Outsourcing to Philippines Help

It depends on what types of jobs you required a VA to do.
First, you need to make an outline of the things that you needed to be done by a VA. This includes lick building (social bookmarks, article submissions, web 2.0, blog commenting, etc), content writing and rewriting, blog posting, design and programming or website maintenance, and the like.

It is hard to set the price if you don't have a lit of these things.

It depends, some VAs charged for 300-400$/month and some charged for less than 200$/month. Seasoned VAs are truly in demand but they are quite expensive.

Chris Ducker is surely the man who can help you with outsourcing. He runs a VA business in the Philippines. Yeah, Onlinejobs.ph is a good site to try. Other sites you can try as well are Staff.com and Fiverr. Staff.com for instance guarantees to hire full time/part time VAs, web developer, programmers etc. Most of their VAs are from the Philippines, too.

Freelance sites have a way to test them. Other than reading through their resumes, you can do an interview (via Hangout or Skype) to gauge their skills. I'm not sure if Onlinejobs.ph allows you to conduct pre-tests but Staff.com does.

$250 a month? You can probably get that with newbies, but definitely not experienced ones.

If you hire someone in that range, you will probably receive $250 worth of service and expect them to find some other job that offers more..

I used to train VAs and found them to be very polite and well educated with college degrees but with no work available. You do need to remember that their first language is not English.

I worked for a big Internet marketer, who was from the Philippines and the VA trainees were from his village.

One still works for me and I pay $300 a month.

As for how to contact them I could not tell you because these people I trained were not found by me.

best regards,
Steve Yakim

i use odesk...it seems to be losing its effect. i do not think they are as good as they us to be.

$250 a month maybe for a VA that will work for you 3-4 hours a day, do not expect him or her to work for you 8 hours a day at the amount.

If you want a well trained and experience VA, you must be willing to invest at least $500 - $1,000 a month depends on what you expect from your VA.

Hello Warriors,

I am also in position where i'm considering hiring an experienced full time web developer (coding larger scale web application from scratch) , my budget is around £500 p/m. Could anyone recommended someone on this forum, who can assist with finding candidates, or has experience with such procedures?... Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

You can contact with a lot of Filipino freelance contractors through oDesk and you might get someone really good for $250/month.

The merger of oDesk and Elance will provide more opportunities for online Filipino VAs. I believe it boils down to your budget. Once you've set a monthly budget for your VA then you can try looking for the perfect VA for your business needs via oDesk/Elance.

The pre-selection and hiring process is pretty easy since oDesk/Elance have constantly improved their processes. You can narrow down your choices by giving an exam and just choose the top 5 candidates for a series of interviews or simply a final interview. You can do this via Skype using chat or voice.

I always believe that everything is a Number's game. Even with a limited budget, you may be lucky in finding a really good talent for a reasonable rate. There are always exceptions since the interview will not test the work ethics and integrity of a candidate. A candidate with a high rate doesn't always exude quality work output nor good work ethics. This would explain why some Clients have a trial or test period. This is a proven practice to avoid investing in the wrong contractor.

Reasonable rate is sometimes synonymous to average skills and work quality. This is why a client needs to be very meticulous with his or her selection process. I also believe that if a client's lucky in finding a contractor with a reasonable rate with great skills then he or she must reciprocate by providing a rate increase after 3 months of exemplary work or provide bonuses. Even if it's online work which is so superficial and impersonal, clients are expected to practice good business ethics and integrity.

A happy employee is a loyal employee. Respect begets respect. Don't treat your VAs like slaves. Remember without them, your business won't be a success. When in doubt, always check your budget and put yourself in the shoes of the contractor. This will help you in figuring out the appropriate compensation for your chosen VA without sacrificing your finances.

It's really not just a question of going to oDesk and immediately getting hold of a good VA for $400 a month. It's not that easy.

It is really hard finding someone with the exact right skills and it's really hard testing them. Then, you have to decide how to check on them – just trust them? Or use time, doctor? Or get them to log on to oDesk every time they work – and oDesk takes a snapshot of their computer about every 10 minutes.

(That's what I currently do with my two part-time outsourcers. I specify their jobs on Basecamp, and they log on to oDesk when they are working. It works well - and they like it too.)

Interviewing for a full-time VA is a thankless task! For a start, nearly every VA exaggerates their skills. So you may have to work through quite a few before you find one that can actually do what they claim to be able to.

I'm not saying they are lying! They just have a different view of being able to do the job properly than I do

If I wanted a VA full time – in fact, I should say *when* I want a VA full time because it will happen - I would check out Chris Ducker. He sounds really cool and lives in the Philippines himself. He will actually find a VA specifically for you for a fee. Then you hook up with them and pay them from there on.

If you want to hear him talk - he's convincing – check out the podcast where Amy Porterfield interviews him on her site. It's a goodie.

But don't imagine that getting a good VA is easy: it's flipping hard. But it's still worth it when you find a really good one.

I really think it's worth paying someone a few hundred dollars to find you a good one because it will save you hours and weeks and months of probable wasted time.

Malc

What if you just need one job here and there...is there a preferred method for finding the right VA in that situation?

Hi travelsoulja! Aside from promoting affiliate products I also work in Odesk. I believe Odesk is one of the most famous online job sites for us Filipinos because it has been proven to be legit. There are a lot of Filipino VA's there.

If you are looking for experienced VA, then don't expect to pay less than $400.
Anyone accepting less than that won,t be experienced.

Hello friend,

Good question...outsourcing can be some-what trickey.

I have used a bunch of services...oDesk, eLance...fiverr, independent services for VAs.

Without knowing what you are trying to accomplish (and trust me this is important) I will give you some basic advice.

Be as SPECIFIC as you can possibly be with whatever you want accomplished. Create a list of tasks, specific targets and objectives. I have spent a lot of money going through this process and the fault was entirely on me for not being as precise as possible.

Find VAs who specialize in specific tasks. If you want a VA who is going to leave comments on blogs, dont also ask them to design you a squeeze page unless they are qualified for this. This is another biggie, yes there are some jack of all trades VAs but this has not been a commonplace, atleast not for me.

Ask them to do an interview via Skype. Ultimately you need to be happy with the other person on the line and verify that they are who you think they are. This helps me sift through my candidates really quickly as I can tell by a conversation who is going to work best with me.

All the best!