4 Tips for Hiring the Right Business Assistant

Starting an online business, launching a startup, or simply creating a product that’s in demand, requires a substantial amount of energy and commitment to be done properly, and as we continue to invest this energy, we start to realize that more and more time goes to tasks such as email management, reputation building, and general activities that don’t really correlate with our business strategy, yet are essential in their own way.

Email for example, can turn out to be one of the most time consuming parts of your business — you’re always replying, always receiving new messages, and surely there is someone who you’ve forgotten to reply back to as well. It’s all part of the business creating process, but eventually you want to step it up a little and perhaps introduce an assistant that can help you with these less technical and less financial parts of the business.

If you’re not sure as to whether you need an assistant, answer these questions to yourself truthfully:

  1. Do I feel satisfied with my overall performance at the end of each day?
  2. Are my energy levels equally balanced after a day of work?
  3. Am I contemplating to stop running my business, because it feels too much?
  4. Am I deliberately slowing the growth rate of my business to keep up?
  5. Would I be able to do more if I had an assistant?

and more often than not, we can quickly realize where our main issue lies — it’s in the manpower, and if we don’t put aside some of the tasks for another person to do, we can often run out of juice altogether. The following tips are to help you find the right person as your future business assistant.

 

1. Decide on the Tasks & Salary

The first steps towards finding a great personal/business assistant is to find out and realize the tasks that you wish for this assistant to do on your behalf, and on top of that you need to figure out a good salary plan that you can work with. Only when you’ve got these two things figured out, can you head to sites such as Elance to find the appropriate people who could do the job for you.

Hiring the right assistant

Freelance sites offer a variety of people, so you need to be clear about your ambitions and expectations, and don’t be afraid to chip in a little bit more if an experienced assistant approaches you. Do you want them to do social media tasks for you? Or perhaps you want your assistant to schedule and organize things for you. Maybe both!

 

2. Take Time to Get to Know Them

You are, after all, going to trust this person with a significant part of your business, and so it is good idea to go through a concise interview process with each candidate to get to know them a little bit on the personal side, as well as on the business side and how they plan to accomplish the tasks that you need accomplishing. Don’t settle for someone that doesn’t fit your profile, you are more likely to run into further headaches that way.

 

3. Learn About Their Previous Experience

Entrepreneurs often talk about one of the most important things to learn about new hires, is their personal experience in the field, and their general understanding of the tasks that they’re about to embark on. Learn about their accomplishments, both small and big, to have better understanding of the areas that the particular candidate has covered and to see how that fits in your current business tasks and model.

 

4. Can They Walk the Talk?

Naturally, you will be doing a lot of the interviewing from your own personal experience, and so some of the questions will come to you automatically and you will be able to tell their worth through your own filter, but some things can only be tested and seen by real field work.

This means, we have to check whether the candidate is ready to walk their talk on the stop, if you’re hiring a sales assistant — have them sell something to you live, or if you’re a social media manager — give them scenarios in which they have to respond to support questions and queries.