When it comes to finding the right executive personal assistant, you need to make sure you are selecting the best person for the job. You might receive hundreds of applications for the position. Narrowing down your selections is essential to focus on what key candidates you want to interview.

Step 1: Review Their Resumes

The last thing you want to do is interview hundreds of people for the position. Take the time to review their resumes to narrow down your search. You want to pay careful attention to their education, prior work experience, and any special skills or certifications they have.

Ask yourself the following questions when reviewing resumes:

1. Have they worked in your industry?
2. How long did they keep their previous jobs?
3. Do they have any skills, competencies, knowledge, or certifications that would fit well with your requirements?

Do this for each resume to start focusing on the job candidates you want to consider for the position.

Step 2: Prescreen Each Candidate

The next step is to pick up the telephone and call each potential candidate and ask them some questions on the phone to narrow down your search even more. If you are using a personal assistant agency to help find your executive personal assistant, they can prescreen the candidates for you.

Key questions to ask over the phone include:

• Are there any areas that you excel at?
• Are you willing to learn new things?
• What strengths could you bring to the position?
• What weaknesses do you have?
• How do you address your weaknesses?
• Are you willing to work unsupervised?
• Using as few words as possible, what is your work style?
• How do you handle stressful situations?
• How do you address conflict?
• Are you willing to take on additional responsibilities as needed?

Basically, you want to tailor your prescreening questions based on the job responsibilities your personal assistant will have. For example, if they will also provide some nanny services, you will want to ask them if they like children and what experience they have working with children.

Step 3: Schedule Face-to-Face Interviews

Now that you have prescreened each candidate, your pool of potential candidates should have been narrowed down even more. From the hundreds of job applications you received, you should now be focusing on about ten or so people who really fit your requirements. That’s not to say if you like fifteen or twenty job candidates you shouldn’t interview each one.

Questions to Ask When Hiring an Executive Assistant

During the interview, you want to ask the right questions. These questions should extend beyond the prescreen questions you already asked the candidate. For instance, you could ask:

• How many years have you spent working in this career area/industry?
• How well can you oversee and manage multiple tasks?
• How well do you work under pressure?
• Have you ever missed a deadline or been late on a project?
• Can you assist in finding the right housekeeper and household support staff if needed?
• What processes would you use to find the right housekeeper or support staff?

Remember to tailor your questions to fit with the responsibilities and roles the person will have should you hire them. Hopefully, after your initial interviews, you will be able to narrow down the job candidates.

At this point, if you have not narrowed it down to a single candidate, you can conduct second interviews. You could also give each candidate the same task and see how well they handle it to help decide who is the best person to hire.

For help finding the right executive personal assistant, contact Staffing at Tiffanie’s by calling 866-484-5550 today!