[Sammy]

Just reading four hour work week, thinking about getting a virtual assistant. Has anyone tried it, and is it worth the hassle?

(I did a search, and there's an old thread on here, but opinion was split pretty much 50/50, wanted to see what the new consensus was)

[OSL]

Figure out what it is you need a virtual assistant for before you start farming out useless tasks.

[OSL]

If you want to experiment, get on fiverr.com and start farming out small tasks like "Research me the cost of living in the following five cities for a single young western person"

Get practice outsourcing with small, low risk, and high value added tasks.

You'll also learn how to screen providers.

[OldRich]

I've probably outsourced 100's of jobs to India and other parts the world. No offence to Indians here but try to stay away from Indian worker as much as you can, the quality is generally poor. As youngmobileglobal said, you need to know what you're farming out first and if you're looking to hire a full time Virtual assistant. You better have a long list of task for them to do. The task you're giving them should have extremely clear instructions or most of the time you'll end up just re-doing it yourself. I've found that the time it takes to explain to them something, I may as well just do it myself.

The best task for a VA is tedious and repetitive that you must be done daily, like some sort of data entry task. Farming out your online dating is actually not a bad idea. It's something I think I'll try soon.

From my experience, it's not as simple as stated in that book. It requires A LOT of experience to be able to farm out your work effectively. I would suggest you start out small first by hiring freelancers for small task. Once you get a hang of it then go for a full-time or part-time VA.

[rekruler]

What do you guys think about hiring them to do online apps for companies? I'm graduating at the end of this semester and in addition to going to job fairs and so on I've been filling out tons of online applications for entry level jobs. Once you have your cover letter and resume set up, it's just a repetitive process of registering to the site, filling out your work and education history, and submitting your resume and cover letter, which still takes around 20 minutes or more per job.

[OSL]

No absolutely do not hire a bunch of Filipinos/Indians to do job applications for you.

They have no idea how to tailor your CV/Coverletter for each specific company. They will most likely use strange grammar and make you sound like a FOB - just look at the language they use when they bid for you projects on elance/odesk:

"Dear Most Honorable Sir, We Would Be Tremendously Delighted To Work On Said Project, Please Forward Mandatory Details At Once."

You are not going to get through the black hole of online applications anyway.

1. Find 20 companies you like
2. Get on linkedin, find one manager at each of those companies that you think would give you a shot at having a phone conversation with you
3. Pay for a one month premium account and send inmails to you top ten choices of managers, introduce yourself and request a phone interview or in-person interview
4. If you can hit a 20-30 percent success rate with this, you have done very well. Get on the phone and try to get an internal referral into these companies

Don't outsource your job search.

[OldRich]

Contrary to what you read about the four hour workweek. The freelancer or VA won't do the thinking for you, they are best at following instruction but even then they will still make mistakes. If all you want them to do is to use the same template for every job, then go ahead but if you need to customize (which you should) then you have to do it yourself.

[OSL]

Yes, OldRich is right. The vast majority of these people are unable or unwilling to make decisions on their own. On top of that, you have to lay out your deliverables in such a way that the process is idiot proof.

A lot of the time, when outsourcing goes wrong it is the fault of the person outsourcing and not the virtual assistant. You should not go into it expecting them to be able to independently come to great conclusions by themselves.

I suggest you read the ebook "Sourcecontrol" by David Walsh - this is a great book for laying out how to navigate the outsourcing world.

[roberto]

Bumping this. What's the current consensus? Not interested in the whole Tim Ferris fraud debate, but I have some tasks which are repetitive basically involve google searching within a set of parameters and presenting the results in a spreadsheet.

I read in another thread that the Philippines is the best place to hire a VA. Can anyone who has done similar recently please chime in?

[TheFinalEpic]

I've hired workers from India via Elance and Upwork. All I can say is you get what you pay for, but even the low cost guys work harder than your average entitled art student from the US or Canada, and are more pleasant even with broken English.

I farm out tasks for contact research, day to day scheduling, and design/writing. You need to highly specify what you need done, and explain it as if it is for a 3rd grader to understand. That being said, I paid around $300 and received 1300+ contacts for my business, which was pretty solid work.

Currently, writing and web design are going to be my more concentrated tasks, so we will see how that goes.

[roberto]

(02-12-2016 03:18 PM)TheFinalEpic Wrote:  

I farm out tasks for contact research, day to day scheduling, and design/writing. You need to highly specify what you need done, and explain it as if it is for a 3rd grader to understand. That being said, I paid around $300 and received 1300+ contacts for my business, which was pretty solid work.

Thanks, that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Would you care to provide a recommendation?

[TheFinalEpic]

(02-12-2016 03:28 PM)roberto Wrote:  

(02-12-2016 03:18 PM)TheFinalEpic Wrote:  

I farm out tasks for contact research, day to day scheduling, and design/writing. You need to highly specify what you need done, and explain it as if it is for a 3rd grader to understand. That being said, I paid around $300 and received 1300+ contacts for my business, which was pretty solid work.

Thanks, that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Would you care to provide a recommendation?

I'd make an account on Upwork.com and just post your job. What I would do before hiring anyone is ask for a sample of their work and their organization of how they chart the potential clients. Other than that, I'd go for low end workers unless you have a bit more to spend as its a "mindless task" (going through Google essentially). Save the big money for the skilled work.

[Running Turtles]

Old Rich's post from 2011 seems to be the general consensus among people who hired companies or VAs from India before. If you're looking for programmers, you might want to check out some Argentine companies as well. A family member had nothing but good to say about them, but they're much more expensive than Indian companies.

[tynamite]

Here's a legit site for getting virtual assistants.
https://www.fancyhands.com

Here's a legit site for getting easy jobs done that can be done in 30 seconds.
http://mturk.com Mechanical Turk is so good, someone used it to make a camera that prints out words of what you've photographed. http://mattrichardson.com/Descriptive-Camera/ Here's some turks that are forbidden.