With the growth of your business, you need more workforces to manage your tasks and projects. As you increase your capital investment, you find yourself in a situation where you require assistance to help you with your daily tasks. For this, you may have to face the challenges of recruitment. There is a variety of reasons that leads you to make a decision of whether you want to hire a full-time employee or a virtual assistant depending upon your needs and tasks to be done. It suits to both working models of process oriented and result oriented strategy as well.
If you are just starting up your business, there may be plenty of issues why you should hire the right person for your business. A wrong selection may cost your time, effort, energy and money. In that case, let’s look at the comparison between a full-time employee and a virtual assistant so that you can make a better decision for your company. But first, for some of us who have no idea of the virtual assistant, we’ll see what a virtual assistant is!
Virtual assistant
In today’s cloud-based era of convenience, freelance and entrepreneurship, small business owners have at least one virtual assistant for connecting their worlds. Virtual assistants are individuals who work remotely from their space to provide employers with the fulfillment of specific needs and assistance for startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs.
Outsourcing is an essential factor of every business that needs to proliferate and most companies are already practicing it. It will help you to offload with a smart move. Virtual assistants are a great choice to help you with managing small yet essential tasks. Virtual assistants can go beyond conventional administrative secretaries. They can do a variety of administrative work including; scheduling your meetings, answering your emails, managing your diary and organizing your calendar. However, they are more specific and specialized as compared to full-time employees.
You can find virtual assistants, who can also manage your content writing, social media marketing campaigns, SEO, graphic designing and website development and optimizing. Hence, to be successful within a reasonable budget and a reliable assistance, you need to think outside the box.
Those days are gone when assistants were hired for routine tasks. Nowadays, virtual assistants are skillful enough to do a wide range of work. They may not be sitting in an ivory office or wearing a tuxedo, but they are talented and well trained on your required skill set. Virtual assistants are popular among e-commerce business, real estate, and email chat support chatbots, accounting, booking flights and accommodations, creating and maintaining your website’s blog, and social media management.
Now if you are well aware of virtual assistance, let’s compare them with full-time employees so you can decide which one is better for your business.
Virtual Assistants VS In-house Employees:
a) Cost comparisons
1. Training costs
Virtual assistants are skilled personals; hence, you don’t need to train them. This will let you save money that you have to spend on the training of your full-time employees. Also, if you find them less professional and you are not satisfied with them, then you can replace them. According to Training Industry Report of Training Magazine, the annual budget located for overall employee training was $308,000 in 2014. You can save this by working with virtual assistants; they start working right when you hire them with giving them orientation, training or internship. Just give them brief info of your business goals and objectives, and they will start working as per your allocated tasks.
2. Operating costs
Researches show that working with a virtual assistant saves you around $3000 on operating expenses. These include the cost of office expenses, stationery supplies, working equipment, utilities and meals. You may spend a fortune on office rents, renovation, desks supplies, useful software and periodic expensive upgrades, virtual assistants hiring will save all of the cost and you can get work done with just a laptop and a coffee mug in your hand.
3. Additional benefits
With in-house employees, you need to take care of a lot of additional costs like paid leaves and payroll taxes. You have to give benefits to your in house employees including; medical/car/healthcare insurance, sick/casual/cash/annual leaves, provident fund, and gratuity. While, if you hire a virtual assistant, then you don’t have to worry about any of the additional costs mentioned above. It’s more like freelance paid task.
Virtual assistants pay taxes by themselves, and you don’t have to think about their health insurance, travel expenses or retirement benefits. You can also scale up without risk. You can pay them hourly, weekly or monthly rates; moreover, you can give them a leave without pay when there is no work. They are flexible and readily available.
b) Productivity & Efficiency
1. Knowledge & Experience
Most new employees are not trained to perform jobs while they also need to fill your work hours to comply with payroll. The result is no knowledge addition and no professional experience for the value of your money. Hence you may be paying for a shoddy quality work. Virtual assistants are knowledgeable and professionally experienced to manage every task you need to get done within budget.
2. Saves time
Virtual assistants work to get an income handy; hence, they are highly productive and deliver the work on time with high value. They realize the importance of time and money. As their revenue depends upon efficiency, are not lazy, they save time, and time is actual money for them.
Separate ways for part-time work
A virtual assistant is hired on a temporary basis and works on project-based or task-based payment. Hence, you don’t have to pay them over-time of compensation leaves. While full-time employees have contractual policies that make you pay them additional.
Also, 9-5 time-bound employees are not comfortable to work with flexible schedules or according to different time zones. Virtual assistants are highly skilled professionals that can be hired anywhere anytime, and anything can get done. This may help you to improve your talent pool without spending additional pay. You can hire a virtual assistant on a part-time basis and increase your business accordingly.
What’s next?
If you are an entrepreneur or starting up a business, virtual assistants may be your secret weapon for growth and success. By hiring a virtual assistant, you can save a lot of time, sound money and you will be able to work flexibly. Also, you don’t need to train them or give them additional benefits, and you don’t even have to accommodate them as well. You can hire them on a task base or project base work and pay them later according to your deal with them.
There are a lot of things that makes complete sense to let you decide whether you should hire a full-time employee or a virtual assistant. Make sure you go through the pros and cons of both before deciding. There are much easier ways to find a skilled and professional virtual assistant with the expansion of freelance services worldwide. Hence, next time when you need to hire a person in your organization thinks of getting a virtual assistant in your pool and don’t let your bucks go in a bucket after that!