It’s a team game.

One great way to make sure your business makes the Grand Final in the virtual business world is by having top back-up and making sure you have all positions covered with a strong virtual team bench!

Any great sport team coach will tell you that success comes from having a squad, not just a team, and keeping this in mind should help you to tailor-make a recruitment policy that is on the look out for as many great “players” as possible.

As you go through the hiring procedure one of the last things you’ll do, after you’ve advertised the position, received the resumes and fired off some questionnaires, is run some trial tasks for your applicants. This is a great way to narrow the field down further because it’s the real-world performances that you’re interested in, not just their experience and their communication skills.

These tasks can be set by you in-house, or they can be set by an external website, such as Expertrating.com, which will set trial tasks that will show prospective employers a virtual worker’s real-world skill levels. A site like this, where you out task the task, can save you time and puts the emphasis of managing the task on to the site rather than you.

Here’s where it gets interesting. You have one position available but you have two or three people who complete the task well, who have communicated well with you and have good experience for the position in question. Who do you opt for?

Well, you may not have the funds or the work to take them all on for 40 hours per week, but remember the importance of squad play. You may be able to keep a couple of other players on the virtual bench, if they are the type of assistants you are looking for.

You can give them individual one-off tasks as they come up and see if they would be interested if other opportunities come up in the future.

Let’s face it – you should be looking to expand and you will need good people later; it would be a shame to just let them go without making an attempt to strike some deal.

Many virtual workers have multiple employers so this may just be acceptable to them – they’re not all after the one “killer” position to work exclusively for, though some positions may develop into that.

At Melbourne SEO Services there are always new changes to the hiring policy as it’s a constantly evolving process. Successful hiring of virtual team members is central to the business model so it’s worth getting right and creating a virtual team “squad” is part of that. Other tips on how to hire virtual workers are featured in the Outsource Profit Machine Workshop. Click here to learn more about it.