The productivity of any sized organisation is significantly improved by hiring an administrative assistant to manage all the time-consuming daily tasks.
Administrative assistants who work remotely can perform multiple tasks, not just general admin duties.
Therefore, knowing which tasks you need the person you hire to do is vital. Failing to identify the functions that will improve your business will only cost you time and money in the long term.
So let’s look at the key areas you need to identify, such as required skills, before you start searching for a qualified administrative assistant and how to navigate the hiring process.
Advantages Of Hiring Admin Assistants
Let’s examine the three main advantages of hiring admin assistants.
Reduce Hiring Costs
Working with administrative assistants saves you time and money by not having to perform time-heavy tasks yourself, and you don’t have to worry about additional employment costs.
When hiring an administrative assistant, you pay them a set hourly rate for their contracted hours.
However, because they are not a salaried full-time employee, you don’t have to worry about sick pay, holidays, or superannuation, and you will also save on office space.
Due to the cost of living being so much lower in countries such as the Philippines, you will pay a lower hourly rate than someone based in Australia.
Extend Your Office Hours
Hiring a virtual assistant can help you extend your business operations office hours, significantly improving your productivity because they work in a different time zone.
When you find administrative assistants working remotely from a different time zone, you can expand your to-do list, knowing that your virtual assistant can do them outside your standard office hours.
A good administrative assistant who works remotely can answer customer queries as they happen, which reflects well on your company.
Spend Less Time On Admin Tasks
When you hire an administrative assistant to answer phone calls and perform other administrative tasks, you can get on with performing more dollar-generating tasks.
Every business administration needs an effective management team, and an excellent virtual assistant goes a long way to achieving this goal.
As a business owner, you need someone responsible for scheduling meetings to ensure your valuable time isn’t wasted.
The right virtual assistant will not just spend time answering phone calls and performing time-heavy data entry tasks and will have the time needed to organise files more efficiently.
Consider These Administrative Assistant Jobs
You must know four fundamental assistant job roles before hiring an administrative assistant.
General Admin Assistant
Answering and making phone calls and dealing with email inquiries, calendar management, and data entry tasks are part of a general admin assistant’s role.
Thanks to the advancements in modern technology, administrative assistants can perform these duties remotely from wherever they live globally.
As a result working with administrative assistants has become popular with businesses of all sizes as it helps their organisation run more smoothly.
Administrative Specialist
Hiring someone as an administrative assistant job specialist means the person you hire will have additional specialist skills.
As the business owner or office administrator manager, you would have to specify in the job description which skills are required for the role.
For example, the role would require the person hired to perform market research, be responsible for bookkeeping duties or focus on content creation across all your social media platforms.
Executive Assistant
An executive assistant position will require the person to have excellent communication skills and extensive experience in dealing directly with company directors.
Tasks for this position include preparing expense reports, keeping important meeting minutes, and constructing daily project performance reports.
The person you hire in this position will have the right skills to handle emails and calls and prioritise accordingly, knowing which correspondence needs to be passed on to upper management.
Administrative Secretary
Administrative secretary jobs will require the person to do the same tasks as a general admin assistant, such as answering phones and organising files, but they will also have additional responsibilities.
The additional responsibilities include making travel arrangements for out-of-office meetings, ordering office equipment and dealing with invoice and office expenses.
How To Hire An Admin Assistant
Hiring an admin assistant can be a tricky process. Here are four essential requirements to consider.
Create A Detailed Administrative Assistant Job Description
Hiring an administrative assistant can be time-consuming, but the first step is identifying which tasks you need your assistant to perform. Doing this allows you to create a detailed job description.
Attracting the right administrative assistant to align with your business goals requires you to determine what level of experience the role requires.
The more experienced applicants with formal qualifications will cost more. Hiring an entry-level administrative assistant and training them to your specific requirements may be more suitable.
Ask all applicants to reply using the words “I’m willing to learn” at the start of their email. You must place this request at the bottom of the advert to ensure they read the full instrucitons.
This filtering method tests the applicant’s attention to detail, an essential position requirement.
Screen Applicants
When you screen applicants for administrative assistant jobs, you must check which applicants have used the words “I’m willing to learn” at the start of their email.
Failing to include this phrase in their email shows poor attention to detail. Just forget this application; it’s not worth the hassle, and. Just move on to the next applicant’s response.
The best applicant responses are those that have detailed information which is relevant to the skills required for the position.
If an applicant has taken the time and effort to compose a detailed response to your job advert, which includes several or all of the job requirements, they must go through the interview process.
Interview The Best Candidates
You should always pick your top-five candidates to take through the interview process when selecting for administrative assistant positions.
Conducting an interview can be daunting, so prepare the right questions to get the correct information from each interviewee. You can’t expect to hire the best administrative assistants if you don’t ask relevant questions.
First, you must establish if the candidate has administrative assistant experience. You can do this by having a less formal conversation to put the candidate at ease.
Once at ease, you must ask more formal questions to determine how they perform under pressure and how good their communication and organisational capabilities are.
Giving each candidate a written test during the interview is highly beneficial to assess their written comprehension skills.
This test can be in the form of them composing a short email and a social media post.
When all selected candidates have been interviewed and assessed on their written tests, you must decide which one you will hire as your administrative assistant.
Start Onboarding And Training
Administrative assistant hiring is just the start. Now you must start the onboarding and training process. Whenever you hire a new administrative assistant, you must introduce them to other current employees.
Your new hire needs to understand what projects your company is working on and your organisation’s business goals. In addition to this, they need to fully integrate into the work environment and know the company culture and what is expected of them.
Allow enough time to explain your company’s software packages and tools. Then, if they need further training on using these packages, ensure it is provided.
You can expect your new administrative assistant’s onboarding and training process to take several weeks.
Call Us For A Free Consultation
As you can tell, hiring administrative assistants is a challenging process and can save a lot of your time and prove costly if you make mistakes.
And that’s where Don’t worry; our team is on hand to help hire a great administrative assistant for your company.
We can provide an administrative assistant from our pool of highly skilled professionals or screen, interview, hire and manage an administrative assistant on your behalf.