From the Experts: Modern Tricks for Hiring the Right Candidate

In this week’s episode of America Back to Work, S2Verify co-founder and chief strategy officer, Arnette Heintze, sits down with Hilani Ellis, founder of Exceptional Admins—a boutique-style placement and consulting firm located in Colorado—to get her expert insights into how companies can be sure they’re hiring the right people. 

Exceptional Admins recruits top-administrative professionals and matches them with like-minded executives. The company’s name reflects its mission to change executives’ lives and positively affect organizations—one exceptional admin at a time. 

Today, Ellis applies her experience working alongside high-functioning executives, a celebrity, and high-profile thought leaders to offer an unconventional approach to the talent acquisition process. 

Her time with high-profile thought leaders offers an unconventional approach to the talent acquisition process. She partners with start-up companies and established businesses to bridge old ideals and modern job expectations, and illuminates the need to look beyond a resume or a job description during the hiring process. Ellis’s passion for people and knowledge of the role helps build a healthy foundation for a successful admin-executive partnership.

In her conversation with Heintze, Ellis shares some extremely unique and innovative techniques for screening candidates effectively in the modern age, particularly administrative professionals. 

First, Ellis recommends that organizations reframe what an administrative professional is to frame the job description appropriately. 

“A lot of people are still holding onto the secretary image, like in Mad Men,” she said. According to Ellis, employers aren’t thinking about administration professionals as strategic business partners––which is really how they operate now. That’s why cutting-edge companies, like Google, are now calling executive assistants “executive business partners.”

Second, Ellis urges hiring professionals to put themselves in the executive’s shoes before hiring. She even recommends hiring leads to shadow the executive for a day, listen in on one of their calls, and get input from board members and other team members who know where the pain points lie with the executive. 

Next, Ellis encourages employers and hiring teams to stay open to candidates with other industry backgrounds. For example, she believes teachers who are leaving the profession are great candidates because they’re experts in time management, communication, and managing multiple personalities at once. 

Ellis also recommends sending job invitations instead of just relying on job postings/descriptions to recruit top talent; invitations are one of the best marketing tools in the HR toolkit for getting the best candidates in the hiring pipeline.  

Click here to listen to the episode and to get Ellis’s top-secret tip for screening candidates. Hint: it’s about the way candidates handle emails. 

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