How To Write An Executive Assistant Job Description

It’s a common misconception that executive assistants are only responsible for answering phones and handling mundane tasks.

However, their responsibilities encompass a wide range of important administrative and clerical duties.

An effective executive assistant can drastically increase the efficiency of your company’s management team, making it critical that you know what traits to look for when hiring for the position.

This article will discuss the primary responsibilities, skills, and education requirements to list on an executive assistant job description. We’ll also provide you an example of such a job description to help you create your own.

Duties and Responsibilities of an Executive Assistant

The main job of an executive assistant is to take care of the routine tasks of the company’s executives, freeing up their time and enabling them to work more efficiently.

Executive assistants support top management roles by performing key duties such as:

• Retrieving and filing corporate documents, reports, and records

• Answering and routing phone calls to appropriate parties, as well as taking messages

• Helping executives prepare for meetings

• Noting down important information during meetings

• Using a broad range of software, including databases, presentation software, and word processors

• Reading, writing, and distributing memos

• Taking care of basic bookkeeping tasks

• Researching, organizing, and presenting data to inform executive decisions better

• Making travel arrangements

• Sorting and filing email, faxes, and other correspondences

• Providing general administrative support to management teams

Executive Assistant Skills and Qualifications

Skilled executive assistants can enhance the performance of your executives, and therefore the performance of your company as a whole.

Make sure that your executive assistant candidates possess the following key skills:

• Competency with computers and technology. Software is ubiquitous in the modern office, especially ones that are remote due to Covid-19.

  Ensure that your candidates are skilled in MS Office, Excel, and Powerpoint, as company executives will likely need them to create presentations, memos, and spreadsheets.

  They’ll also need data-entry skills to submit data to virtual help desks, customer service platforms, and many other common systems.

  Above all, executive assistants need to be adept at researching and learning about technology. Their job is extremely fast-paced, so they’ll often need to possess enough tech intuition to know how to troubleshoot issues and learn new tools on the fly.

• Written and verbal communication. One of the most important roles of executive assistants is to organize and transmit information to managers effectively. This is done through a variety of mediums, such as reports, memos, and in-person.

  If a candidate demonstrates poor communication skills, you certainly shouldn’t rely on them to inform your company’s executives of key information effectively.

  Executive assistants may also need to work directly with clients and customers, so you want to make sure that a coherent individual represents the company.

• Organization. Executive assistants are typically responsible for a long list of tasks and deadlines that they need to balance.

  This includes everything from reports that have to be filed and memos that have to be distributed to travel arrangements and meetings that need to be scheduled.

  Executive assistants often need to tend not only to the needs of actual executives but also to clients and company suppliers.

  A disorganized executive assistant that forgets to send an important correspondence or memo could cause other employees to have to delay their work, which would cause disastrous results for the company as a whole.

• Strategic planning. Strategic planning is a critical component of being well-organized.

  Executive assistants need to maintain a clear picture of the tasks that need to be done at all times. This allows them to plan for contingencies and unexpected situations.

  At some point, a meeting that your executive team was planning to attend will be rescheduled or canceled.

  The executive assistant candidate you hire will need excellent strategic planning skills to prepare plans for such possibilities ahead of time.

• Customer service. When taking phone calls, executive assistants will often need to handle client inquiries and concerns.

  You want to make sure that the candidate you choose has the customer service skills to do this professionally that represents your company in a positive light.

  Some of the most important customer service skills for executive assistants to demonstrate include:

  1. Conflict resolution

  2. Lead tracking

  3. Energetic and cheerful demeanor

  4. Ability to follow up promptly

  5. Negotiation skills

• Travel arrangement booking. Knowing how to book travel arrangements may not seem like a specialized skill. After all, it’s something that plenty of non-executive assistants do all the time to visit family or go on vacation.

  However, executive assistants will often need to book travel arrangements for large groups of people, which suddenly creates room for many concerns and complications.

  For example, executive assistants need to make sure that their bookings don’t conflict with anyone’s schedules.

  Booking travel for many people is also extremely expensive, so executive assistants should also understand how to minimize costs using a variety of strategies, such as:

  1. Applying company discounts

  2. Picking cost-effective accommodations

  3. Booking sufficiently far in-advance

  They may also need to understand how to track and itemize all of these expenses on an expense report.

• Resourcefulness. The environments that executive assistants work in are often extremely fast-paced and quickly changing. They need to be experts at adapting and using creative-thinking skills to solve problems and meet deadlines under all sorts of different and unexpected circumstances.

  This is especially the case when their supervisors are busy or otherwise unavailable during a crisis. Such situations require executive assistants to explore other avenues to find a solution.

• Ability to anticipate needs. Effective executive assistants should take the initiative and complete critical tasks without supervision or being asked.

  This may include everything from updating an out-of-date contact list to filing expense reports and spreadsheets ahead of time.

Salary Expectations for Executive Assistants

Here are the 2021 figures for how much executive assistants typically make:

• Median annual salary. $48,000

• Top 10% annual salary. $32,000

• Bottom 10% annual salary. $72,000

Note that these are just general statistics.

A competitive salary for an executive assistant may depend on the type of company you’re hiring for.

If you’re hiring an executive assistant for a technology, manufacturing, or finance company, then your candidates may expect above-average salary offers.

In financial industries, salaries for executive assistants tend to be slightly lower.

Executive Assistant Education, Certification, and Experience

Here are the type of qualifications you can expect a typical, seasoned executive assistant to hold:

• Education. The most common education level requirement that companies set for executive assistant positions are a bachelor’s degree, usually in a related field such as business or communications.

• Certification. The most common certification that executive assistants hold is a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) degree, so don’t be surprised if you see plenty of them among your candidates.

  It’s a good fit for the position, as CNAs employ the same communication skills and ability to work in a fast-paced environment that executive assistants require.

  Another great certification to look for in candidates is any sort of project management certification. Any candidate with such certification is likely to have excellent organizational and time-management skills.

• Experience. You should first look for directly related positions on a candidate’s resume, such as an administrative assistant or office assistant.

  There are also many different roles in unrelated industries that involve the same skills required of executive assistants.

  Any type of IT background is a huge plus, as almost any executive assistant you hire will need to use a wide variety of software to aid them in their job. Technological proficiency and intuition are often hard to train, so it’s great whenever a candidate has already developed them.

  Any experience with jobs that involve heavy amounts of written or verbal communication is also positive to see. Examples include public relations manager, media planner, and sales professional.

  Lastly, you should pay attention to any job experience in fast-paced work environments.

  Meetings frequently get rescheduled, and events get canceled, so you want to make sure the executive assistant candidate you hire is quick on their feet and is prepared to adapt to changing circumstances.

Example Executive Assistant Job Description

Author

Chris Kolmar

Chris Kolmar is a co-founder of Zippia and the editor-in-chief of the Zippia career advice blog. He has hired over 50 people in his career, been hired five times, and wants to help you land your next job. His research has been featured on the New York Times, Thrillist, VOX, The Atlantic, and a host of local news. More recently, he's been quoted on USA Today, BusinessInsider, and CNBC.