Was thinking about getting one to apply to jobs on the side for me. Anyone care to share their experience with these? Any resources you'd recommend? Thanks!
I've worked with multiple assistants that I hired for myself - both virtual and in person, both part time and full time.
Given that you seem to want part-time/virtual, my biggest suggestion to you would be: keep doing your work manually until it becomes rote enough that you can write down (use use Loom, Scribe/Tango, similar) an exact process on how to do it.
Once you can write down an exact process on how to do it, follow your own process, update it until your written process covers everything, then hire 4-5 people (or services) for a 1 hour paid work sample, and then whoever does it best, hire them ongoing.
If you were looking for someone full-time, then it'd be a slightly different process I'd recommend, but the above should work well for your part time thing.
Unless you can define the task well, it'll likely not be worth the investment in training & getting on the same page with your hire and evaluating potential hires (unless you have many hundreds of hours worth of work for them, in which case the fixed time-cost of training will give a better time ROI).
Years ago I used a service called Magic Assistant.
Some folks here might remember them. They were okay at first, but the quality dropped.
Went a few years without needing one and when I went to look them up found getmagic.com
Not sure if it's a related service or not, but they worked well for the work I needed them to do. Fiverr and hiring direct can save you some money, but you need to be extremely clear with what you need done. Using one to look for new work can definitely be lucarative too.
Given that you seem to want part-time/virtual, my biggest suggestion to you would be: keep doing your work manually until it becomes rote enough that you can write down (use use Loom, Scribe/Tango, similar) an exact process on how to do it.
Once you can write down an exact process on how to do it, follow your own process, update it until your written process covers everything, then hire 4-5 people (or services) for a 1 hour paid work sample, and then whoever does it best, hire them ongoing.
If you were looking for someone full-time, then it'd be a slightly different process I'd recommend, but the above should work well for your part time thing.
Unless you can define the task well, it'll likely not be worth the investment in training & getting on the same page with your hire and evaluating potential hires (unless you have many hundreds of hours worth of work for them, in which case the fixed time-cost of training will give a better time ROI).