5 Tips for Hiring a Reliable Executive Assistant in Chicago

Finding the perfect executive assistant in Chicago can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. You need someone who is not only skilled and efficient but also trustworthy and reliable. 

With these five essential tips, you can navigate the hiring process with confidence, ensuring you find an assistant who meets your needs. These guidelines will help you secure the ideal candidate to support your success in the Windy City.

1. Decide on the Qualifications

An executive assistant typically needs a blend of education and experience to excel. See if you can find someone who holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration, communications, or a related field is often preferred. An MBA would be perfect, but candidates with this qualification for such a job will be hard to find. 

Besides, you’ll also want strong organizational skills and exceptional communication abilities in them. More about these skills and their importance in the following section. Many employers also value experience in similar roles, highlighting the importance of prior administrative or executive support experience.

You should also remember that those who seek executive assistant jobs must also possess excellent time management skills. Discretion and trustworthiness are crucial due to the sensitive nature of the information handled. Professionalism, adaptability, and problem-solving skills round out the qualifications needed for this role.

Now, if you want to make the hiring process easier for yourself, work with an agency that helps with executive assistant staffing in Chicago. Such a staffing agency will do all the hard work while you can simply handle the interview process by yourself. 

According to C-Suite Assistants, Chicago has a lot of offices of bigshot corporate names. The demand for highly qualified executive assistants at these offices is pretty huge. Hence, you’ll have to work very hard to find the right match for your company. Thus, working with a staffing agency to hire for this role is not that bad of an idea.

2. Prioritize Two Skills in Particular

Communication and organization skills, for an executive assistant, are super vital. After all, if they are to thrive in a fast-paced corporate environment, they need to be well-organized and know how to communicate effectively. 

Being organized is an absolute must for your executive assistant. After all, if an assistant can’t stay organized and do things on time, they can’t expect to help top-level company executives do the same. 

As for communications, these executives will have to handle a lot of the emails and calls of their bosses. Hence, anyone you hire needs to be well-versed when it comes to both corporate as well as general communications. Being polite, professional, and accurate is a must for them. 

3. Have a Practical or Role Playing Test

Let’s say you’ve shortlisted a few candidates for the role of executive assistant. Now it’s time to put these aspiring corporate job seekers to the test, but this won’t be your usual job interview quiz or test. Instead, it’ll be a more hands-on – or practical, you can say – test. 

Here’s how:

• Have the candidate over at your office.
• Assign them a few sample tasks that assistants are often required to handle.
• Time them; see how efficiently these executive assistant candidates do their work.
• Also, see how many errors they make.
• This can be a day-long test or even a half-day test.

Testing a candidate this way will put them under pressure. You can then see how well they perform and decide whether or not they are right for you. 

4. See What Other Companies in Chicago are Offering in Terms of Salary

In the higher range, executive assistants in the Chicago area make anywhere between $66,000 to $86,000 a year. However, there are many offerings that are between $22,000 and $30,000 a year. 

See what other companies are paying in terms of salary and how you can compete with them. If not in terms of money, maybe you could offer more benefits or reduce the job responsibilities. Balancing all these details will help you land a good candidate for the post. 

5. Plan the Onboarding Process

Once you’re done with the hiring, it’s time to begin the assistant’s onboarding process. This need not be long; just have them over, explain their work, and let them get to it. 

If training is necessary, that’s a different thing. However, given the extensive hiring process they went through, these recruits should do just fine. Even then, give the assistants a little time to settle down. 

To conclude, hiring an executive assistant in Chicago need not be that challenging. As long as you stick to what we’ve discussed above, the hiring process will be smooth and free from trouble.