6 Most Important Interview Questions For Hiring A Personal Assistant

The world now moves at a record pace, and it’s a challenge to balance work and personal responsibilities. It’s not uncommon for busy professionals to find themselves juggling their job and home tasks, which is why so many executives, family offices, and entrepreneurs are turning to personal assistants to help streamline their lives. Securing a personal assistant is often the perfect solution for handling demanding workloads alongside family commitments. It can be the difference between treading water in your career and home life and excelling on all fronts.  

Employing a personal assistant can reduce stress, improve productivity, and allow you to focus on the parts of your life that you consider most important. Before you hire a personal assistant, however, you should identify what you’re looking for and the related interview questions.  

Why Hire a Personal Assistant?

An experienced PA will bring a wide range of skills to the table, from calendaring, handling your email inbox and travel coordination to household organization, managing bill-pay and event planning.  

Personal assistants also offer a highly customized skillset that is adapted to your exact needs. They represent close working relationships that are, simply put, more personal. They can support not only you, but your family or anyone in your universe, and will assume ownership for the most mundane tasks as well as larger projects. Their entire goal is to ensure that your life runs smoothly.  

How to Find the Perfect Personal Assistant

f you’ve decided that you want a personal assistant, start by considering your needs and requirements. You will, of course, want someone who is organized, proactive, trustworthy, and most important, compatible with your working style.  

You’ll also want to consider issues such as access to private information.  A personal assistant will know more about your personal life than most work associates, and you need to trust them enough to bring them into your life so they can do their job.  

Once you’ve identified your top candidates, your interviews should include questions that:  

• Get information about relevant skills. When going through the job history section of the resume, get details about what they actually did. Ask why each job ended. 

• Pull for answers that address your requirements in an assistant. If you need travel planning, ask them in detail about the travel planning they’ve done before. 

• Allow you to glimpse the person beyond their work life. You don’t want to dig deeply here or check if they’re married or have children (that’s actually illegal). But asking where they grew up, if they liked where they went to college, about their major, their hobbies, allows you to get a fuller sense of who they are. 

• Give you a sense of the candidate’s personality. Do you like him/her? Were you happy during the time you spent with him/her during the interview? 

Key interview questions to ask when interviewing a Personal Assistant: 

1. Why did you apply for this job?

Your personal assistant is going to be a primary source of support. Regardless of whether they’re in-person or virtual, they will be working closely with you. Finding the right fit is crucial, so ask potential employees about the why behind their candidacy. Ideally, they can provide examples of how they’ve helped similar clients, and exactly how their past experience is relevant even if it’s not obvious from their resume.   

A PA should clearly articulate what interests them about the job and be able to sell themselves. Their answers should be coherent, relevant and not go off on tangents. It’s also important that the candidate link their answer with your needs and not just theirs. A good assistant knows that what they want is secondary. 

2. What is your previous experience?

You should ask them about what previous positions involved, especially recent or long ones, such as what kind of tasks they performed regularly for employers and how past positions overlap with your requirements. Ask about the location of previous jobs (office, home, remote) and the nature of their relationship with their Principal. How did they handle challenges? What is an example of something they learned? How have they grown? Did they interact with families and work with other employees regularly? Get a sense of those relationships and responsibilities, and how your candidate dealt with different personalities and changing priorities. 

Part of the selection process includes considering the length of time a candidate has spent at previous jobs, and why positions ended.  

Listen to your own instincts as well—any responses that don’t resonate with you or feel off in some way shouldn’t be ignored. Your intuition is almost always right, even if you don’t understand why you feel uncomfortable.  

3. How are your technological skills?

The importance of tech skills varies with your requirements, but these days this is probably something you should consider whether you need someone to make up for your shortcomings or keep up with you. Ask them if they know the programs you use; if they’re good at troubleshooting office equipment like printers; if they can learn new software quickly. Ask what they do if they don’t know how to do something tech-related (the answer should be to Google it). One basic way to assess a candidate’s overall tech skills is how well they know Excel – this can be used as a rough estimate. If they know Illustrator it’s a good sign because it’s a hard program. If you need social media or design capability you should look at examples of their work. The range of quality is very wide here.  

4. What is your working style?

You want to get a sense of if they work best independently or with oversight and their degree of flexibility between both registers. The vagueness of this question also pulls for how they deal with ambiguity, which is inherent in being an assistant. To an extent, your assistant will have to identify with you in order to act effectively on your behalf. You want to make sure that they can do that while also following your directives. 

5. How do you prioritize and stay organized?

Every candidate will tell you that they are very organized – there are no exceptions. One third will tell you they’re almost(!) OCD. The trick here is to get a sense of whether this is true. So ask them how they stay organized, which systems they use. Be very concrete about it. Exactly which programs? Where do they keep their to do lists? What’s an example of when they forgot something, when they made a mistake, and why did that happen? How have their systems evolved over the years? Which practices have they learned from other people? 

6. How do you handle unexpected or urgent requests?

An effective PA will handle the unexpected like an emergency room doctor handles his patients – with a sense of capability and calm so things can be fixed with the lowest amount of stress possible. Ask for examples of when they have had to deal with an emergency, the unexpected, or something urgent. Get a sense of their level of resourcefulness. Your life may not be filled with a series of dramatic events. But you never know. It’s better to have an assistant who can leap into action like a Special Forces operative rather than someone who asks stupid questions when you are in a crisis. Your assistant should be unfazed when facing the unexpected and be the solution to problems. They should also be willing to jump on last-minute requests as needed with zero attitude, assuming you are being reasonable.  

Discuss how they handle last-minute changes to meetings or travel plans, how they assess priorities, and how they communicate these changes to others. This provides information about how flexible they are, how they think on their feet, and around problem-solving skills.  

Streamlining the process with Lambent

Interviewing a personal assistant can feel daunting, but it doesn’t have to be with help from Lambent. An exclusive, boutique staffing firm, we help CEOs and HNW individuals find Executive and Personal Assistants, with a rigorous screening and interview process that vets potential employees prior to your interview. Typically, a client will interview 5 candidates out of 300 applicants, after we have interviewed 15 and presented 9 for consideration. You are meeting a highly curated set of prospects. 

Lambent conducts the initial interviews, allowing you to take a more relaxed approach to your own interviews, and better evaluate the quality of the potential relationship. Once you’ve identified the candidate you’d like to hire, we take care of background and reference checks.  

A personal assistant can make your life easier on many levels, freeing you up to concentrate on those important business matters as well as giving you more time for family, friends, and relaxation. Hiring through Lambent makes the process seamless, as we take the stress out of the hiring process and guarantee a professional, hassle-free experience.