Number one, you can share questions in advance. Providing interview questions at least 24 hours before gives candidates the time they need to prepare thoughtful responses, and you may find that if you’re working with a VA who is highly informed on how to work with neurodiverse folks, they may also provide you some stuff they want to ask you, or you could ask them for that in advance as well, like, “Hey, is there anything that you’re going to ask me? I would love to just prepare.” You can ask for that and advocate for yourself there as well.

Offer multiple communication options. Some candidates might prefer a video call where others might find a normal phone call or just video off-type Zoom call less stressful. Offering those options can help them perform their best. If it’s not essential to the role that they show up on video, it shouldn’t be essential for the interview or for the discovery call either. Allow for pauses.

A lot of neurodiverse candidates may need a little bit more time to process questions and formulate responses, and likewise, it may be the same for you. You can show understanding by allowing for those thoughtful pauses, not rushing conversations, and like I said, advocating for yourself as well, like, “I’m just going to need a moment to think about this.” Then you’re creating this culture of safety where it’s okay for people to advocate for themselves as well.

Clarify expectations early. You could explain what your expectations are for the interview or discovery call process, including any tasks or tests that you may have involved so that candidates can prepare adequately and reduce their anxiety. Finally, this is a really big one for me is, show, not tell. It can be better to focus on allowing candidates to demonstrate their ability to complete job-specific tasks versus being asked to recall a time when they. I really struggle with recalling information or knowledge that I have in the moment sometimes.

Unless provoked in a particular way, sometimes I can’t tap into my memory reserves. If somebody instead says to me, “Can you show me how you might do that?” No problem, but if they say, “Can you tell me a time where you solved a problem?” I’m like, “No, I can’t. Never solved a problem in my life.” [laughs] I really like this option, the show, not tell. That is a big one for me personally. That’s why I like it. These are all things to help you have better conversations with candidates to ensure that it’s a good fit all around. Most importantly here, I want you to empower yourself by being really clear from the start on your needs, and expectations, all those things that we talked about.

Then I want you to empower your hires to speak up for their own needs, creating a culture of safety with direct, clear communication. Ultimately you want to be designing a mutually beneficial working environment where everyone can thrive in their respective roles. With that, question to you, what could you implement into your hiring process and business operations at large to support your needs? I’m just curious if anything’s coming up for you as we’re going through that. Feel free to drop in the comments. That brings us to the end of my session here today.

I just want to give a quick recap. We talked about the basics, what VA’s are, what they do, what fair payment looks like, how to know if you’re ready to hire. I introduced you to the concept of innovators versus executors, and also the delegation tree with those ground, up, and out hires with a task for you to identify which areas you might want to be hiring in. I gave you four strategies to land great talent, and I also gave you some tips on how to conduct neurodiverse inclusive– I’m going to bring myself back on screen here, interviews. here’s how I can help you hire smart.

You can post a free job with our trained and trusted Virtual Excellence Academy members. That is our virtual assistant and freelancer training program, which is a leading program in this field. You’d be hiring trusted talent there who are continually investing in their growth and skills. Then it’s free to do that. I’m also offering a freebie here today, which is a PDF of 21 plus questions. I say 21 plus, because I’m still editing it. [laughs] It’s 21 right now, but there’s a few things I want to add to it by the time this is live. 21 plus questions to ask a potential VA or freelancer before working with them.

It’s the kinds of questions that many people fail to ask, forget to ask, or don’t realize are important. I feel for this audience here today, you will benefit greatly from this freebie. Do pick that up as well. Over to you. It is question time. If you have any questions about hiring, about anything I’ve talked to you about today– I’ve got the sun on half of my face now. It’s a beautiful sunset here. I wish you could see it. I’ll be happy to answer anything. Thank you for being here. Thank you for engaging with me and thank you for having me on this summit.