Secretarial recruitment: How to get it Right the First Time

Behind every successful executive is a dutiful personal secretary, or so the saying goes. Secretarial recruitment is one of the things no one wants to get wrong. There is simply no room for mistakes in secretarial recruitment, as a poor choice of a secretary can be extremely costly to an organization’s image.  And while the circumstances under which and for which one finds themselves recruiting a secretary, there are some general steps one can take to ensure success in secretarial recruitment.

1.     Go for quality: In the hard economic times currently facing most businesses and non-profit organizations, the temptation to use the salary quotation as the sole recruitment yardstick is very strong. Using salary demands as the sole recruitment yard stick means going for the candidate who quotes the lowest figure in response to the question on salary requirements. But recruiting with a bias to the lowest salary quotations might be the wrong strategy when recruiting for secretarial and other PA Jobs. When recruiting for secretarial and indeed all the other PA Jobs, you need to keep it in mind that your secretary or personal assistant is an agent who reflects the image of your organization. Consequently, a secretary who is overtly cheap might create the impression that your organization is cheap, denying you the more lucrative contracts in the case of a business organization or reducing your funding allocation in the case of non-profit organizations. 

2.     Establish an objective selection criterion: Objectivity in all recruitment matters is a factor which can never be overemphasized. Once it gets into public domain that you are recruiting for secretarial or PA Jobs, you are likely to get tons of applications, as these are jobs for which many people consider themselves qualified. To help you sort out these applications, it might be good to establish an objective criterion with which to sort through the applications. You can do this through by creating a spreadsheet, with the rows bearing the names of the candidates, and with columns for academic qualifications, professional qualifications, experience, personality (to be deduced from interview) and other relevant factors. Better still, you can allocate a point score for every qualification, and then you can simply take the candidates with the most points into the short list for the next recruitment stage. Oh, and if you trust your instincts in your recruitment, you can just have ‘your feeling about a candidate’ as one of the factors (spreadsheet row) you are looking at, with a score for it. This way, your intuition will be reflected in the recruitment, but alongside other important factors as well.

3.     Consider Making Use of a Secretarial recruitment agency. To ease the recruitment task and increase the chances of getting just the right candidate for the job you have, you might consider enlisting the services of a secretarial recruitment agency. As mentioned, secretarial and PA Jobs are jobs for which many people consider themselves qualified, and a secretarial recruitment agency can help you to sort out the serious candidates from the jokers. A secretarial recruitment agency is likely to have many candidates to choose from, hence enhancing the recruitment scope. And the services of some secretarial recruitment agencies, especially those that charge candidates for holding their resumes in their databases may be free to you as an employer. And even if the secretarial recruitment agency charges you a fee for their services, it is likely to be cheaper than what you could spend in advertising, short-listing and interviewing for the position.