A personal assistant will help you with various tasks from administrative duties to picking up dry cleaning to maximize your time on more strategic tasks that will add to your success. Your assistant will manage your schedule to ensure your day-to-day runs smoothly, and any important meetings and appointments fit into your workday.
For many successful professionals hiring a personal assistant is money well spent since it helps them save time and increase efficiency, leading to greater success. Hiring the right personal assistant is critical as they are not all created equal. Finding a qualified assistant isn’t always the hard part; it’s finding one that is an excellent fit for you is the most critical element.
A great assistant is an extension of you, and you will be spending a lot of time with them, so it’s crucial you get along and work well with them.
Starting the Hiring Process
The search to find and hire an exceptional assistant can be a time-consuming and complex process. Starting the process can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to begin and the best approach.
It is not a task that should be rushed or taken lightly since this individual could make your life easier and add to your success or cause you many headaches with costly mistakes.
Make a List
Before you start looking for an assistant, you should lay out the exact duties that you want your personal assistant to handle. You could do this by creating a long list of all of your responsibilities, both business and personal. Then list out the mundane and time-consuming ones that you don’t like doing as those are great tasks to delegate to your assistant.
It’s important to have a clear picture of what you want your assistant to handle for you to get the most out of the position.
Common duties:
Managing your schedule, including booking and rescheduling appointments and meetings
Managing emails
Acting as the first point of contact, or gatekeeper, to decide who should get through to you and what they could handle on your behalf
Conducting research, preparing reports and presentations, typing, editing
Booking travel and transportation, and planning agendas
Filing and sorting
Special projects that support organization and production
If you have children, helping with transporting to and from school and activities
Personal tasks like running errands, picking up dry cleaning, shopping or meals
Ideal Fit
The right fit is crucial, so you want to think about who the ideal candidate is, including their personality, attitude, and work style. When you have the perfect fit written out, it will help you have a clear idea of the type of candidate to look for, which will help you quickly know who isn’t a qualified candidate.
Your assistant should match your operational behavior and be an extension of what you’re doing and trying to accomplish day-to-day. When interviewing with an applicant, you want to get a feel for how well you think you may work with them based on their personality, estimating how well they feel under pressure, if they are self-motivated, and a problem solver.
As a busy professional, you don’t always have the time to review every email that your assistant sends out, every detail to your travel agenda, every meeting document that’s prepared, or every challenge.
Hiring an assistant who is a problem solver, self-motivated, and works well under pressure will save you a lot of time and stress down the road. Ideally, you should give them a list of tasks and complete them without any additional assistance from you.
Schedule and Pay
While the personal assistant schedule typically fluctuates depending on your exact needs and the tasks, you should have a good idea of the typical hours you need your assistant to work.
You should also identify holiday hours and time off ahead of time, so there’s no surprises or conflict later on.
Deciding how much you want to invest in a personal assistant can be difficult. An exceptional personal assistant will help you be more successful and save you time which adds to a more healthy work-life balance but sometimes comes at a higher cost than an average assistant.
You can offer a decent salary with the option of bonuses based on performance.
Finding a Personal Assistant
To find a personal assistant, you could put out an ad on one of the many employment websites for job listings. There are thousands of job seekers looking for employment on the sites, so you should get many applications.
However, you will have to go through all of the applications and schedule and conduct many interviews. You will also want to do background screenings and check references. It is a time-consuming process that can be stressful.
A more straightforward, more effective, and less stressful option is to have a recruitment firm do it all for you. Pocketbook Agency specializes in matching job seekers with employers. With a network of exceptionally qualified individuals, we will quickly find you the personal assistant who seamlessly fits the role.
With years of experience placing support level roles and our proprietary Smarter Staffing Technique, we know what to look for and what it takes to effectively match our clients with excellent individuals that will be the addition to their team they are needing.
We will complete thorough background screenings and reference checks before presenting you with qualified individuals. We take the headache and unknowns out of the hiring process for you.
Onboarding Your Personal Assistant
When you find the perfect individual to hire as your personal assistant, it’s vital to set them up for success from the beginning, providing them with all of the data and tools they need to succeed in the role and perform to the best of their ability.
You also want to list out the exact tasks, functions, preferences, and working styles. For example, do you want your assistant to notify you of any problems, or do you want them to try to handle it themself first and inform you if they cannot solve it quickly? How often would you like to receive updates for certain things or projects they are working on?
When you give the assistant this information upfront, it will help foster a more successful working relationship. Spending the right amount of time training them on their duties will save you a lot of time in the long run.
Staying on the Same Page
One concern that many professionals have about a personal assistant is staying on the same page with them. Staying on the same page can be difficult if you have not managed employees before or have not managed them effectively.
Here are a few tips you could implement to keep yourself on the same page with your assistant:
1. Get your assistant on instant messaging and use it or text messaging for quick requests and email for non-urgent needs, with the understanding that they will let you know when it is done.
2. Weekly updates to review the requests that came in the previous week and to discuss the schedule, goals, and plan for the upcoming week
3. Consistent tasks that happen weekly should be done on the same days and times if possible to be aware of when they will be completed.
Conclusion
Hiring a personal assistant can make your life much easier by saving you time, increasing productivity, and keeping your schedule running smoothly. As long as you hire the right assistant and give them the training and resources that they need to succeed, you will see the benefits right away. The perfect fit isn’t always the most qualified candidate, but one that fits your personality and is easy to get along with.
The search for the best personal assistant could be a complex and time-consuming process. Since the individual will be working closely with you daily and have access to private information, you want to be sure they are trustworthy and have high integrity. By completing background checks and verifying references, you could weed out any applicants that may not be trustworthy.
Hiring a staffing agency to do the search, initial interviews, and screenings will save you a lot of time and stress throughout the process. They will present you with the top qualified candidates that would fit well with your personality and get the job done successfully.
With a staffing agency, you may have access to more experienced assistants that will stay with you long term and add to your success.
Are you ready to find an excellent personal assistant to help you with your day-to-day tasks to free up your time for a better work-life balance? Contact Pocketbook Agency today, and we will be your helping hand to find you the perfect personal assistant.
Sources:
Work-Life Balance: Weighing the Importance of Work-Family and Work–Health Balance | NIH.gov