At my company, the administrative workload varies from week to week. Rather than rushing into adding additional administrative personnel, we keep one or two people on our roster who are interested in working for us on special projects an as needed basis.

We utilize three resources to find our project-based administrative help: networking, craigslist and elance.com.

Networking
Before we expand our search, we always email staff, family and professional contacts to find out if they know of anyone looking for extra work. We typically find people that are employed full time or are stay-at-home mothers through our network. These are people who need a flexible work schedule in order to take on any work. Our projects are structured in such a way that they can be done from home. It’s an ideal arrangement for anyone who needs extra cash and has spare time, a computer and an Internet connection. One email to family, friends, staff and close professional contacts, usually digs up a few qualified candidates.

Craigslist
Depending on the nature of the work, we will post to either the part time job opportunities or gigs section of craigslist. Part time job posting are better suited if you know you will have a regular, ongoing need for help. If you need help with a specific project, you are better off posting to the gigs section. Craigslist is a great resource if it’s popular in your area and has the added benefit of free posting in most areas.

Elance
The Internet age has allowed an entire new category of service professionals, such as the Virtual Assistant, to emerge. Online service marketplaces like Elance make it easy to connect with consultants and service providers, including professional, virtual administrative assistants. Simply register and post a well defined project. Interested parties both in the United States and abroad will then bid on your project. You can review samples of past work as well as reviews submitted by previous customers. You then select the service provider who you think is the best for the job. Since the service provider pays Elance a percentage of the consulting fee, it’s free for you to list your project. One downside to Elance is that you don’t usually get to meet with potential service providers and you’re never quite sure what to expect. For this reason, we like to test the waters with small projects and then offer additional projects to people who work out.

We have always used lawyers, IT specialists and accountants on an as needed basis. It’s only recently that we realized that any work we need done that is not related to our core competencies (in our case, generally any work where customer interface is required) can be outsourced or handled by a part time, hourly employee. Although we still have a core team of salaried employees who enjoy permanent, benefit-paying positions, we have learned how to utilize part time and contract-based help to handle periodic surges in our work load in a cost effective manner.

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