Reduce VA Hiring Time with a Trust Bridge
If you have recently come to the realization that you need administrative support, chances are you are feeling a great sense of urgency to find and hire a virtual assistant to regain the margins of your life and get back to the work you truly love. Time is of the essence when you are feeling overwhelmed and buried in tasks. But cutting corners to find, vet, hire, and onboard a new VA quickly is a recipe for future disappointment and may even compound the problems needing to be solved. You need a strategy to reduce hiring and onboarding time without skimping on quality.
Recognizing the Need to Delegate
More often than not, leaders who partner with Trusty Oak feel they needed help well before they made the decision to hire a VA. Yet they also understand that rushing through the hiring process for this key role could be costly down the road. Perhaps you can relate? As high-achievers, we tend just to keep pushing ahead until one day, we finally hit a breaking point and recognize our need to delegate. Hiring a virtual assistant is one of the best ways to alleviate the burden of administrative tasks, but the process, when done well, requires significant time and attention.
So, how can overwhelmed leaders feel confident in their VA hiring decisions without the process dragging out for weeks or months?
Use a Trust Bridge
In his best-selling book, The Speed of Trust, Stephen M. R. Covey explains that the level of trust and the speed of progress and results have a direct correlation to each other. When trust is high in relationships, speed goes up. In low-trust environments, progress moves about as quickly as the regular screening line at the airport. Covey shares that in situations where trust may not have had a chance to develop yet, one way to increase trust faster is to use what he calls a trust bridge.
What is a trust bridge?
Building a trust bridge is accomplished through the transference of trust from someone with whom you already have a high-trust relationship or through someone with a proven reputation as an expert. Let’s explain this with a familiar example.
The TSA Pre-Check screening line is a trust bridge at work. Pre-check ticket holders are allowed to go through screening without taking off their shoes or emptying their bags as required in the regular screening line because they have been pre-vetted and documented as “known travelers.” With that added layer of accountability, there is a higher level of trust between TSA and these travelers, making it possible to move these people through the security checkpoints faster while also maintaining everyone’s safety.
How to Build a Trust Bridge When Hiring a VA
Here are a few examples of trust bridge options within the process of hiring a virtual assistant:
- Ask for a referral from a colleague who you know well. Going with a recommendation from a trusted friend will save you hours of research and vetting.
- If you are hiring directly on your own, don’t skip the important step of due diligence in the interview process. You can build a trust bridge by conducting formal background screenings and thoroughly checking references on virtual assistant candidates before you hire them.
- Hire a reputable virtual assistant agency with multiple positive online reviews (and without negative ones!) Agencies like Trusty Oak specialize in vetting quality candidates and have proven processes for quickly matching leaders and VAs.
- Work with a recruiter or executive assistant placement firm if you are looking to fill a full-time role. Like VA agencies, recruiters are experts specializing in finding great candidates. They have talent pools and processes that allow them to narrow in on a great hire more quickly than starting from scratch.
Trusty Oak as Your Trust Bridge for Hiring and Onboarding
I founded Trusty Oak in 2015 after working at a marketing agency startup for five years. My role back then was focused on business operations as well as project management for building client websites. We served numerous high-achieving leaders with incredible visions, and many struggled to make them a reality because they didn’t have the necessary support in place, and they rarely had time to find, vet, and hire top talent.
My goal with Trusty Oak has always been to help leaders regain the margins of their lives by providing them with quality administrative support teams. We are well-positioned to serve as a trust bridge because we have spent the last 8+ years building a positive brand reputation online and beyond.
Plus, we have systems in place to ensure our VAs are working with clients they love and who need their unique skills. We also offer a money-back guarantee to leaders if we are not able to match them with a VA. This allows us to serve as a trust bridge for our VAs and clients. This double-level accountability and commitment require us to earn and maintain the trust of our VAs and clients day after day, and this creates a win-win-win scenario for all involved.
Onboarding your new hire is also a necessary part of delegation, and Trusty Oak collaborates with leaders to develop a delegation plan that prioritizes tasks for delegation in a way that sets both the leader and the VA up for success and incremental trust building. This white-glove support speeds up the process and ultimately allows leaders to focus more on revenue-generating activities or strategic planning instead of lower-level tasks like scheduling, invoicing, or social media management.
If you are like most leaders, you need support sooner than later and are already too busy to devote an extended period of time to finding and vetting qualified candidates. We understand your pain, and that’s exactly why one of the key performance indicators (KPIs) our Trusty Oak Success Team tracks to measure success is the number of days it takes to match leaders with the best virtual assistant for their immediate needs. Our current average time to match is 15 days. (Based on the last six months of data.)
Working with Trusty Oak will reduce the time it takes to hire your new VA because we’ve pre-vetted candidates, conducted background screenings, checked references, and have a proven process for quickly and effectively matching VAs and leaders.
Get the support you need before you feel burned out and overloaded, and you’ll be ready for the unexpected. If you are already feeling overwhelmed, use a trust bridge to scale your business’s support personnel much quicker. This is the best way to reduce hiring time and get the relief you need within a few weeks, allowing you to scale your business and take care of yourself in the process.
Are you ready to find your perfect VA match? Let us be your trust bridge!
Book a discovery call with Bex Howell today.
Before founding Trusty Oak, Amber spent five years at a rapidly growing digital agency based in Austin, TX. Four of those years, she was responsible for hiring and leading both local and virtual teams while working closely with clients ranging from CEOs to bestselling authors to build their brand online. As VP of Operations, Amber helped lead the company’s growth to #15 on Austin Business Journal’s Fast50 List in 2014.
As a female founder and leader of a company that has quickly established a recognizably special culture within a non-traditional workforce, Amber has energized and empowered women from diverse professional and personal backgrounds to go against the grain of historically standard female roles in business, technology, and leadership. Trusty Oak provides an opportunity for experienced admin and marketing professionals to work independently as freelancers, but with a supportive internal network consisting of other ambitious and resourceful remote workers.