A quarter of virtual assistant roles name no software at all

This article is a submission by VA Masters, a global virtual assistant recruitment agency. It places rigorously vetted Filipino VAs through a custom six-stage hiring process, serving businesses across e-commerce, digital marketing, real estate, healthcare, financial services, and more.

Alon Pearl founded VA Masters in 2021 after hiring his first virtual assistant to keep up with a growing company. That hire is still with him today. He now leads a team of about 30 and writes about hiring at volume, drawing on the 166,350 applications VA Masters processed between January 2025 and July 2026.

What 322 job descriptions reveal about the tools employers actually expect

Key takeaways

• Across 322 virtual assistant roles opened between February and August 2026, roughly a quarter named no software at all.
• No single tool appears in more than 17% of roles. There is no piece of software that most employers expect.
• Finance is the exception. More than two thirds of finance and accounting roles name QuickBooks, the strongest single-tool concentration anywhere in the data.
• Writing roles now look like design roles. The most requested tool for content creation is Canva, ahead of any writing or editing software.

The question I get asked, and the answer that surprises people

When a business owner briefs us on a new role, one of the first things I ask is which tools the person will be working in. A good number of them cannot answer.

That used to read to me like a gap in the brief. Something we needed to go back and pin down. After looking at seven months of role descriptions properly, I think it is often the correct answer.

The work has not been built yet. The owner knows what needs doing and has no settled view on what it should be done inside.

We analysed 322 virtual assistant roles opened between February and August 2026, all of them carrying a full description. About a quarter of them named no software whatsoever.

That is worth sitting with if you are about to hire. The instinct is to write a tool list, because a tool list feels concrete and makes the posting look professional. But a quarter of the businesses in our data skipped it, and those roles got filled.

No tool is the default

Here is the finding that surprised me most. No tool clears 17%.

The single most commonly requested piece of software across all 322 roles is Google Workspace, and it appears in about one role in six. Everything else sits below that. There is no baseline stack, no software that a virtual assistant is simply assumed to know.

If you have been assuming there is one, and writing your job posting to match it, you are describing a standard that does not exist.

Every category has its own stack

Aggregate figures hide the real structure. Split by work category and the picture sharpens considerably.

All figures are shares of roles within each category, February to August 2026. Categories with fewer than 15 roles are not reported.

Three things stand out.

Finance is the most concentrated category in the dataset. More than two thirds of finance and accounting roles name QuickBooks. Nothing else comes close to that level of dominance. If you are hiring for bookkeeping, the tool question is more or less settled, and a candidate without QuickBooks is a genuine gap rather than a preference.

Writing roles look like design roles. The most requested tool in content creation is Canva, at 40%, ahead of any writing or editing software. CapCut and Photoshop follow. Written content is now produced and published visually, and the role has quietly absorbed that. If your content brief asks only for writing ability, you are hiring for half the job as it is actually performed.

Technical roles are about connecting systems, not building them. Zapier and n8n lead in both tech and analytics. What employers want is someone who can wire existing tools together so work moves between them without a person copying and pasting. That is a different skill from software development and it is worth naming as such in the posting.

Sales is the loosest category of all. The most requested tool, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, appears in fewer than one sales role in ten. Sales work here is defined by activity and outcome rather than by the stack it runs on.

One number we deliberately left out

There is a tool in our data that would top this ranking, and we removed it.

GoHighLevel appears in 18.9% of roles, which places it above Google Workspace. It reaches 63% of technical roles and 64% of analytics roles. It is spread across roughly fifty separate clients, so it is not one large account distorting the figures.

We kept it out of the main ranking because GoHighLevel is the standard CRM among US marketing agencies and local service businesses, and our client base carries a meaningful concentration of both.

Presenting it as the leading tool in the virtual assistant market would be a claim about the market that our data cannot support. The reasoning is set out in full in the underlying report.

We are telling you this rather than quietly deleting it, because you deserve to see what the raw data says and why we made the call we made.

What to do with this if you are hiring

Do not write a tool list to look thorough. A quarter of the roles in our data named nothing and filled anyway. A list of software you do not actually use screens out capable people for no reason.

Do name the one tool that genuinely matters. In finance that is your accounting software. In e-commerce it is your platform. In marketing it is usually your CRM. One real requirement beats eight aspirational ones.

Separate tools you need on day one from tools someone can learn. Most software in this list can be picked up in a fortnight by someone who already understands the underlying work. Judgment cannot.

If you cannot name the tools, say so. Describe the outcome instead. Some of the strongest hires we have placed went into roles where the owner said, honestly, that the process did not exist yet and they wanted someone to help build it.

About this data

This report describes what passes through VA Masters, not the offshore hiring market as a whole. Every dataset of this kind reflects the business that produced it. Our client base skews toward the companies that find us, and most arrive on their own through search and through referrals from existing clients. That shapes what appears here.

The sample still says something real. It covers hundreds of roles across ten reported work categories and clients on four continents, and the patterns are consistent rather than driven by a handful of accounts. But treat it as a detailed view of one large pipeline, not a measurement of national demand.

Tool mentions were extracted from free text in role descriptions, which were written by a VA Masters recruiter from a client briefing call and approved by the client before the role opened. Full methodology is published with the underlying report.