How to Hire an Executive Assistant – Complete Guide

You may think that executive assistants are a luxury for post-IPO enterprises. The truth is that EAs are even more crucial hires for startups than for big companies. Why? Because startups cannot afford to burn unnecessary cash, and one of the most strategic ways to ensure you stay focused on high-impact goals is to hire an EA to work side-by-side with you. But do you know how to hire an executive assistant? 

The first thing you need to do is assess your needs and then create a precise job description that attracts the right candidates. After that, you should strategize for smart recruiting and determine if there’s a cultural fit. 

When your new hire joins your company, it’s all about two decisive factors: a successful onboarding process and managing their performance. But before we dive into all of these components, you should have a clear understanding of the EA role.

As a company that focuses on training top EAs and pairing them with execs like you, we want to help you understand what kind of support you need and the main steps to find it. 

Table of contents

• What is the role of an executive assistant
• Assessing your needs
• Creating a precise job description
• Strategizing for Smart Recruiting
• Managing Performance and Being Future-forward

What is the role of an Executive Assistant?

What is the role of an executive assistant? If you’ve never had an executive assistant before, you might think that EAs are the staff members who order office supplies, pick up the phone, or memorize your coffee order. And while all of that might actually fall under the EA scope, it’s not even close to everything they do. 

How to Hire an Executive Assistant: key areas of support

For instance, the types of hands-on support you can expect from a Viva executive assistant can be grouped into six different buckets: 

Calendar management

Keeping up with your calendar can be a challenge, especially if your company is going through rapid growth. Recurring meetings tend to multiply, and team members simply find and slot time into your calendar without consulting you. That’s how you end up having too many meetings in one day, with no restorative breaks between them. No prep time, no breathing time. Just you with a full day, going from one meeting to the next, and no time to focus on deep work.

When you bring an executive assistant on board, they can compartmentalize your calendar, manage inbound/outbound scheduling, resolve overlapping meetings, attend meetings on your behalf, and ensure you have at least 5 minutes between meetings to clear your mind and prep for the next meeting.

Email management

Managing your personal email is a piece of cake, but when you become a VP or C-level executive, the amount of cold emails, spam, meeting invites, and endless threads grows exponentially. If you manage your own email, chances are you spend too much time going through your inbox, you rarely (if ever) make it to inbox zero, and almost unavoidably, miss out on important emails or take too long before answering them.

Delegating email management to your executive assistant means they can categorize and triage all your emails, draft and send out replies, filter and delete spam, and clean up your inbox. Our EAs are always alert and make sure their executive reach inbox zero every day.

Travel and expense management

When you travel constantly for business, you have little to no time to waste. Attending a summit, meeting prospects for coffee, or catching up with important customers is already pretty time-consuming. If you’re the person who also has to handle reservations and map out your itinerary, you’ve got an unnecessary burden on your shoulders that could be alleviated if you had an EA.

An executive assistant can ensure your trips run smoothly by researching and booking the best flight and hotel, securing a coworking space, making rental car reservations or a driver, coordinating networking lunches or coffee breaks, and completing expense reports the moment your trip comes to an end. One of our EAs has planned so many trips for her executive that all it takes for him to approve an entire itinerary is to just click on his preferred options for flights, hotels, and restaurants. What used to take at least a couple of hours is now completed asynchronously and in a matter of seconds.

Meeting support

We’ve all joked about how a meeting could’ve easily been an email, but how can you achieve that shift in real life? Some meetings have been ongoing for as long as you can remember and some include several members of the executive leadership team –  can you really pull the plug on them?

Executive assistants are always looking after you and your productivity, which means that a truly outstanding EA will make executive decisions when it comes to the meetings you attend. At the end of the day, you’re the one who will make the final call, but your EA is there to challenge some meetings and help with others. They can prepare pre-meeting briefings, agendas, and decks, coordinate board meeting logistics, take notes, and follow up on assigned action items. If they think a meeting is unnecessary, too long, or too frequent, Viva EAs are trained to encourage you to pull the plug.

Team engagement

As a startup leader, there’s probably a lot on your plate and yes, you should focus on your priorities because they will move the company forward. But what happens if all you can focus on are company goals? That means you won’t have time to attend to responsibilities that are just as important, such as leading your team. If you’re struggling to find the time to guide and encourage your team, hiring an executive assistant is the perfect approach.

EAs have a privileged vantage point: they understand leadership’s priorities and know the team’s struggles. If they spot a decrease in team engagement, they can immediately flag it so you can put more time into building team spirit. Your executive assistant can plan team or company-wide offsites, organize team events, or coordinate gifts for team milestones. One of our EAs has helped her executive become a better leader by ensuring that her team is fully engaged and feels valued and appreciated. EAs ensure teams are not only productive but also happy and motivated.

Operations and special projects

If you’re looking for an executive assistant who can do all of the above and then some, then you have to be really picky with who you choose. By this, we’re not referring to a specific college degree or designation, not even to previous EA experience, but the skills that can tell who would make an outstanding EA and who would be just a good EA. To give you an example, some of the executives we work with have described their Viva executive assistants as being “thought partners” or “a second brain”.This is why startup executives think so highly of their Viva EAs.

An executive assistant can organize documents and workspaces, create playbooks and process flows, conduct research, and prepare reports. One of our EAs found out her company had 228 contractors, but no centralized information about them. She took it upon herself to create a database that housed all vendor details, making it accessible to all company leaders.

Assessing Your Needs

Now that you have a better understanding of all the support areas an executive assistant can help you with, it’s time to get specific about your needs and learn how they can help you hire the perfect executive assistant. All executives could benefit from getting support on email, calendar, and travel management. But what do you need? We suggest you ask yourself these 5 questions and make a list with your answers. 

1. Which tasks tend to fall through the cracks most often? 
2. Which are the least impactful projects you find yourself working on?
3. What part of your job brings you the least joy? 
4. What are some repetitive tasks on your to-do list that you’d feel comfortable letting someone else handle? 
5. Which projects have you postponed due to lack of time?

You can see this list as the first draft of what will become your executive assistant’s priorities. Imagine that everything you don’t have the time to do gets picked up by someone else. That’s how you move the needle forward. 

How to Hire an Executive Assistant: Creating a Precise Job Description

If you want to get an outstanding executive assistant, your job listing should be equally remarkable, setting the tone. Refrain from posting generic job descriptions; instead, be specific about what you’re looking for. Find a way to incorporate some of the needs that made it to your list above, and talk about your working style and the company culture. 

Pro tip: Be clear about what the growth path for that role will look like. Exceptional executive assistants are really ambitious. Seeing that they can move up or grow within your company will attract the type of candidates you want to apply. 

Strategizing for Smart Recruiting 

Hiring for a key role can be a lengthy process. In the time it takes some companies to perform initial screening, arrange interviews, conduct behavioral or personality tests, and complete background checks, the person you were eyeing as your ideal candidate might have accepted another offer. 

That’s why a lot of startups prefer to entrust the entire process to specialized companies with EA hiring experience. At Viva, we’ve onboarded over a hundred startup executives, pairing them with some of the best executive assistants they’ve ever had. Our process guarantees that our EAs are fully onboarded and ready to add value to your company within <24 hours.

Assessing Cultural Fit

When hiring for an executive assistant, a lot of execs focus too much on two variables. The first is the candidate’s previous EA experience and the second is whether they have the “right” degree. Time and experience have taught those of us at Viva that the EA role requires much more than that. The ability to figure things out without needing hand-holding, being able to adapt to the executive’s ever-changing needs, having a driver mindset, and willingness to exercise extreme ownership of responsibilities and decisions are some of the skills that set top-notch executive assistants apart from those who are less capable. 

Make sure that the EA candidate to whom you make an offer has the people skills you need and is aligned with your company’s culture. Someone who resonates with your working style, vibrates with the company mission, and believes that what the company does matters, is someone who will perform better and stay put for the long run. 

Onboarding and Integration

An effective onboarding process can make or break an employee’s experience – and can set the stage for their relationship with and performance in your company. Research shows that 93% of employers understand the importance of a positive onboarding experience, and realize that it directly influences a new hire’s decision to stay with the company. Unfortunately, 29% of employees feel their organization did not adequately support them during the onboarding process.

We recommend you follow these five steps to ensure your new EA has a successful onboarding experience: 

1. Come up with a pre-onboarding protocol
2. Ensure your new EA knows the itinerary for the first couple of days
3. Appoint a designated onboarding buddy
4. Let your EA shadow you in as many meetings as possible
5. Schedule weekly 1:1 meetings with your new EA

How to Hire an Executive Assistant: Managing Performance and Being Future-forward

At Viva, we believe in a culture of open feedback, and it’s an approach we always recommend for the executive assistant and their executive because we believe open feedback is truly valuable for everyone. The way we see it is: that if there is no open communication about what’s working and what’s not, there is no room for growth. Give valuable feedback to your EA and see how they become better every day. 

Creating opportunities to continue to help your EA grow will benefit you, too. This might mean giving them access to training programs that are relevant to their work duties, allowing them to attend workshops, and seeking mentorship opportunities for them. Finally, establish clear performance objectives aligned with the company’s goals. Being transparent about your expectations gives your EA a map with clear coordinates. 

If you’re curious about the challenges of finding the right executive assistant and how to overcome them, check out this article.

If you’re ready to hire an executive assistant but going through the entire process seems too daunting, don’t worry. 100+ executives just like you have trusted us when searching for the ideal business partner and have claimed to see value in less than a week. Chat with our team and see which plan best fits your needs.