I refunded my first client without being asked to
I won’t get into too many specifics, but I’ve been doing recruiting work specifically targeted towards virtual assistants for over 6 years now, and I’ve always considered myself pretty good at it. When I got into it, I thought “how hard could it be? everyone is looking for remote work and so many online businesses work with VA’s. All I have to do is just take a couple of interviews and I’ll figure it out”. BIG mistake.
So when I first had a client take me up on the offer of placing a VA in their company, I went in head first and thought “easy money”. I posted a couple jobs on a very famous VA platform my client had mentioned and got literally hundreds of applicants in days. I thought I was the shit, had everyone spamming my inbox “hire me!”, “Im the best!”, so obviously I thought I just discovered a goldmine.
Then I started actually having interviews with them. I had all these vetting questions written down, which had taken me quite a long time to come up with. In only one day I had completed over 30 interviews with people that were supposed to be qualified, except…they weren’t. I didn’t even actually get to ask the majority of my vetting questions because none of them had the experience I had asked for or the results to show for it, so they were disqualified in the first couple of minutes.
A full week went by, and I had repeated the same process over and over again. My client was already asking how much longer it would take, since duh, they hired me to get the job done, not wait around, whilst I was losing brain cells trying to understand what was wrong with these people and why they were applying for something they were obviously unqualified for.
I ended up hiring someone who ghosted the literal onboarding call, making me look like a dumbass in front of my client. Long story short I refunded them out of my own initiative because I really delivered literally nothing. It took me the next couple of months to understand that this was not the VA’s fault. I was posting jobs on a platform with no barrier of entry for anyone. A place where you didn’t have to prove what you knew, where you weren’t verified in any way, where you could lie to anyone about anything and just get away with it, and I thought my vetting questions would solve that lol.
It’s obviously been a very long time since then, and I’ve gone through a lot of trial and error but the real lesson I learned from my first interaction with VA’s is that most employers tend to go wherever they can find the most people instead of where they can find a smaller pool of truly qualified workers. So that’s it, that’s my rant and I hope it helps those that are thinking of hiring.
Before wasting your time coming up with a thousand ways to ask the same question and ramble on and on during an interview, focus on where you’re looking first. Because most times you won’t even get to ask those questions when you realize you’re talking to someone that has no clue what you’re even asking them.