Recruitment is a long and winding but necessary process that helps firms find the candidates best suited to their open positions. Recruiting a personal assistant (PA) requires more attention than usual, as the job often doesn’t come with a definite description. PAs may find themselves working on a variety of tasks to help with daily management as well as provide administrative and secretarial support. As discussed in‘ Quick Tips and Tricks for Success, HR personnel must have an organised recruitment process to make hiring more efficient. Here are some important guidelines to help you successfully recruit a good PA:
Tip 1: Assess Personality Fit
A PA will be working closely with leaders, managers, and various teams. Given this, it is crucial that you assess whether a candidate’s personality aligns with the company’s culture. While hiring new employees that have an impressive skill set is important, when hiring for a position that requires connecting to a lot of individuals, Business News Daily believes that personality fit is of greater worth because it’s something that can’t be taught.
Tip 2: Ask About Their Work Experience
Ask about their prior working experience and zoom in on how long they’ve stayed at each job and why they left. The candidates’ answers to these questions can give you an idea about their work ethic and the kind of job they’re looking for at the moment. While the candidates walk you through their career story, take note of patterns that can be used as a predictor for future behaviour.
Tip 3: Conduct a Background Check
As a recruiter, the safety of your boss and your company is of the utmost importance. You wouldn’t want to hire a PA with anything negative in their background. A post by Comeet on ‘Employment Background Check’ lists a handful of things to check for, ranging from bad driving records and a poor credit standing, to inconsistencies in their resume and sub-par performance reviews. Most importantly, HR personnel must check for a criminal history that candidates may try to sneak past them.
Tip 4: Ask the Right Questions
A job interview is definitely a powerful tool that you can utilise when looking for a PA; however, it will only be as good as the questions you ask. The right questions can help separate desirable candidates from the mediocre ones and assess whether they showcase the skills and personality befitting of the position they are applying for.
Tip 5: Use a Checklist for Hiring a PA
According to The Balance, having a checklist will help you systematise your recruitment process and implement it much more effectively. Recruiting can be a taxing task due to the number of procedures you have to do such as reviewing applications and scheduling interviews. A checklist will help you keep track of recruitment efforts and can give you definite criteria of skills you’ll want your PA to have.
