The Best Screening Practices for Hiring an Assistant to Help You Soar in Your Work

With advances in technology constantly pushing us toward achieving greater speed and efficiency in work, it’s now perhaps an all-too-common assumption that everything in business has to move at a faster pace in order to bear top-notch results and keep up with the rest of the world. 

But some endeavors simply cannot be rushed — and one of those is hiring an assistant. 

To fly through hiring someone who is going to work more closely with you than probably anyone else in your company — not to mention someone who will ultimately be responsible for keeping many of the day-to-day operations of your own work running smoothly — will cost you more hours and headaches than just buckling down and doing it right the first time.

Finding someone who can do the job is easy — just take a look at all of those excellent qualifications listed in the resumés piled up on your desk! But vetting someone who will be the right fit for your company culture and daily work flow, on the other hand, is the true task.

It’s always very telling to begin the screening process with two essential questions for candidates: Why do they want this job? Why do they want to work with this company? 

It’s really effective to have these two questions answered in a 60-second voicemail message in which the candidates outline how they’d benefit the company and why they’d be a perfect fit. 

First off, you’ll be able to tell right away if the candidate listens to instructions — an imperative quality for an assistant. Was their message right around 60 seconds? Did they answer the questions? If so, then move onto evaluating other qualities that can be shrewdly gleaned from a voicemail message: coherency of the candidate’s thought processes, articulateness, confidence, creativity, enthusiasm for the job, and overall composure. 

From here, consider mixing obvious tests with stealth tests. This allows you to examine both hard and soft skills to assess the more ingrained attributes of a candidate, like their approach to problem solving and sense of character. 

When it comes to obvious tests, consider questions similar to the famous Google interview questions, which are meant to gauge critical thinking skills and knowledge of relevant programs. The interviewees know that they’re being tested in this case, and are often required to demonstrate hard skills, such as code writing and graphic designing. 

For an assistant, send a detailed email (or provide an in-person assignment) that they must follow to the letter. See if their work is perfect or whether it has a few errors. At this stage in the game, if their work contains any errors at all, it’s wise to disqualify the candidate. It may sound harsh, but the screening process is when a candidate should be putting forth their best effort, and if they’re making small mistakes now, they’ll most certainly lack the drive to excel once they’ve already landed the job.

When it comes down to stealthy tests, you can be more creative and clever. Hubspot’s David Cancel tests candidates’ teamwork abilities by offering them a cup of water during the interview. If they don’t clean up their own trash, he won’t hire them. He believes that this is a huge indicator as to whether the individual will work well with a team and he swears by the test, having interviewed over 100 of Hubspot’s 700+ employees. 

You can apply simple tactics like these for screening an assistant as well, or come up with your own measure of qualities you feel are important to the job. For instance, springing an interview with the company’s CEO or top-level executive can help you to determine soft skills, like how well the candidate reacts under unexpected pressure. The point is to understand whether the potential assistant will fit well within your company culture. 

Finally, assign a more challenging task to each candidate and score their results. You can divvy up percentages into sections such as grammatical correctness, factual accuracy, creativity, people skills, and timeliness. If the candidate scores an 85 percent or higher, move them onto a final phone or in-person interview. At this stage in the game, only the cream of the crop candidates will have made it past the secure screening gates. If you work with a larger company on a team, it’s a good idea to have the final candidates interface with 2-3 different interviewers so that you can benefit from different observations and perspectives.

Going through these thoughtful steps to screen — and eventually hire — an assistant is a crucial process that will save you both time and productivity in the long run. 

And let’s be honest: the whole point of hiring an assistant is not to fly haphazardly through the screening process, but to find the right person who takes care of the “flight attending,” so that you can pilot your work with ease and success.

Quick Tips for Evaluating Candidates for an Assistant Position:

1. Grammatical errors are non-negotiable.
2. Timeliness is next to godliness.
3. People skills are a must.

Good Questions for Evaluating People Skills:

1. What would the person who likes you least in the world say about you? (This question tests a candidate’s honesty.)
2. If you had to explain our company to an elementary schooler, how would you describe what we do? (This measures the candidate’s communication capabilities.)
3. Why are manholes round? (This question helps to evaluate the candidate’s problem solving skills.)