How to hire a virtual assistant for admin

The job is the running of a person's week or a small company's back office. Six tasks account for most of it.

Inbox triage

Sorts your inbox, drafts replies for your review, archives the noise and surfaces what needs your attention. Routine replies go out independently within limits you agree.

Calendar management

Books meetings, manages reschedules, blocks focus time and keeps your schedule clean across time zones, with prep information sent ahead of each meeting.

Travel booking

Books flights, hotels, transfers and accommodation, and prepares itineraries with confirmations, addresses and contact details ready before you leave.

Document & note prep

Formats documents, prepares meeting notes, drafts standard correspondence and maintains your filing system so someone else could find things.

Expense tracking

Processes receipts, categorises spending, prepares monthly expense reports and syncs them with your accounting tool.

Supplier & vendor coordination

Liaises with suppliers, schedules service visits, manages quotes and handles the routine vendor communication that should never reach you.

Before you hire, write your own version of this list. Go through last week's calendar and inbox and mark every item someone else could have done with the right access and a clear rule. That list is the brief, and it decides the hours, the skill tier and the price.

Admin support is judged on reliability more than brilliance, so the skills to test are the unglamorous ones.

Written English you would send under your own name. Most of an admin VA's output is email. Ask for a written reply to a realistic scenario, not a CV, and read it as your client would.

Prioritisation with a reason. Give a candidate ten mixed items and ask for the order they would do them in and why. The order matters less than whether the reasoning is about your business or about their convenience.

Calendar discipline across time zones. If your meetings cross borders, a candidate should be fluent in Google Calendar or Outlook and a booking tool such as Calendly, and should describe how they avoid the classic mistakes: double bookings, meetings at 4 a.m. for one side, and no prep sent.

Documented habits. The best admin VAs write things down without being asked: a running list of open items, a note of what was promised to whom, a filing convention. Ask to see how they track their own work.

Security hygiene. A candidate who is comfortable working through a password manager, who does not ask for credentials in plain text, and who understands that access is revocable is already ahead of most applicants.

Tools are secondary. An assistant who has run an inbox in Gmail can run one in Outlook within a week; what does not transfer is judgement. Hire for judgement and train the tools during onboarding.

Four questions, asked of a freelancer, an agency candidate or a managed provider, expose the difference between someone who has done this work and someone who says they can.

Which of these tasks have you owned before, and in which tools?

"Owned" is the important word. Answering emails that someone else triaged is not running an inbox; booking a hotel once is not travel management. Ask for the last business they did each task for, the tools they used, and what went wrong at least once. A candidate with no story about something going wrong has not owned the task.

How do you report what you did each day or week?

You need a rhythm you will actually read: an end-of-day note, a Friday summary, a shared task board. A good answer names a format and a time. A vague answer means you will be chasing for updates, which is the job you were trying to get rid of.

What happens when something is outside your scope?

The right answer is a rule, not a reassurance: "I flag it to you with the context written up, and I do not act on it until you say so." Admin work meets scope edges every day, from a supplier asking for a discount to a client asking a question only you can answer. You want someone who stops at the edge and hands over cleanly.

How do you handle access, passwords and customer data?

Listen for a password manager, for an understanding that credentials are never sent in a message, and for no discomfort about signing an NDA and a data-processing agreement. This question also tells you whether the person or the provider behind them has a process, or whether you would be inventing one.

If you are hiring through a managed provider, ask the provider the same four questions about the assistant they propose. The answers should come with the assistant's name attached, not as a general policy.

The model sets the price more than the task does. A UK-based assistant, employed or through a UK agency, costs what a UK salary costs plus employer National Insurance, pension, holiday, a desk and your management time. A freelancer's hourly rate looks lower until you add the hours you spend recruiting, briefing and covering their absences.

A managed admin VA from Ant Assist starts at £5 per hour on the entry rate: the first 6 months on the Entry tier, 3 months on Mid, 1 month on Expert. After the promotion, the admin rate card applies: £6.30 per hour full time on the Entry tier (160 hours a month, £1,008) or £6.50 per hour part time (80 hours a month, £520), with Mid at £7.25 and Expert at £7.88 per hour full time for assistants with longer experience. There are no platform fees on top, and the rate includes the assistant's time, our office facilities in Cairo, and the supervision and management that keep quality up. For the comparison against a UK employee, line by line, read how much a virtual assistant costs in the UK or put your own hours into the calculator.

What the £5/hour entry rate includes

• Dedicated VA, never shared
• UK-hour aligned support
• Management and supervision included
• Recruitment and onboarding included
• Office infrastructure included
• VA replacement available
• No NI, pension, or holiday costs
• No long-term contract, rolling monthly

Most clients have their VA active within 5 to 7 working days of signing up. What happens in the following four weeks decides whether the hire sticks.

Before day one. Set up access through a password manager, never by sharing credentials in a message. Write the three rules your assistant needs on the first morning: which emails they may answer without you, which meetings may never be moved, and who gets a reply from you rather than from them. A one-page list beats a 40-page manual nobody reads.

Week one: access and observation. Your VA reads the inbox and the calendar without acting on much, learns your tone from the last month of sent mail, and writes up the patterns they see. You approve every draft. The output of the week is a shared document describing how your week actually runs.

Week two: drafts and bookings. Replies go out after your review; meetings are booked and rescheduled with you copied in; the expense pile from last month is cleared. The end-of-day note starts, and you read it.

Weeks three and four: ownership. Routine replies go without review inside the limits you set. The calendar is theirs to defend. Supplier chasing, travel and document prep run without a prompt from you. You spend the time you have won back on the work only you can do, and you keep one weekly review slot, because that slot is what keeps the standard.

At Ant Assist a UK team supervises quality alongside you throughout, reviews the work with your VA, and adjusts hours and scope as the business changes. If the fit is wrong, we replace the VA and carry the handover, with no re-recruitment and no restart from zero.