How can you find an administrative assistant worthy to be hired when it seems like all the good ones are taken, and job boards are snagging resumes from prospects who are not qualified? Maybe you’re looking in the wrong places.

Joshua John McWilliam, CFP, FMA, a 20-year MDRT member, found an assistant at the golf course, where she was working as a beverage cart attendant. She has been with his practice for 13 years now.

“My hiring strategy is that I never really focus on hiring for experience — almost the exact opposite,” McWilliam said. “I focus hiring for personality, work ethic, reliability or dependability. What drew me to her was the fact that all the golfers at the club were happy with the service she was providing. She knew your beverage of choice and called you by name. The customer service aspect was top notch.”

Although she had no financial services experience, she demonstrated an ability to assume responsibility and work independently, so McWilliam figured he wouldn’t have to micromanage her.

“I took a leap of faith and trained her in the customer-focused role I wanted her to do,” he said. “I already knew she was fantastic working with the public, and that skill should be transferable. She turned out to be excellent.”

Several years later, he hired a barista from the local coffee shop to be another assistant.

“It’s the same thing. She was working on her own. I would walk in. She knew my order. She was friendly, pleasant and just seemed to have a good aura around her,” McWilliam said about the former barista who has now been with his practice for a few years. “They both worked out really well. They didn’t have any experience in insurance, investments, financial planning or working in an office, but if you hire for personality and train for the role you want them in, there’s a lot to be said for that approach.”

Job posts

Amy R. Fullenkamp intentionally creates vague job descriptions whenever she posts openings to an online community job board. The five-year MDRT member lists five or six bullet points about general duties like “help with paperwork and office activities” and “care for clients.”

“If you have something in your job description that women don’t know, they might not throw their hat in the ring, and you might miss out on a candidate,” Fullenkamp said.

Various studies by LinkedIn, Harvard Business School and others found that women are less likely to apply for a job opportunity if they perceive that they don’t meet most or all the employer’s criteria, contrasted with men who are more apt to apply even if they lack some of the required qualifications.

“I want someone who is adaptive, because everything we do in the industry changes,” Fullenkamp said. “There’s new paperwork, new processes, new compliances, and I need someone who is going to walk that with me. So, I don’t really hire for a position because the position might change.”

She also doesn’t require college degrees.

“For an assistant, I just don’t think that requiring a degree makes sense, because they have to have tenacity,” she said. “They must have that can-do spirit. They have to research, be proactive. Those attributes can be part of earning a degree, but either you have it or you don’t.”

Instead, she looks for candidates who worked in jobs that call for “a servant’s heart.” Positions like schoolteachers, day care and preschool workers, massage therapists, restaurant servers and kitchen help inherently require you to care about somebody else. 

She is not concerned if the candidates do not have a great interview. That is not a red flag. Besides, the better interviewees might have just memorized the answers they think you want to hear.

“Typically, the people I want don’t interview well at all because I’m asking someone whose sole role is to care about somebody else to come in and brag about themselves,” Fullenkamp said. “Inherently, they can’t.”

The job interview

Some hiring managers use personality tests. Fullenkamp’s regimen for screening applicants is shaped by 26 years of serving in the U.S. Army National Guard. To find people who will have her back, she relies on asking these unique questions during a 15-minute job interview:

• What is the last new thing you’ve learned?
  “There was one lady we just interviewed, and she was like, ‘Thank you for asking. I just learned how to crochet. My grandma did it, and I always wanted to learn.’ I was like, that’s my gal. Crocheting is tedious, it’s counting, it’s numbers, so she’s in,” Fullenkamp said. “Someone else came back with, ‘I was really frustrated at work when they asked me to do something that I didn’t know how to do, so I looked it up on Google and figured it out.’ We’ve got a few poignant questions that will pull out that level of information.”
• Tell us about a time when you got tough feedback from a boss and how you handled it.
  “If they say, ‘I’ve never gotten tough feedback’ — red flag. Everybody has gotten tough feedback,” Fullenkamp said.
• Would you describe yourself as a planner, a thinker or a let’s-just-get-it-done kind of a person?
  “There’s no right or wrong answer. It’s another way of asking how they approach problems,” Fullenkamp said.
• If I were to ask the team at your previous employer to describe you, how would they describe you?
  “Instead of asking what their strengths are, I ask them how somebody else would talk about them. Now they have to answer how they made that team better,” she said. “I’ve also asked them to describe your least favorite client or team member. It’s interesting what people are willing to put on the table for that one. One girl mentioned this lady who always told her what to do. I was like, well, that won’t work here because we need to tell you what to do.”

Other queries include, “Are you comfortable talking on the phone” and “Tell us about our company.” That answer will tell her who prepared for the interview and who didn’t. “Even if they say, ‘I know you do investments, but I don’t understand what it is,’ I’ll take that, because that means they had the wherewithal to look us up. We’ll have clients coming in needing stuff, and you have to know what to research ahead of time,” Fullenkamp said.

Checking references

The job interview creates an impression. Then Fullenkamp validates her hunches with references. She asked candidates for three previous job references and contacts at least two of them. She’ll contact the third if the first two references offer split reviews. The interviews are kept to about five minutes to respect their time. She’ll always ask a former manager/owner whether they would rehire their former employee. If the manager is coy, she’ll make the question easier by asking if they would rehire that person in the same role or a different role. One manager told Fullenkamp he didn’t know his former employee was looking for work, but if Fullenkamp doesn’t hire her, let her know that he will. “If they want them back, that’s the best ringing endorsement you can get from a reference,” she said.

Another question for references is, Tell me a little bit about (the candidate).

“I want to see what they lead off with,” Fullenkamp said.

Did you increase the candidate’s responsibilities or salary while he or she was on your team?
“That shows they had growth or were valuable enough to increase their duties and tells me they’re capable of learning and have growth inside them,” she said. If she still doesn’t have enough clarity about the candidate, she may ask, If you had a high-pressure moment at work, how did they act? Did they fall apart, or did they add value?

Training

Since hiring in this manner, Fullenkamp hasn’t had anyone leave, aside from retiring, since 2016. She cautions that the success of her method is predicated on being willing to train. Most people will need at least three iterations to master a task, and that can take months as a new hire might encounter a financial services function just once a quarter or a couple of times a year.

“I’m willing to train because I’d rather have somebody with no bad habits,” Fullenkamp said. “If you’re not willing to train, then this won’t work, but I get more diamonds in the rough this way.” Her practice of five advisors and nine assistants includes a former day care worker hired almost four years ago for an entry-level post who is now the office manager.

McWilliam also emphasizes the benefits of training for building a strong team.

“The learning curve would be a little steeper, but if you’re looking for a long-term employee and you’ve got a long-term focus, then investing some of that time on someone you think would grow into the role might be worthwhile,” McWilliam said.