What's Your Experience With VAs and oDesk?

I'm looking to hire my first VA to run my link acquisition (manual outreach) campaigns, and I'm wondering if anybody has any advice.

The rates on oDesk for VAs from India and the Philippines look an absolute bargain.

I'd love to know what your experiences with oDesk and hiring VAs in general are.

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You get what you pay for. That's just my experience. Sometimes they aren't the most responsive. Finding an excellent one at a good price is sometimes hard to come by.

did you get your VA ?

I have gotten VA's from odesk and elance. I prefer the latter, you just have to lay our your terms and ask preliminary interview questions. Simple as that.

I have had great luck with odesk. I do agree with the term.. "You get what you pay for".. Don't pay ghetto wages and research how many projects completed as well as hours. I tend to avoid those with 1000+ hours on 1-2 contracts...

Mostly good with oDesk.
I used it exclusively for translation and video transcribing jobs. There's a lot of scam, such as when someone from India/Pakistan registers as USA/Britain/France/Germany resident and pretends to be a native speaker. Such people use credentials and photos of real people taken from their facebook pages, still they could be filtered out after a bit of scrutiny and a small test job. It is very important to find a native speaker when you need a translation. There's a huge, huge difference between native and non-native ones. For video transcribing I had huge success with Filipino workers. They understand spoken English well (unlike for example me, hehe), work fast and their wages are acceptable. Often they even get a small bonus payment from me.

I usually don't post pay-by-hour jobs. The professionals prefer pay-by-project anyway, as they can estimate the time.
You get what you pay for, but sometimes you can find a bargain, when a talented freshman tries to get his first or second job.