When hiring your first VA, it feels like a new and exciting chapter. You expect your work to become easier instantly and for your focus to be only on high-level work. However, the reality is typically different. Many are disappointed after working with their VA for a few days or weeks—sometimes even on the very first day.
Most failures don’t come from the VAs being unqualified. If you did your VA interview right, you likely hired someone who genuinely knows what they’re doing. Instead, these failures arise from first-VA mistakes that people without experience working with them can easily make. Thankfully, these mistakes are easily avoidable.
Here, I’ll show you why many people don’t get the best out of their first VAs and what you can do to avoid these mistakes.
Common Reasons People Fail With Their First VA
They Don't Know What They Actually Need Help With
Hiring a VA without first knowing what you truly need them to do is a recipe for failure. You may think you’ll eventually figure out what you really need them for, but it may take time, and the period without clarity may feel like a period of poor performance.
Say you run an e-commerce business and you take a VA to “just help.” Nothing seems coordinated, and they guess what to prioritize while you assign them tasks randomly. On some days, they answer emails; on others, they update product descriptions. They may post on social media on some days if they think it helps.
This lack of coordination makes the VA seem ineffective, as they may stall when confused or underperform because they don’t know what you consider good performance.
Zero Or Poor Onboarding
The day your VA starts is not the day they’ll start crushing heavy targets. Proper onboarding must take place, and it can run into days or weeks, depending on the nature of your work. Complicated tasks and processes can even span months.
Without proper onboarding, they easily miss out on access and contexts needed to perform optimally. No matter how skilled or experienced a VA is, without understanding the unique way things are done with you, they can’t deliver the results you expect.
A customer support VA, for instance, will need access to relevant communication channels and guidelines for responding to different types of customer messages, such as inquiries and complaints, during onboarding.
Without proper onboarding, they’ll constantly pause their work to ask for access to specific channels when needed and for guidance on how to answer specific questions in line with your company’s style, tone, and timeframe. If you are unavailable for hours to respond, there will be a waste of time, and you may blame the VA.
Expecting A Mind Reader
Mind-reading doesn’t belong in the workplace. When a VA is new, consider them a blank slate when it comes to expectations and contexts. They never know what’s on your mind unless you say it out loud. It often shows the idea of what “good work” means between the client and VAs.
For your social media pages, you may believe good work comprises clean graphics, a friendly but professional tone, zero typos, and posts scheduled 3 days in advance. However, your VA creates simple text posts, uses casual slang, and schedules content only a few hours before posting. Depending on the environment, these are both good works, but one isn’t the one you want.
When you expect your VA to be a mind reader, you deal with countless mistakes. Correcting these mistakes takes time that would have been spent doing high-value work, and eventually, it turns into frustration.
Giving Tasks Without Systems Or Processes
For accuracy and speed, every task should have a step-by-step workflow. Some VAs have their own systems and methods, but they may not always fit into your operations. Others have no systems and depend on the one you’ll provide.
Not providing a system can leave your VA guessing, slow down their output, increase errors, and yield inconsistent results that don’t align with your business’s operations. Instead of following proven steps, they make assumptions that frustrate both of you.
Inconsistent And Unclear Communication
Remote work thrives where communication is regular and consistent. Of course, you don’t have to be available to respond to all questions in minutes, but you can’t expect quick results if you disappear for days and leave your VA hanging.
Besides being unavailable, vague communication doesn’t do anyone any favors in remote work. If your VA can’t understand how to approach a task after you share it, there’s a chance you didn’t communicate it well. And when you ghost them, they are unable to clarify doubts or get your input when needed quickly enough.
Hiring The Wrong Type Of VA
There are different kinds of VAs for different kinds of tasks, including admin VAs, executive VAs, creative VAs, and specialized ones. One VA can’t do everything.
Admin VAs do task-based, process-driven, routine, and repeatable tasks to keep daily operations smooth. Executive VAs work directly with founders and managers, operating at a higher level that requires proactive thinking and judgment making. Creative VAs produce and refine digital content, including text, images, and videos, while specialized VAs are trained or certified in a particular skill.
Hiring an admin VA to handle a creative task will not work out for you, and neither will making a creative VA do the work of an executive VA.
Wanting Instant ROI
The truth is that hiring a VA will save you more money than employing an in-house staff. However, it won’t happen instantly. Your VA will take time to adjust to your systems, processes, standards, and deadlines, and you will spend time correcting their work.
Even in-house staff who may be in the same physical location as you can take months to adjust; how much more a VA thousands of miles away? If you’re not patient enough to see the VA’s growth in your operations, you may assume they’re wasting your time, fire them, and conclude it was an experiment gone wrong.
How To Avoid These Mistakes
Start With A Task List
Before you make a job post, make a list of everything you want to delegate, then group them into categories. A task like drafting product descriptions falls under creative & content tasks, while managing CRM systems is a specialized task. This grouping of tasks lets you know which kind of VAs you need and helps you assign work to them once they resume working with you.
Build A Simple Onboarding Plan
Your virtual assistant onboarding plan doesn’t have to be complicated; it just has to be comprehensive. It should include access to the pages and tools your VA needs to do their job, instructions on what they should do, and the goals for the first week. During onboarding, you should also clarify their responsibilities and tell them how you prefer communication to flow.
Create Basic Processes Before Delegating
Before assigning tasks, the processes should be outlined first to provide guidance for the VA. This is where task-based SOPs come in handy. While you wait to build one, you can provide simple checklists of everything your VA must do before they consider a job done correctly. Alternatively, you can provide a screen recording of the task being performed to guide them.
Set Clear Expectations From Day One
From the first day of work, explain priorities and deadlines to your VA. Also, tell them about the communication channels and reporting formats. All of these can be included in your communication and other SOPs. If you don’t have a communication SOP, you can build one using ChatGPT. With all these in place, there are fewer misunderstandings, and communication can flow smoothly with messages being responded to in a timely manner.
Schedule Regular Check-Ins
Besides being available to respond to VA questions, schedule regular check-in meetings with them. Weekly or bi-weekly is good enough, but depending on the nature of your operations, more or fewer may be needed. If your rules rarely change, once a month can work, but if your needs are evolving quickly and consistently, daily check-ins may become necessary. During these sessions, provide constructive feedback, updates, and answers to their questions.
Match The VA To The Work
Your VA should match the task you hired them for—a creative VA for creative tasks and specialized VAs for tasks that require specialization to be carried out properly. Choosing the right VA for the job also involves checking their experience level. Some work can take VAs with a little experience, but others, especially when the stakes are high, need a well-experienced VA.
Give The Relationship Time To Settle
When it comes to making the most of a new VA, time plays a role. The longer your VA stays, the more they learn about your processes and the more confident they become, which is good for business. Without patience, you’ll keep firing and hiring VAs and still struggle with the same issues. But when you give it time, you’ll notice that your VA becomes more valuable to your operations.
Conclusion
When structure, communication, and clarity are involved in remote work, many failures become absent. These factors make managing virtual assistants easy, even for people who are just hiring them for the first time, but without them, people start to see hiring VAs as more of a problem than a source of help.
The lists above point out things that can help you avoid the first VA mistakes others struggle with. Use it to prepare for your next VA hire, and don’t rely on guesswork. And if you already have a VA you are frustrated with, before you let them go, let’s help you find out if it’s the right time to do so.
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