Recruiter here: save yourself a bit of pain
I'm an in-house recruiter in a rapidly expanding, remote startup. I received a message from the owner on LinkedIn, and I filed it away. She was polite and did not spam me, so I kept the contact and PDF set aside. We have very little turnover. We also do not traditionally partner with Virtual Assistance agencies since they underpay their worker (~$11 per hour), or external recruiting firms as we have our resources.
When we returned from holiday break I received notice that the COO and 1 of 3 administrative assistants had accepted new jobs. Not the best news start to 2024, but it happens. We are a bit swamped helping the team expand. We need a hand and we are searching for more recruiters, but now 2 of my best interviewers are stepping away.
I decided to take a second look, it normally takes us 2 - 3 months to finish the interviews for a new assistant; say what you will but it reduced our turnover by 87% over 5 years. It took 7 days for them to send me a list of applicants, which made me nervous....
Lesson learned. All are sourced and located in MST-USA as requested. Assistants make no less than $3000 per month for part-time, and almost double for full-time; we chose FT. All have over 5 plus years of experience. Every person had already been screened and their work history and skills were verified. Every person we spoke to was incredible. None of the applicants were "yes" men, and they all said that their interview and assessment process with this team was as enjoyable as our consultation.
We just booked a Lead Executive Assistant for a 3-month, contract-to-hire so we can give it a go before potentially extending an offer, and we have COO candidates lined up for us to review next week.
I am so relieved that we rolled the dice on this one. We can't wait to start our new LEA and feel very confident that we made the right move by expanding our resources.
If anything changes I'll update this review, but so far based on the customer service, speed, flexibility, honesty, no BS demeanor, and cost we anticipate that this team will be our default for the admin role moving forward so we can stay focused on recruiting technical talent.
1 January 2024
Unprompted review