27/08/2026
Here's a post that's been making the rounds in VA circles, translated to English:
Please stop the "fake it until you make it" attitude.
My client asked me to find a suitable VA for his solar business. He's very particular about experience and tool proficiency. I filtered applicants and forwarded him a resume that checked every box. He interviewed her and found out she doesn't actually have all the experience listed. She said she's willing to learn.
My client was very disappointed. He didn't yell at me, but he tightened the criteria. If you're not honest on paper, you're probably not honest at work either, according to my client.
It's discouraging because I'm willing to help people, then the client himself tells me you're not being honest, and it drains the motivation to help.
Just sharing my thoughts. Bye.
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Here's where I'd push back on the framing.
The resume wasn't verified before anyone acted on it. -- This wasn't an agency with ten people and a hundred open reqs. It was one person doing the sourcing, one client, one candidate. And still, nobody talked to the candidate before her resume landed in front of the person making the hiring decision. A fifteen minute call would have surfaced the gap before the client ever saw the resume. Instead the verification step happened at the worst possible point in the process: after the client had already invested time believing they'd found the right person.
That's not a character failure on the poster's part. It's a process gap. And process gaps are fixable in a way that "people need to stop lying" never is.
The candidate's resume gap is a coaching problem, not a integrity problem. -- Plenty of VAs get told, by course sellers, by "resume optimization" advice floating around Facebook groups, by sheer trial and error, that the way past an ATS filter or a skimming reviewer is to list every tool and skill a job post mentions, whether or not they've used it in a real project. Nobody sits most new VAs down and teaches them how to describe two years of general admin work in a way that actually shows what they're capable of. So they pad, because padding is what they were told works.
The fix here isn't a lecture about honesty. It's teaching VAs how to write a resume that's accurate and still compelling: naming the adjacent skills they do have, being upfront about what they're still building toward, and trusting that "I don't have X yet, but here's how fast I pick things up" is a stronger sell than a list that collapses under one follow-up question.
What this actually costs, if nobody fixes it -- The client tightened their criteria. Which sounds reasonable until you notice what it actually means in practice: a higher bar, applied to a lower budget, filtering out honest beginners in favor of whoever's next resume happens to survive one interview. The poster is now warier of every applicant who says "willing to learn," which used to be an honest, useful signal and is now a red flag by association.
Nobody in this story is wrong to be frustrated. But the fix isn't more suspicion on either side. It's a pre-interview screen that exists before the resume reaches the client, and better resume guidance for VAs so there's less to screen for in the first place.
