Ask HN: what do you know about virtual assistants?

Outsourcing isn't too hard. Just remember that you are still hiring someone, so you should take the time to actually interview a number of candidates and find a good fit. I recommend oDesk, but have had decent experiences with eLance as well. Many offers on these sites will come from outsourcing companies in India, the Philippines, and China. I'm sure that some of these companies do good work, and they do offer the advantage of having people in-house with many skill sets; however, I try to hire people who are independent consultants because I prefer to develop a personal relationship with the contractor.

I recommend interviewing over AIM or Google Chat and having candidates answer some questions or send you written work to help evaluate how well they know English. For example, I interviewed 8-10 people before I found my current assistant. I had them each write an example document, and I also told each of them what kind of affiliate links are appropriate for Freebie Finder (one of my websites - http://absurdlycool.com), then had them each pick the best affiliate link from an example set of links. This tested their comprehension and ability to learn from example, and I found it to be a revealing metric. I narrowed my candidates down from about 10 to a couple of candidates then chose my current assistant, who lives in the Philippines and speaks English very well. She has done excellent work and I gave her a raise at Christmas from about $3 to $4 per hour (25% raise over her bid hourly rate), and I am going to be giving her another raise soon. I've had outsourcers disappear on me more than once in the past, so I try hard to treat them well and to have backup plans. For the current assistant, I took the time to write detailed and reusable google docs about her responsibilities, so that the next training should hopefully be easier. But so far she's been great! (I am conflicted about globalization and outsourcing, but I think that if I pay more than someone bids, and treat them well, I can't really be causing harm.)

A few other thoughts:

* You usually get what you pay for, but I've gotten good assistant work for $4 an hour and a pretty solid web design for $75 total. It can be hit or miss, but once you form relationships they can be very valuable. You can probably get good copy editing and preliminary research for $7-$10 an hour. For more skilled labor, you will likely need to pay more, or do a more extensive interview search.

* Be clear about what you need and spend the time to train contractors.

* Get them to recite back to you what they will do in order to check their understanding. It can be hard to get people to admit that they don't understand you, so tease it out, at least until you get to know them.

You should post a couple of job positions on odesk and interview and give it a try! Let us know how it goes!

Watch out for bots on Mechanical Turk -- I'd add some sort of qualification test and a good way to reject bad work from people. We were using it to process 1000s of HITs a day, and the quality got to be so bad that we had to turn it off.

Charuru, could you speak to your positive experiences? (maybe types of tasks / HIT volume)

I made pretty good experience with a VA from India (no agency), currently working with the same guy for over 1 year now.

Regarding success: If you picked a reliable person, I think one of the most important things is how well you describe a task (unambiguous, measurable results). And you should have done the task before by yourself, so that you can estimate the effort and the difficulties of the task.

Usually I describe the task to the VA in form of sequential steps like a use case. When I am not sure how much time it needs, I tell him to invest 1-2 hours and then get back to me so that I can see how far he got. By this approach, I avoid to waste time and money.

For the quality assurance, I always tell him to do first 2-3 examples of the task and then get back to me. Then I check it, and if everything is fine, he proceeds with the task. This also saves me from wasting time and money.

I found the VA through mturk. After I completed my tasks there, he mailed me and asked whether I got some more tasks. In retrospecitve, I think this was a pretty good quality filter since only the really motivated guys write you an email and asking for more. Of course, this is not a scalabe approach but on a small level, it worked for me.

And I recommend building a working relationship and see him as partner, not as cheap assistant. This is something that you do rather indirectly, by how you communicate and express yourself in the emails, etc... From my experience, veing a nice person will have a big impact on the quality of the work. But that's actually valid in any field.

A note about being conflicted: if you are paying $300 USD or more per month to someone in the Philippines, that is already a good (though not "great") wage. IBM pays about $350-400 USD per month to start, for example.

Outside the country earnings are not taxable to the person doing the work (under Philippines tax laws), and anywhere outside of metro Manila (say Quezon City to Sucat and anything in between) you can stretch your dollar even further.

A lot of the other comments are spot on. Namely hire selectively, treat it as you would any relationship, be clear in your instructions and get a sample of each task before having them spend 10 hours doing the wrong thing.

A lot depends on the kind of work you want them to do, but I recommend hiring two at a time. One in the $10-15/hr range, and one in the $3/hr range.

The higher paid one is for things that require critical thought, good english, and reliable judgment. Writing emails, filtering out the useless info provided by VA#2, managing other tasks.

The $3/hr one is for pure menial labor. For instance, you want to find a group of blogs on snowboarding to contact regarding your snowboarding product. Have them return an excel file with the blog name, blogger's first name, blogger's last name, blog address, link to relevant article. Stuff like that.

The fact is that you're outsourcing work, but not all of that work is the same. Don't pay someone $15/hr to do stuff that someone can do for $3/hr. And don't waste your time and money by paying the cheaper VA to do tasks that they can't do well.