3 Foolproof Ways to Hire the Best Secretary

No, we’re not talking about posting a personal ad on Craigslist.
3 Foolproof Ways to Hire the Best Secretary
There’s a fine balance between considering your current employees’ wants and the needs of the business.

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Finding reliable office workers can be daunting and time consuming. Slim pickings of qualified employees in the labor pool make it even more troublesome. 

Whether you’re a two-man plumbing operation or a plumbing, drain cleaning and septic outfit with 50 employees, a dependable administrative assistant can help you manage those annoying tasks that need to get done but you don’t have time to do. 

We want to help simplify this and reduce your headaches. Take a look at these three ways to hire the best secretary: 

1. You trust your current employees. Ask for their input!

Ask your plumbers to give you a list of some of the things they’d like to see in an office assistant. Of course, take their suggestions with a grain of salt because you’re the boss, not them. Take their legitimate suggestions — “hot” is not legitimate — to heart because everyone will have to work as a team. If personalities don’t mesh, you’ll be SOL. Or you’ll have to fire someone, which nobody likes to do so don’t even put yourself in that situation. 

There’s a fine balance between considering your current employees’ wants and the needs of the business. Are your plumbers crude and sometimes inappropriate around each other? If that’s how you work, awesome, but keep in mind that not everyone will take kindly to it, so just be cognizant of other personalities. 

A great suggestion is to do group interviews with a few of your top plumbers who can ask potential hires questions to really get to know them. You’ll also quickly learn if the new admin will fit into your work environment.   

Think about it. Your employees will probably be harsher on a new employee than you, so let them get down to the nitty gritty in a group setting. 

2. Befriend a friendly plumber.

If you have a good relationship with your local plumbing peers, reach out to them for some tips. Before you roll your eyes or scroll onto the next tip at the thought of getting chummy with your competitors, consider this — Who better to go to with worker questions than someone who does what you do? Call and talk to their secretaries! What traits do they recommend? What type of personality is a good fit for secretarial duties?  

I would guarantee the plumber down the street has been or will be in your shoes, searching for someone who can run their office and do general bookkeeping. So don’t shy away from asking for help. 

You don’t have a good relationship with other companies? First, why not? Second, take another approach by asking community members and business owners how they hire office personnel. Your dentist has a secretary. Your auto repair shop has someone who answers the phone. Find out how they found the person to fit the bill.  

3. Stay classy — and grammatically correct — San Diego.

No, I don’t mean posting a personal ad on Craigslist. Today’s social media mayhem might seem a bit overwhelming, but there are many great resources available to post jobs. And those darn whippersnappers just hunt for jobs differently these days. 

Off-the-cuff posts can be laid-back and quirky, but a job posting should be — slightly — more professional. You get what you ask for, remember? If your ad is full of spelling errors and misinformation (who’s phone number is that?), then you’re going to get calls from unqualified applicants. 

Speaking of calls, don’t forget to include a phone number for questions, and I recommend requesting applicants send resumes and information to your email address rather than snail mail. Why? You’ll know right away whether the person is computer savvy, and it will speed up the hiring process because you won’t have to wade through paper applications. Resume pops up in your inbox, you scan it, send it to your plumbers for their thoughts, vote “yay” or “nay” to call for an interview. Done and done. 

And that, my friend, is how to hire the best secretary.



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