Recruitment Virtual Assistant Australia

Hiring eats the week you least have to spare. You post a role on Tuesday, and by Friday you have 80 applications, half of them irrelevant, a LinkedIn search you abandoned, and three interview times nobody confirmed. The candidate you actually wanted has already accepted somewhere that replied faster. A recruitment VA closes that gap: they run the funnel so the role fills while you keep running the business.

The bottleneck this clears

Recruiting is rarely hard because the judgement is hard. It is hard because the admin around the judgement is relentless and badly timed. Sorting a Seek inbox, chasing a referee who will not pick up, re-posting because the first ad pulled the wrong people, juggling four diaries for one panel: none of it needs you, but all of it stalls without someone owning it. So time-to-hire blows out, good candidates go cold, and you either settle or start again. A recruitment VA takes that funnel admin off your desk, leaving only the part that needs your call: who to interview, and who to hire.

What they own by week four

In week one the VA learns your scorecard, your tone, and your non-negotiables: the must-have tickets, the salary band, the notice-period tolerance, the deal-breakers that quietly disqualify. By week four they run the top of the funnel end to end. They draft the ad from your briefing and post it across Seek, Indeed and LinkedIn, source passively through LinkedIn outreach and prospecting, screen inbound against your scorecard, and run the 15-minute first calls so only vetted candidates reach you. They keep the applicant tracker clean, so every candidate carries a status and nothing rots in “applied”. They coordinate the panel through calendar and interview scheduling, chase references, and send one weekly funnel report: applicants in, screened, advanced, offer stage, days open. The compounding part is the scorecard. Each round it sharpens, so your shortlists improve while your involvement shrinks.

A realistic benchmark

Across DotVA’s 25 industries, a recruitment VA running one to two open roles handles roughly 40 to 80 inbound applications a week, books 8 to 12 screened first calls, and returns a shortlist of 3 to 5 genuinely qualified candidates per role. A typical placement reclaims 15 to 20 hours a week of founder and hiring-manager time, most of it the fragmented half-hours that wreck a working day. We do not promise a hire by a fixed date: that depends on your market and your pay band. We do promise the funnel runs every day without you pushing it.

Where it goes wrong, and how we prevent it

Three failure modes. First, a VA who screens on gut and floods you with weak shortlists: we prevent it with a written scorecard locked in week one and refined every round. Second, candidate ghosting from slow, scattered replies: a dedicated one-to-one VA on your local Australian hours answers same-day, so candidates stay warm. Third, confidentiality slips when sensitive applications and salary data sit in shared inboxes: every DotVA VA works inside 1Password Teams under a confidentiality agreement signed on day one.

What stays with you

Execution is theirs; judgement is yours. The VA never makes the hire, runs the final interview, assesses technical capability, or sets the offer terms. They prepare the decision; you make it. That line matters more in recruitment than in most roles, because the cost of a wrong hire lands on you, not the funnel. If you want to model the funnel against your own headcount plan, the VA cost calculator and our transparent pricing show exactly what a specialist-tier recruitment VA costs against a local AU hire at roughly $35 to $45 an hour loaded.