How to Find the Perfect Virtual Assistant for Your Firm with Jaime Nacach

hiring podcast virtual assistant Jul 07, 2022

If you’re struggling with time and your workload, hiring a virtual assistant might just be the best business decision you’ll ever make. While we often talk about hiring offshore talent and highlight the positive experience on the podcast, there are also some challenges and considerations you need to know before hiring a virtual assistant. For instance, would you benefit more from seeking the services and expertise of recruitment consultants, or should you look for, vet, and hire VAs on your own?

In this episode, Jaime Nacach, founder and owner of Virtual Latinos, joins us to talk about how virtual assistants can be a game changer for your law firm and why they are the future of the global workforce. He shares his insights on what you need to know before you hire virtual assistants.

Start freeing up your time to focus on what’s important with a team of capable, professional and reliable virtual assistants.

If you want to know more about outsourcing and how to hire a virtual assistant Latin America, then this episode is for you.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode

Learn the challenges of hiring virtual assistants and how to get started.
Understand how virtual professionals and offshore talent can make a difference in your business growth by saving you time and money.
Discover how Jaime’s company, Virtual Latinos, can be the perfect virtual assistant agency for you.

Resources

Schedule your Free 1:1 Law Firm Expansion Coaching Session with Profit with Law. Limited spots available!
Connect with Jaime: Website | LinkedIn I Bloominari I Twitter
Virtual Latinos: Website | Email | Phone: +1 (619) 558-1118
Looking to hire virtual professionals for your law firm? Book a call with Virtual Latinos now!
Want to know more about outsourcing tasks? Download an eBook on the 40 most common tasks you can outsource to a virtual assistant.
Tasks to Outsource — delegate these tasks to your virtual assistants!
Grammarly

Episode Highlights

Introducing Jaime

Hiring offshore talent and virtual assistants, as well as changing how you bill clients, can make a massive difference in your business growth.

Jaime has assisted in the online growth and operation of over 700 companies.
He was from Mexico City but has lived in San Diego for some years. He is a digital marketer by profession.
His digital marketing agency grew to a point where he needed to decide on how to decrease costs. His personal experience of hiring outside the US wasn’t positive.

Seeing how no one offered any virtual assistant companies from Latin America, Jaime built an agency himself in 2018. His company now helps clients from all over the US, Canada, and Europe.

Virtual Assistant Hiring Challenges

Time zone differences can create delays in workflow.
Lawyers who sought Jaime’s services were worried about data privacy. However, he ensures that various tech tools are available to protect data.
The major challenge for many employers is identifying which tasks to delegate to VAs.

Virtual Latinos’ clients can be categorized into two: those who are okay with hiring virtual assistants who have experience working with lawyers and those who prefer those without law experience.

Lawyers usually hire VAs for administrative tasks, case management, and customer support tasks.

How to Integrate Virtual Professionals in Your Office

Jaime shares that there are a lot of hybrid firms who work well with remote workers in a virtual team. He recommends this setup for midsize and larger firms.

He recommends the company have a communication platform like Slack or Telegram. It helps erase the distance gaps between the physical and virtual offices.

Jaime: “One of the things that definitely worked for hybrid companies is the fact that they have Slack or something like Telegram, where there's chatting constantly all day, which is kind of the same as obviously talking to someone. Now, of course, it's never the same as physically seeing someone compared to chatting on the chat. But, many US companies today already have communication systems in place, whether they're in the office or not. So when everybody's in that same chat, it makes it a lot easier. You erase these gaps of distance between the physical and the virtual.”

Some of his clients have also flown their assistants from Latin America to their local office. You can also consider team-building retreats.

Why Hire from Latin America?

Businesses typically hire offshore talent to reduce costs.
Trained legal assistants typically cost more than offshore talent. You can reduce costs anywhere from 30% to 70% by hiring hand picked virtual assistants offshore.

Jaime: “Having trained legal assistants is very expensive. We can go from $20 to $50 an hour, where our assistants are going to save them between at the minimum 30% all the way up to 70% in costs. The cost savings are a huge thing.”

Jaime has also started calling his virtual assistants “virtual professionals” because they are experienced and educated.

If you want to hire offshore talent, consider Latin America because it has the same time zone as the US.

Finally, choose a reputable agency, like Virtual Latinos, because they have a tried and tested system to find remote workers and vet assistants.

Jaime: “Choose to work with an agency as opposed to hiring on your own. We, as an agency, really do take all the time-consuming work of finding, vetting, and interviewing all the assistants, and we only present people three to four of the best options… The reason people need an assistant is because they’re so busy, they don’t even have time to properly do recruitment.”

How Virtual Latinos Vet Their VAs

While Jaime doesn’t have a background in recruitment, his interview process is based on how he personally hires for his marketing agency.
He looks for people who are detail-oriented, good with communication, and committed.
Virtual Latinos’ interview process includes English aptitude, personality tests, internet speed checks, and sometimes letters of recommendation or references.
It is long and boring, but it helps filter out individuals who cannot commit to the process.

Jaime: “There [are] a lot of hurdles that they have to go through, [and] these hurdles have helped us filter the people who are committed, who want to truly be part of our community, and that we know are going to most likely work with our clients and us for the long term, because they’ve already proved to us that they’re okay with going through a lot of hoops and they’re detail-oriented based on the little tasks that we ask them to complete so that we can approve them.”

Should You Be Worried About English Skills?

Virtual professionals from Virtual Latinos are one of the two: they’re good with spoken but not written English, or vice versa.
Jaime’s company ensures his bilingual virtual assistants at a minimum have ample English skills to communicate with clients, both verbally and in writing.
More importantly, they vet and recommend virtual professionals based on a client’s needs. For firms that have client-facing roles, Jaime matches them to VAs with excellent English-speaking skills.
They also require their VAs to use Grammarly to fix grammar and spelling errors.

Working with Virtual Latinos: Community and Competitive Rates

Virtual Latinos has an internal virtual community on Facebook and Telegram. The community is very active and supportive.
The company also provides them with resources on various topics.
Virtual Latinos has a smaller profit margin that allows them to give their VAs competitive rates. The VAs typically receive around 68% to 92% of what the clients pay the company.
The rate ensures that the VAs are happy with the company, thus improving both employee and client retention.
The company is also exploring incentives and perks to give their virtual assistants from Latin America. If the small business owners choose to give their VAs a raise, they get to keep 100% of that bonus.

Jaime: “Opposed to other organizations that are in the recruitment business that I know, where [they] keep 50%, or they keep 70%… There’s this huge profit margin for these agencies. We don’t want to do that … because we want to make sure that our clients are happy, and they’re only going to be happy [when] the assistant [is] happy [and] getting paid well, otherwise, the assistant is going to leave them and then they’re gonna leave us.”

Benefits of Hiring Virtual Professionals

Aside from cost savings, hiring VAs frees up your time to focus on more important things.
Look at what your attorneys and paralegals do, and you’ll notice how you can pass down some of their work to capable VAs.
Virtual assistants can take a larger role in the company. You can train and develop their skills to take on leadership roles.

Moshe: “Instead of looking at the cost savings, look at how much time you can buy… Imagine how many more clients you can serve, how much more revenue you can get, [and] therefore, how much more profit you can earn in this process.”

Jaime’s Advice

We’re just seeing the beginning of the future global workforce. More companies will hire globally because talent can come from anywhere.

Jaime: “We are at the very beginning of the future of the global workforce. The reality is that in 20 years, we’re [probably] going to be looking to hire globally, because the talent can come from anywhere.”

Take the time to change your staffing. Take advantage while you can.
Moshe and Jaime also observe how offshore staff are not only talented but also hardworking.

Jaime: “A lot of people keep thinking virtual assistants are only going to do low-level tasks. Let me tell you, clients — whether they’re ours or from other companies — are very impressed in general with the talent you can find.”

About Jaime

Jaime Nacach is the founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos, the first platform focusing on connecting Latin American virtual professionals to entrepreneurs, teams, and agencies from the US, Canada, and the world! By providing reliable, hardworking, and remote talent professionals, business owners can spend more valuable time growing their business.

Jaime is also the founder, CEO, and marketing strategist of Bloominari, a design and marketing firm offering graphic design, print and online marketing, marketing strategy, online stores, and more.

Learn more about hiring virtual assistants on Virtual Latinos.

You can also connect with Jaime on his website, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

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