The emergence of virtual assistants during the new normal

The emergence of virtual assistants during the new normal

The Virtual Assistant Staffing Agency was first started by Christine Durst in 1995. The term “Virtual Assistance” is believed to be first used by Anastasia Stacy Brice and life coach, Thomas Lenard, around 1996. It became the pop word around that time when she was working for overseas clients as a Virtual Personal Assistant arranging travel plans, managing admin work, etc.

December 2019, when people were busy making new year’s resolutions, we never thought how the following year was going to shake us to the core!

In March 2020, there was a nationwide lockdown and slowly the whole world was under the sudden impact of the lockdown. Novel coronavirus became a threat to the globe.

Everything stalled and moved fast simultaneously, a rise in widespread infection which unfortunately led to millions of deaths, layoffs amidst the virus spread, transition from work from office to work from home, emergency shutdown of companies, bankruptcy, debts, no human touch, no contact. It felt like the end back then.

But there were few who turned that threat into an opportunity. Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, was on a hiring spree when the recruitment process was freezing elsewhere.

There were so many issues that we had to deal with. Today, here we are going to talk about the work from office to home transition for virtual assistants. The process has been relatively smooth for the virtual assistants and the Virtual Assistant Staffing Agency as they already have the experience to work from offshore.

Here are few of the reasons for the rise of Virtual Assistants and Virtual Assistants Staffing agencies during the new normal.

1. Delegate everyday tasks: Virtual assistants are known for providing a chain of services seamlessly, like say, administration and operational tasks. Be it booking flight tickets, and hotels, be it managing calls, emails, or calendars, or be it scheduling meetings, appointments, and interviews, or online researching for your business – they do it all well.

When the pandemic struck, many businesses were impacted majorly the seed-level ones and medium-sized enterprises as well. While the business owners and executives were busy making decisions and planning ways to generate revenue and keep their business afloat – the VAs were hired for handling the administration and operations of the firms.

2. Cost cutdown/ hourly basis: Hiring a VA independently or from any VA staffing agency is beneficial for your business any day, with or without the pandemic. For starters, you don’t have to take care of their remuneration, onboarding if you hire from the latter. VAs are usually trained or need minimal training. We know that training takes up a lot of time and money. And during pandemic when cash flow was one of the major issues, then hiring VAs were the best decisions. Moreover, you don’t need to hire a VA for full time role, you can hire them on hourly basis, get your work done and also save up a lot of finance!

3. Pool of talents: India and Philippines are known to be the best of few where skilled virtual assistant staffs are present. The virtual assistant pool is unending and vast. The plus point from hiring a VA from VA Staffing agency is that you get a big pool of talent in the same place otherwise, there are many other sites like Upwork and Fiverr where you can find independent VA who have their own quotes for their respective services they can provide.

During pandemic, VA became very popular for their experience working for international clients and having the actual market knowledge. You will always find your next best hire in this vast market.

4. Experience of working without physical supervision: The primary reason why VA had a smooth to no transition during pandemic is because they have always got their work done without any physical supervision from their client. Their efficiency were never questioned even during the “new normal” time. They are also known to have mastered work-life balance.

What Accoance can provide you ?

  1. A pool of talent where you can sift through people according to your requirements.
  2. Swift onboarding and payrolling system of the VAs from our end. Hence, clearing more of your time.
  3. Trained and quick-learner professionals as they have experience working with diverse industries.

So, what are you waiting for click here and book your first free consultation call with us!

The Benefits of Hiring a Skilled Virtual Assistant

The Benefits of Hiring a Skilled Virtual Assistant

Are you looking forward to expanding your business? Want to cut down operational costs, speed up the recruitment process, and invest most of your time & energy for your other business functions?

You know who your perfect fit is – a virtual assistant. Now, let us begin with the virtual assistant tour!

Who is a virtual assistant?

A virtual assistant is a contractor who will provide your company with a series of services such as administration work (scheduling calls/meetings, managing calendars, answering to emails, preparing excel sheets/presentations) to skilled work such as (recruitment, bookkeeping, payrolling, accounting, talent research, lead generation, content creation, social media management, etc.) from a remote location, without any supervision needed from your side.

Virtual assistants have been in the corner for almost a decade now, but they have been mostly popular for the admin work. With changing times, their skills have polished as well and now, we can hire them for any skilled job as well.

From small scale businesses to MNCs, they all hire the virtual assistants mainly for the admin work. Nowadays, we can also find they are being hired for the skilled work as well. Since the COVID-19 pandemic has struck, the last two years have made the culture of hiring virtual assistants popular as they already have had the experience to work remotely with efficiency. We have the views of how companies like Spotify, Netflix, Apple, Meta have a mixed response towards the new change in work culture.

Why hire a virtual assistant?

  1. Cost effective: Hiring a virtual assistant saves a lot of your finances. For starters, they don’t need to be physically present in the office, that is your workplace savings. They have a home office or are working from an offshore company. Also, they pay for their own internet connections, and sometimes tools and software’s they use to aid with your tasks.
  2. Directed time investment: Now, this is applicable for small scale businesses, they’ll take care of your backend (admin)jobs like managing your calendars, booking your travels, answering calls, drafting emails, making reservations, data entry etc. while you stay focused with your other parts of your business – making objectives, targets, meeting up with potential stakeholders & investors, generating revenues. Also, you don’t need to hire and train an employee with the tedious & mundane jobs.
  3. Contract flexibility: In a conventional setting, a full-time employee is paid by hours worked per day, in contrast, usually, a virtual assistant is paid not by hours but in terms of the tasks they do. 

Why hire from a virtual assistant staffing agency?

Let’s walk through the benefits of hiring Virtual assistants from any Virtual assistant staffing agency.

One of the major reasons is, it helps you with the vetting process; where most of the organizations lose their time while making joint contracts. Vetting process is a process where you will decide to make a contract with the respective agency once you have made a thorough investigation with regards to their business background.

Another reason, interim help. Many a times, you will be a handful of tedious and heavy jobs and short of staff, that’s when virtual staffing agencies can step in and be of huge assistance as you can hire a temporary employee of theirs until your needs are met.

Besides this, when you are signing the contract with the respective virtual staffing agency, you are almost signing a contract with a large pool of candidates with similar talent or more than your current requirement. You get the luxury to sift the talents and find the perfect fit for you.

Apart from this, it saves you a bunch of time and you can invest it elsewhere for your other business function. The question is how? The employees onboarding and payrolling process will be handled by the agency and all you need to do is draft and sign the contract and pay for the invoices. Neat and sleek, isn’t it!

Finally, the process of hiring speeds up as the agency knows your pre-requisites for the job profile as well as they are aware of their employees’ talents and skill sets. Again, you also have the guarantee of the effectiveness and quality of the employees as the vetting process was successfully done.

In a nutshell, hiring a virtual assistant is one of the best decisions for a growing venture company. Remote working is the new era of work culture – that is getting acceptable and more and more universal which in turn makes a growing need for skilled virtual assistants.

Why Accoance Technologies?

We, here at Accoance have a set of dedicated virtual assistants who are ready to help you. The services we can provide you with are,

  1. Executive PA support: In need of assistance to manage your work and schedule! We’ll aid you with diary /inbox/ calendar management, travel/personal reservations, research & reports, event organization.
  2. Data Entry: Data entry is one of the most tedious jobs! We’ll aid you with the best data entry specialists. Your work will be done with utmost speed and accuracy, you need not worry about cross-checking.
  3. Customer Support: Worried about missing clients and customers! We’ll aid you with our customer support specialist who can make and receive calls, resolve the queries/tickets raised over calls, mails, and chats.
  4. Accounting VA support: Need a hand or two to keep tabs on your finances! We’ll aid you with QuickBooks/ Xero certified advisors to check and to keep up-to-date with your accounts.
  5. Real Estate VA: In need of talent who understands Real Estate business tasks! We’ll aid with best talents who have attention to detail and deal with repetitive tasks and paperworks for your client, along with follow ups from clients for the positive outcomes.
  6. Talent Acquisition VA: Finding the right fit for your company and/or client is made easy! We’ll aid you with sifting resumes/ screening/ processing of the selected candidates till the final interview.

So, what are you waiting for, hire the best talents for your job from Accoance! Still have queries – get in touch – we are just a few clicks away.