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Master the Skill of Outsource Training and You’ll Never Need to Train an Assistant Again

Finding highly qualified Virtual Assistants can be a Godsend to your home based business. Unfortunately, not all of your Virtual Assistants will stay with you for the long haul. After all, they desire a flexible schedule that could change abruptly on them, forcing you to change assistants. In that situation, you are forced to hire someone new and retrain them in all of your processes and systems. By putting in a little thought ahead of time, you can avoid the bulk of this.

Pre-qualify Prospects Before Hiring Them - Outsourcing by its nature allows you the flexibility to change personnel if they are under-performing. But this doesn’t mean you should disregard the upfront sleeve rolling when sourcing an assistant. Create a well thought out series of questions that you should ask all candidates to fill out prior to interviewing them . These should include specifics as to their proficiency in the various tasks you will be asking them to do. This includes any technical proficiency such as specialized software. Ask them to rate themselves on a scale of one to ten. High proficiency candidates require less training time.

Ask New Candidates to Manually Record Their Own Processes for Future Use - It makes little sense to go through the effort to train an assistant if you can’t get some leverage out of it in the future. One simple solution is to ask your new assistant to write down the various important points of their job as they learn it. This could be in the form of checklists, bullet points, descriptions of stumbling points they encountered and how they overcame them, or shortcuts they discovered along the way. Get them to review their logs with you on a weekly basis so you force them to record while the information is fresh in their minds.

Record Video of Tasks To Create a Permanent Record - It is not to hard to learn the art of on-screen video capture. Several programs allow you to capture click actions on-screen. This is an elegant way to put complicated steps into a visual permanent record so new assistants merely need to watch the recorded video as they learn your processes for the first time. Once again, force your assistant to go through the motions of recording early in their training so they don’t forget things they encounter along the way.

Make Checklists of Processes - Checklists are great ways to reduce your various processes to simple learning. They can act as a safety net for you when you have little time to manage your assistants but require them to perform without mistakes. Almost every process can be reduced to a series of steps that will get someone to “task completion” without your ongoing involvement. If you are lucky enough to latch onto a strong assistant, ask them to recommend additions to your checklists to make life even easier.

The decision to outsource doesn’t end with hiring someone. In fact, it should merely be step one in an ongoing effort to constantly make outsourcing as efficient as possible. Taking the time to get your training recorded for future use, whether by written form, video or audio form, will pay off handsomely as you cycle through new assistants. Co-opt your good assistants into the process to relieve the burden on you.

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