Better Virtual Assistants: Filipinos, Indians, or Pakistani? Experiences please.

I guess I will check out ODESK and find out what is to be had there.

It depends on a lot of factors. You'll find extremely skilled, talented and hard working people in both the countries. At the same time, there are people who are not so skilled or talented, too.

I've got in-house team of 11 working in India and a few people from PH. Your hiring process should be good enough to weed out the bad prospectives and select only those who will fit your needs - both skills and attitude wise.

Have a set and strict selection process. When you post your job, direct all the e-mails to a separate e-mail and have the gMail vacation autoresponder enabled. In that autoresponder, have a link to a questionnaire consisting of 6-7 questions. You can write them yourselves depending on the tasks you're hiring for.

That will weed out a lot of people itself. The ones who do take the test - go through their resumes and pick the ones you think are good for the second round of interview. Conduct that over Skype and then you can sign the hiring agreements, etc (if you have any).

Then, the training is extremely important, too. Good training in the early stages can save you lots of time, frustration and money (!) later. You don't have to spend lots of time correcting their mistakes, etc.

These days, I have a QA gal who takes care of checking everything is in the right place and being done the right way plus other couple of general stuff. She's from Phillipines, and she's great. Her work ensures that other people's work is according to the benchmark set by the organization. This way, I don't have to spend hours manually checking if each and every order is being done the right way. Similarly, several other people fill other such holes. Makes my job really easy.

They have their set tasks that they get in the morning through Basecamp. If they have to interact, they use Campfire and we usually have a team session at least once a week. All the training, important passwords, other information is posted in Backpack. Once they are done with the day's worklog, they complete a form that we created using Google Docs. It automatically fills up a spreadsheet and the QA gal can pick up from that point and see if everything was done correctly, etc.

Being in India, I *usually* prefer programmers in India. Its much easier to explain stuff, especially technical, in person than it is online (Or rather, I've not found the right solution!).

Make no mistake though, you can easily find really good programmers in PH, too. Same with any other task - there are plenty of good and skilled people in either country. You just need to know where to advertise, how to hire and how to train.

However, to extract the best out of these people, it's really important to have good systems in place. From hiring to training, and every other single thing in your business; break it down into small things and then assign those small things to specific workers. As you go, you'll refine and better that process thus making it more effective. However, you have to start simple and keep on building on that process.

If you want a really good VA without having to do a bunch of digging around, hiring new VA after New VA...Prepare yourself to pay about $250 a week to start and you can get someone from the states.