Your week is finally about to wrap up, but it has felt like a comedy of errors to say the least. You’re at a meeting in Chicago, and your office’s administrative assistant booked your flight back into Newark, so you’re going to be scrambling to get to a charity event at the Guggenheim tonight at 8.
Your presentation was well-received, but you barely made it from the office to the airport on Tuesday because you had to stop and pick up some documents that no one had remembered to scan, and you know the minutes from the meetings you’ve missed won’t be enough to bring you up to speed when you return on Monday.
Your company’s shared admin staff does their best, but without a dedicated executive assistant, you spend much more time on tasks below your pay grade than you should. You know your time could be better spent, but these aren’t exactly balls that you can let drop without major consequences. You need to find a highly qualified and experienced New York executive assistant, and you need to find one now.
Whether your situation echoes that described above, or you’ve been working with an amazing executive assistant who’s moved onto another opportunity, finding an executive assistant in New York is an important process that needs to be undertaken with care. You need the right person with the right combination of attributes, skills, and experience to make your work life run smoothly.
So, what makes this city different from others when it comes to finding an executive assistant? And what steps do you need to take to find your ideal executive assistant in NYC?
A Needle in a Talented Haystack
The demand for top administrative talent in New York City is strong. It is definitely a “candidate’s market”, and you need to be able to move quickly to identify and hire the creme de la creme of executive assistants.
New York City, as a major center of commerce and home to Wall Street, has a plethora of experienced people looking for jobs and it’s easy to get flooded with resumes. A lot of these people are going to look great on paper. But when it comes to finding your perfect executive assistant, it’s all in the details! Properly weeding through the thousands of applications you will likely receive, to focus on the few people who might be right for you, can be a huge challenge.
New York is also unique in that this is a city filled with people with big dreams, and you don’t want to be a stepping stone. That’s not to say that you don’t want to hire someone who wants to grow alongside you, but if you’re looking for a long-term partner in your career, as a great executive assistant often becomes, you don’t want to hire someone who’s just looking to stay for a few months to a year and move onto something else.
In this city in particular, you may also come across many applicants who are very qualified, but are actually pursuing another career and view their office job as just a “day job.” If your executive assistant can clock out every day at 6pm to pursue their dreams, that is one thing, but if hours may fluctuate and their work with you needs to remain their top priority, you will need to make sure you haven’t brought on a talented person whose true passions lie elsewhere.
How to Find a Great NYC Executive Assistant
Even in a huge city full of talented people, it can be difficult to find the executive assistant who is exactly right for you. According to Jan Jones, author of The CEO’s Secret Weapon How Great Leaders and Their Assistants Maximize Productivity and Effectiveness, “what sets the exceptional executive assistant apart from the good, or even the very good assistant, are the intangible traits.” So you not only need to find someone who matches what you’re looking for on paper, but you also need someone who has the je ne sais quoi that makes him/her a great executive assistant for you. And the best way to find someone like that is by finding someone who is already doing the job amazingly well and who clicks with your personality and work style.
Chances are in this highly competitive market for executive assistants, the type of person you’re looking for will be employed and may or may not be actively seeking new employment. So, what is the most effective way to reach these people and cast the widest net?
One avenue is through networking. Use your friends, coworkers, associates, family, and social networks to locate great people who fit what you’re looking for. You are likely to find great people through networking, as people close to you know you and the type of person you might work well with, and can pass those people along.
Another and more efficient way of finding candidates is by working with highly experienced New York executive assistant recruiters. A company like C-Suite Assistants has a deep network of passive and active job seekers at their fingertips as well as the experience and expertise to go beyond the resume and identify those intangible qualities in a candidate that make them perfect for you. This is exactly what they have been doing for years and what they do exclusively. Depending on your situation, it may make sense to bring in the experts.
