A recruiting virtual assistant supports hiring by posting jobs, sourcing candidates, screening applications against your criteria, scheduling interviews and keeping every candidate updated. They keep your applicant tracking system clean and your pipeline moving. Hiring decisions, final interviews and offers stay with you. For most small teams the biggest win is faster scheduling and fewer candidates who never hear back.
Hiring is slow for reasons that have little to do with finding talent. A manager means to review applications on Tuesday but gets pulled into a client issue. Interview scheduling takes six emails. A strong candidate takes another offer while waiting to hear back. Every one of these delays is admin, and admin is exactly what an assistant is for.
What a recruiting VA handles
Job posts and outreach
Your assistant can turn your notes into a polished job post, publish it to the boards you use and refresh it when it starts to sink. They can also source candidates directly on LinkedIn or niche boards and send first outreach messages from your templates.
Screening
Most roles get plenty of applications that clearly do not fit. An assistant can do the first pass against criteria you set, such as required experience, location, work authorization or a must have skill. They sort applicants into yes, maybe and no, with a short note on each maybe.
Be careful here. Screening should use criteria tied to the job. Write them down, apply them consistently and review the results so nothing unfair creeps in. If you are unsure about employment law in your area, check with an expert.
Scheduling
This is where many teams feel the difference first. Your assistant coordinates times across interviewers and candidates, sends calendar invites with video links, confirms the day before and reschedules when something changes.
Candidate communication
Every applicant should hear something. Your assistant sends acknowledgments, updates after each stage and polite rejections. It sounds small, but it shapes how people talk about your company.
Applicant tracking
Keeping your ATS or hiring spreadsheet up to date with every stage, note and decision. When you look at the pipeline, you should see the truth.
What stays with you
Deciding who to hire, running the substantive interviews and making offers. Your assistant can prepare interview packets, take notes on calls if you want and draft offer letters for your review. The judgment calls are yours.
Setting up the role
Start with one open role and a clear process. Write down the stages, who interviews at each stage and how long each step should take. Give your assistant access to the ATS, the job boards and the relevant calendars. A shared inbox like careers@ keeps candidate email separate from your personal inbox and lets you see what goes out.
Build templates for every message you send regularly. The first week, review each message before it goes out. After that, spot check.
Hiring the hiring assistant
It is a little meta, but use the same rigor you would want your assistant to use. Ask candidates how they have screened applications before and what criteria they used. Give a paid test with ten sample resumes and a short job description, and ask them to sort and explain. Look for clear reasoning and good written communication.
If you are new to the process yourself, our guide to how to hire a virtual assistant walks through each step, and the interview questions post has prompts you can borrow.
Volume and hours
Hiring comes in waves. A company filling one role at a time may only need part time help. A company growing fast with several open roles can keep a full time recruiting assistant busy. Some businesses combine recruiting support with broader HR admin, which smooths out the quiet months. Our HR virtual assistant post covers that side.
At delegateit, part time starts at $900 a month for about 80 hours, full time starts at $1,500 a month for about 160 hours and specialist roles start at $2,200 a month. A more experienced sourcer or recruiting coordinator may fit the specialist plan. Use the estimator on the pricing page to compare.
Measuring the impact
Track a few simple numbers before and after your assistant starts.
- Days from application to first response
- Days from first interview to decision
- Share of scheduled interviews that actually happen
- Candidates who drop out during the process
If those numbers improve, your assistant is doing the job. You will likely also notice that your managers complain less about hiring, which is harder to measure but just as real.
Working across time zones
A Filipino recruiting assistant can cover North American business hours, which suits live scheduling and screening calls. Another option is an overnight shift. That lets them sort applications and queue up messages for your morning approval, so candidates hear back early in their day. Plenty of teams run a mix. Scheduling happens during the overlap and sourcing happens in the quiet hours. Pick based on where the delays in your process are today.
Privacy
Resumes contain personal information. Store them in your ATS or a permissioned folder, never in personal email or downloads folders. Delete records according to your retention policy. If you hire in places with specific privacy laws, make sure your process respects them.
A typical week
Monday your assistant posts any new roles and sends you the weekend's applicants sorted into groups. Tuesday and Wednesday they schedule first round interviews and send updates. Thursday they chase interviewer feedback, which is often the slowest part of hiring. Friday they send a short pipeline report showing every candidate, their stage and what is waiting on whom.
That Friday report is one of the most valuable things you can ask for. Keep it short enough to read in two minutes, with names grouped by stage and a line at the top listing anything that needs your decision. It makes bottlenecks visible, and visible bottlenecks get fixed.
Mistakes to avoid
Do not let the assistant become a black box. If screening decisions happen without any review, you will not know whether good people are being filtered out. Review a sample of rejected applicants every few weeks.
Do not skip the feedback loop. When a hire works out well, tell your assistant what made the candidate stand out. When someone is a poor fit, discuss what the early signals were. Over time your assistant's screening gets sharper.
Do not forget the candidate experience. A fast, kind and clear process is one of the few hiring advantages small companies have over big ones. Your assistant is the person who delivers it.
Recruiting assistant questions
Can a recruiting VA conduct interviews?
They can run short screening calls with a set list of questions. Substantive interviews should stay with the hiring manager.
Which tools do recruiting assistants use?
Common ones include applicant tracking systems like Workable, Greenhouse or BambooHR, LinkedIn, job boards and calendar tools. A spreadsheet works for small volumes.
How do I keep screening fair?
Write job related criteria down, apply them the same way to everyone and review a sample of decisions regularly. Get legal advice if you are unsure about local rules.
Will candidates mind talking to an assistant?
Most candidates care about speed and clarity. A responsive assistant usually improves how they see your company.