One great way to make sure your business succeeds in the virtual business world is to make sure that you have all positions covered with a strong virtual team bench. Your recruitment policy should be to find as many great A players as possible.
Having put your applicants through the prescreening process of a questionnaire, resume and covering letter, you may be left with three or four possible employees. The next step can be then to run some trial tasks for these applicants. You are interested not only in their experience and communication skills but their real–world performances.
You could set them some tasks yourself, such as part of the work that you want them to complete once they have been hired, and you could pay them for ten or twenty hours work You could alternatively leave this up to an external service. Such a service is expertrading.com which will set your candidates some trial tasks. You set up the trial job and it is managed through ExpertRating. They provide very good competency testing.
You might require someone with CSS competency for example. If the candidate says that he has this skill, you can send him over to ExpertRating and they will test him out to see if in fact he has this skill.
If you find through this process that you are left with two excellent prospective employees, you will make the final selection through your interviewing process. The person who is not successful can then be asked if they want to sit on your virtual bench. Explain to them that you are a growing business, managing virtual teams and that you will be able to offer them one off tasks from time to time. If at a later date a more permanent position arises, you will be able to consider them for this position. Many people will be very interested in being available for work in this way.
The process for finding a virtual assistant follows a number of well thought out steps. First the job is advertised on a service like JobStreet. You will often get over a hundred applicants who register their interest. You then go through their resumes and whittle the number down to around fifteen or so.
You can then send these people a questionnaire and probably a few will not return this questionnaire. You would pick the five or so best candidates from the returned questionnaires. You can set your trial job and select the best three who you then interview. You choose the best person from the interview and place the other two on your virtual team bench.
Having gone through this extensive process of selection, if you have found three golden players but have only one position to offer, it would be a shame to let the other two go completely. Offering them a place on your virtual bench can be good for them and for you. It can give them a certain sense of stability in that they know they will be offered more work from you. You know that if for whatever reason your chosen person decides he doesn’t want to work with you after all, or you find he has weaknesses you were initially unaware of, you still have two other people you can fall back on.
Successful hiring of virtual team members is central to any good business, so getting it right is essential and creating a virtual team bench is part of this.
There are always new changes to the hiring policy in every company as it’s a constantly evolving process. Here at Melbourne Video Production we believe that a strong virtual team bench is key to getting things done right. Want to know how we do it? Check out Outsource Profit Machine Workshop for more information.
