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I’m Hailey – content strategist and founder here at Your Content Empire where we help you create more profitable, purposeful and productive content — and hopefully enjoy yourself more while doing it too. Learn more about me here >>
Taking the first step of hiring your first Content VA is a big one that can be filled with a lot of scaries, frustration and ‘what the heck am I even doing’ feelings.
But at the same time, a Content VA is usually one of the first hires a business owner will make and one that when done right can pay off big in terms of freeing up your time and allowing you to scale.
So in this blog post, I’m going to walk you through my very thorough, practically fail-proof hiring process for finding and hiring your first Content VA.
Thinking about hiring your first Content VA? Or maybe you’ve tried in the past and it did not turn out the way you wanted? Finding the right Content VA for your business can be really tricky.
For starters, it’s often a big challenge to even articulate what you’re even looking for – what they’ll be doing, what skills they should have and how you’ll be using their time. Plus, you might not even have your own systems figured out which makes bringing someone in is even tougher in terms of training and onboarding. And what I hear the most? It’s almost impossible to know if the person you want to hire actually has the skills to do what you need them to.
At the same time, a Content VA is usually one of the very first hires that a business owner makes. There are a lot of time-consuming tasks that come with content—like social media, scheduling, creating images, formatting, sending newsletters, etc. So bringing someone on to help with these things can free up your time for more of the strategy and original content creation. Or allow you to focus on things that are going to grow your business faster—like collaborations, sales, service delivery and product creation.
So I’m going to walk you through my very thorough, practically fail-proof hiring process for finding and hiring your first Content VA.
Plus you can grab my Content VA hiring spreadsheet for free to help you implement this action plan and get my personal templates for the job posting, evaluating candidates and a checklist to find your Unicorn Content VA.
Before we can get to hiring, we have to talk finding the right person. And this is where the majority of the work actually happens. In fact, the people I see who have the worst luck with hiring usually gloss over these steps.
Before you can find someone, you have to know who that someone is—especially when it comes to dating, hairdressers and hiring a content VA.
Which means answering some important qualifying questions such as:
If you’re not sure what you want your Content VA to take off your plate, start by making a list of all the things you do content and marketing-wise or things you’d do if you had more time. Then give these a time estimate for how long you spend doing them and a couple of scores 1-10 based on how happy you’d be to never do them again and how easy it’d be to train someone to take them over. Those with the higher scores are great candidates for outsourcing first to your Content VA.
Remember you can download my free Content VA Spreadsheet for a template to come up with these tasks.
Once you have a general idea of what you want your Content VA to do and how long these things will take, the next step is to create your job posting.
In the Content VA Spreadsheet, I have a template and a sample for you, but you could just create this in a Google Doc too.
Here are the sections I include:
Extra Tip: If you’re hiring locally instead of online, my secret job title is to use coordinator instead of VA. So I’d use Content Coordinator (instead of Content VA), Marketing Coordinator (instead of Marketing VA), etc.
Once you have the job posting, it’s time to decide where you want to post it and source your applicants.
There are a lot of options available but here are some considerations to keep in mind:
Personally, I usually stick with the latter 2 options unless I’m hiring for a specialized one-off project. I try to reserve one spot on my team for mentoring a college student so I can help them build their resume, gain skills and job experience and make money with flexible hours (I know how much I would have loved this type of opportunity when I was in university).
After posting the job, I usually wait 4-5 days before starting the next step which is to evaluate your applications. Then I do a quick scan through, removing anyone who either really isn’t a fit or hasn’t completed the application process.
Then I go back through again and invite the remaining applicants to the next stage which is to complete a Google form which helps make sure I have all the info I need to only get on a call with the top candidates.
It can be hard to know from just a resume or cover letter if someone is a good fit for your business. And I used to find that I’d be getting on a call with a dozen or more candidates and still have no idea how to make a decision.
Now I create a form that asks job-specific questions that I build in Google Forms and then evaluate the candidates blindly based on their answers to ensure fairness.
Here are some questions you may want to include for a Content VA form:
* You can use whatever free personality test you’d like here (or not). I don’t use it to decide on who to hire but it just helps me understand their responses within a bigger context.
Open the completed Google forms as a Google sheet and hide the email and name associated with the responses.
Then use a scoring matrix (like the one included in the Content VA Hiring Spreadsheet) to evaluate the candidates:
Here's some notes:
Then reach out and invite the top 2-3 candidates to an interview.
The interview for me is just about clarifying any questions I have about their experience (or transferable skills), whether the position is a fit for what they’re looking for long-term and to go through the details to make sure we’re on the same page.
Here are some of the questions I usually ask:
After finishing the interviews, I’m ready to make a decision. Although if 2 candidates are really neck and neck sometimes I’ll hire both on a trial basis.
And if you want my free Content VA hiring spreadsheet for the full checklist, job posting template and evaluation spreadsheet, grab the link down below.
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