If you’ve tried recruiting an Executive Assistant recently, you’ll know it isn’t as straightforward as it once was.
You put together a job description, brief a recruiter and wait for the applications to arrive. Sometimes the right candidates never appear, sometimes you find somebody fantastic, only for them to accept a counter-offer before they start. Sometimes they join, settle in, and then leave twelve months later because another opportunity comes along.
None of this means recruitment is broken. There are still plenty of organisations successfully hiring exceptional Executive Assistants every day. However, if you’ve spent months trying to fill a role without success, it’s worth asking a different question.
Is recruitment actually the only solution to the problem you’re trying to solve?
Why Executive Assistant recruitment has become more challenging
The Executive Assistant role has changed significantly over the last decade. Today’s senior EAs aren’t just managing diaries and booking travel. They’re supporting leadership teams through acquisitions, managing board governance, coordinating international travel, helping with projects, acting as trusted gatekeepers and often becoming one of the people a CEO relies on most.
That level of experience is understandably valuable, and experienced EAs know it. At the same time, many organisations are trying to achieve more with leaner teams. Senior leaders have fuller diaries than ever before, hybrid working has added another layer of coordination, and expectations of support have continued to grow. It’s hardly surprising that experienced candidates are in demand.
Even when recruitment goes well, it can take several months from advertising the role to having someone fully embedded in the business. If your leadership team is already struggling under the weight of administration, that’s a long time to wait for relief.
Before recruiting again, understand what’s actually causing the pressure
One of the first questions we ask organisations is surprisingly simple: what problem are you trying to solve?
Sometimes the answer genuinely is another full-time Executive Assistant, and if that’s the case we’ll say so. More often, though, the picture is a little more complicated.
Perhaps your CEO has excellent support, but the layer underneath doesn’t. Maybe your existing EA has gradually become responsible for more and more people until they’re trying to support half the leadership team. Sometimes every executive needs help, but only for a few hours a week. Other businesses experience peaks and troughs throughout the year, where support is essential during board cycles or major projects but much quieter at other times.
All of those situations create pressure, but they don’t necessarily require the same solution. Understanding where the problem sits is often the first step towards finding a more effective way of solving it.
The hidden cost of leaving senior leaders unsupported
One of the biggest misconceptions we see is that waiting to recruit doesn’t really cost anything. In reality, the cost is just absorbed elsewhere.
Senior leaders spend more time managing diaries, booking travel and working through overflowing inboxes. Existing Executive Assistants stretch themselves across more executives than they can realistically support. Important pieces of work get pushed back because everyone is busy keeping the day-to-day running.
Individually, none of those things feels particularly significant. Collectively, they can have a real impact on productivity.
Projects move more slowly. Decisions take longer. Expensive last-minute travel bookings become more common. Senior people find themselves answering emails at seven in the morning or catching up on administrative work long after everyone else has logged off.
The financial cost of recruitment is easy to measure. The cost of talented senior people spending hours every week on administration is much harder to see, but it’s often considerably greater.
Looking beyond traditional recruitment
If recruitment isn’t delivering the result you need, there are other ways of bringing experienced support into your business.
Some organisations use interim Executive Assistants while they continue recruiting. Others bring in temporary support during maternity leave, long-term sickness or particularly busy periods.
Increasingly, we’re also seeing organisations choose fractional Executive Assistant support.
Rather than employing another full-time member of staff, they bring in experienced senior EAs for the number of hours they actually need. Those hours can flex up or down as workloads change, making it easier to support several senior leaders without committing to another permanent headcount.
For businesses where workloads fluctuate throughout the year, or where multiple executives each need support but not enough to justify a dedicated EA, it can be a practical and cost-effective alternative.
It also opens the door to a level of experience that can be difficult to recruit directly. Many highly experienced Executive Assistants choose fractional work because they enjoy supporting a variety of organisations and working with different leadership teams, rather than remaining with one employer.
Sometimes the answer is both
One of the biggest misconceptions about fractional support is that it replaces your existing Executive Assistants. In our experience, that’s rarely the case.
Many of our larger clients already have outstanding in-house EAs supporting their CEO or Executive Committee. We work alongside them, providing additional capacity where it’s needed rather than replacing the role they’ve been recruited to do.
That might mean supporting the senior leadership team beneath the C-suite, taking ownership of project work, providing holiday cover or helping during particularly demanding periods. It allows the in-house EA to focus on the strategic support they’re there to provide, while ensuring the rest of the organisation isn’t left competing for the same limited resource.
It’s a model that often benefits everyone involved, particularly when businesses are growing or restructuring.
When recruitment still makes perfect sense
Despite the challenges, there are plenty of situations where recruiting another permanent Executive Assistant remains the right decision.
If your executive needs someone on site every day, regularly hosts visitors, manages physical events or has a consistent forty-hour-a-week workload, then a full-time EA is likely to be the best fit.
The same applies if your organisation has the budget, the long-term demand and the management capacity to support another permanent employee.
Fractional support isn’t designed to replace every employed Executive Assistant. It’s just another option available to organisations whose needs don’t quite fit the traditional model.
Choosing the right solution for your business
Every organisation works differently, which is why there isn’t a single right answer.
Before launching another recruitment campaign, it’s worth taking a step back and asking a few questions. How much Executive Assistant support do your senior leaders genuinely need? Is that workload consistent throughout the year, or does it change around projects, proposals or board meetings? Could your existing support team achieve more with additional capacity around them? And if recruitment hasn’t been successful so far, is repeating exactly the same process likely to produce a different outcome?
Sometimes those questions will confirm that recruitment is still the right approach. Sometimes they’ll point you towards a different solution entirely. Either way, it’s far better to make that decision with a clear understanding of the problem you’re solving, rather than assuming another permanent hire is the only answer.
If you’re weighing up your options, we’d be happy to have a conversation. We’ll take the time to understand your current support model, where the pressure points are and whether recruitment, fractional support or a combination of both is likely to work best. We’ve recommended all three over the years because our priority has always been helping organisations find the solution that genuinely fits, not just the one we happen to provide.