In short: an in-tray exercise gives an EA candidate a realistic slice of the job, under a time limit, and scores what they produce against a fixed bar. It is the most predictive thing most hiring managers never do. Keep your own version to 45 minutes to an hour, set the same brief for every candidate, ask for the reasoning as well as the answer, and mark against the five pillars before you decide who you liked. Three ready-to-use tasks and the scoring sheet are below.
In thirteen years of placing Executive Assistants, the hires that I saw go wrong almost never went wrong at interview. They interviewed beautifully. They went wrong on the third Wednesday, when the diary collapsed at ten past nine and nobody had ever seen what this person did under that kind of pressure. An in-tray exercise is how you see it before you make the offer, and it takes less time than a second interview.
This piece is the practical version: what to set, how long to give, and how to score it so the result means something. It sits inside the wider process I set out in how to hire an Executive Assistant in 2026. If you would rather have this done for you, to the same standard for every candidate and reviewed by someone who does it weekly, that is what the scenario-based executive assistant assessment for employers is. But you can start on your own, this week, with what follows.
What an in-tray exercise is, and what it is not
An in-tray exercise is a task drawn from the actual job, completed by the candidate under conditions you control, and marked against criteria you set before you saw their answer. The phrase covers what people also call an interview task, a trial task or a practical assessment, and what the research on hiring calls a work sample test. It does not cover three things that are often confused with it.
It is not a typing test or a software quiz. Typing tests are out of date. They belong to a version of the role that stopped existing years ago, and they say nothing about where the EA role has gone: judgement, stakeholders, protecting a principal’s time and reputation. They also send a message. The best EAs read your process as a preview of the job, and a test that treats them as a typist puts them off before you have made an offer. The exercise you set should reflect the role you are actually hiring for, and the value that role can carry, so that a strong candidate is excited to sit it rather than insulted by it. That is a large part of why The Core Standard exists.
It is not a personality questionnaire, which tells you how someone describes themselves rather than what they do. Nor is it an unpaid trial week. If you want a candidate to do real work on your real business for more than an hour or two, pay them for it, and be clear that it is paid work rather than part of the interview.
The version that works is short, fictional, and identical for everyone. Forty-five minutes to an hour, three tasks, a made-up principal with a made-up diary, and a brief every candidate receives word for word. That is deliberately shorter than the Core Standard, which goes much deeper: six scenario modules at Operational EA level and up to eight at Executive Business Partner, layered into one working day of sixty to ninety minutes, with curveballs a three-task exercise cannot hold. A day like that needs a reviewer to mark it. Three tasks in an hour is what one hiring manager can build, run and score well.
Three tasks you can set this week
Each of these maps to the pillars we score every candidate against in the Core Standard: Prioritisation, Judgement, Communication, Execution and Partnership. Run all three in one sitting, or pick the two that matter most for the seat. Give the candidate the brief in writing and ask for written answers, so you can mark them side by side.
Task one: the 8:45 inbox
Time: 20 minutes. Tell the candidate it is 8:45 on a Tuesday. Their principal, a managing director, is in back-to-back meetings until eleven and cannot be reached. Give them twelve emails as one-line summaries, for example:
- The chair’s office asking to move Thursday’s board pre-meet to Wednesday afternoon.
- A supplier chasing a signed contract that was promised last Friday.
- A colleague asking for ten minutes with the MD “today if at all possible”.
- A hotel confirmation for next week’s trip, with the wrong dates.
- A journalist asking for comment on a story running tomorrow.
- An internal newsletter. A LinkedIn notification. A calendar invite with no agenda.
- The MD’s partner asking whether they are still on for dinner.
- The finance director, marked urgent, about a payment run that needs approval by noon.
Ask for three things: the order they would work through it, one line of reasoning per item, and which two they would deal with entirely themselves without involving the principal. You are testing Prioritisation and Judgement. A strong answer names a principle, usually some version of who is blocked, what is irreversible, and what only the principal can decide. It spots that the journalist and the payment run are the two that cannot wait, and that the hotel dates are the quiet one that will hurt most if missed. A weak answer works top to bottom, or flags everything as urgent, or escalates all of it to the MD at eleven.
Task two: the diary that falls apart
Time: 15 minutes. Give them the principal’s Wednesday: a 9:00 one-to-one, a 10:00 client meeting across town, a 12:30 lunch with an investor, a 14:00 internal review, a 16:00 call with the US office. Then two things happen at 9:20. The client asks to push to 11:00, and the investor’s office says lunch has to be 12:00 sharp or not at all. Ask the candidate to rebuild the afternoon, say what they would cancel or move and why, and draft the message to whoever is being bumped.
This tests Judgement, Execution and Communication at once. Watch whether they protect the investor and the client over the internal review, whether they notice the travel time between the 11:00 and the 12:00 makes both impossible as stated, and whether the message they draft is clear about the new time without over-apologising. The candidates who ask what the principal would want to protect, and then decide anyway, are the ones you want.
Task three: the reply in the principal’s voice
Time: 10 minutes. A senior contact, someone the principal genuinely values, has asked for a meeting the principal does not want to take. Ask the candidate to draft the reply, in the principal’s name, declining without damaging the relationship. Then ask for a two-line internal note to the principal explaining what they sent and why.
This is Communication and Partnership. A strong draft is short, warm, specific about why not now, and offers something real in its place. A weak one is either a wall of apology or a flat refusal. The internal note tells you whether they think of themselves as an extension of the principal or as a message-passer. It is the single most revealing ten minutes in the whole exercise.
How to score it
Write the criteria down before you read a single answer. Then mark every candidate against the same sheet, ideally with a second person marking independently. A simple 1 to 5 per pillar is enough for a shortlist of five. Here is what each end of the scale looks like.
| Pillar | Strong (4 to 5) | Weak (1 to 2) |
|---|---|---|
| Prioritisation | States a principle and applies it consistently. Sequence survives contact with the reasoning. | Works in the order things arrived, or calls everything urgent. |
| Judgement | Catches the quiet risk: the wrong hotel dates, the impossible travel time, the journalist’s deadline. | Handles the loud items and misses the one that would actually have gone wrong. |
| Communication | Short, warm, in the principal’s register, clear about what happens next. | Over-apologises, over-explains, or sounds like a template. |
| Execution | Every loose end named and closed: who is told, what is confirmed, what is still open. | Moves the meetings and forgets the people in them. |
| Partnership | Acts for the principal within sensible limits and tells them what was done and why. | Either escalates everything or decides things that were never theirs to decide. |
Add the five scores and you have a number out of 25 per candidate. Use it to rank, not to decide. A candidate with 22 and a flat profile is a different hire from one with 22 that is five, five, five, five, two, and the two is Partnership. The shape tells you where to probe in the final conversation. If you want to see how this scales to a published rubric with behavioural anchors and a 0 to 100 benchmark, the Core Standard methodology is public.
How to run it fairly
The value of an in-tray exercise comes entirely from consistency, so most of the rules are about keeping it the same for everyone. Send the brief in writing, with the time limit stated, and let candidates complete it at a time of their choosing within a window. Do not run it live in the interview room unless you run it live for every candidate. Mark answers before the second interview, not after, and mark them blind if you can, with names removed.
Offer extra time to anyone who asks for it on grounds of neurodivergence, disability or a medical reason. Twenty-five per cent on the clock is the standard we use, without asking for evidence. The task does not change and neither does the marking. Tell every candidate up front what the exercise is for and how it will be used. Use a fictional principal and a fictional diary. Real confidential material has no place in a hiring exercise, and a candidate should never be asked to do unpaid work on your live business.
Three mistakes that waste the exercise
Turning it into a typing test. If the task is “format this document” or “build this spreadsheet”, you will learn who is fast in Word. You will not learn who protects the principal’s day, and you will lose the candidates you most want, because they will draw their own conclusion about the seat. Every task should contain at least one decision with no obvious right answer.
Marking after you have decided. It is very easy to read the answers of the candidate you liked at interview more generously. That is why the sheet is written first and the marking is done before the next conversation. If two of you mark and the scores differ by more than a point on any pillar, talk about why before you move on.
Asking for real work. A candidate who is asked to triage your actual inbox, or draft a real email for your actual principal, is doing your job for free. It is unfair, it puts confidential material in front of a stranger, and the best candidates will quietly withdraw. Keep it fictional and keep it short.
When to stop doing it yourself
Everything above works. I have watched hiring managers run it and make better decisions the same week. The limit is not the method, it is the time. Building a good brief takes half a day. Marking five candidates properly, with a second marker, takes most of another. Doing it again for the next role, to the same bar, so that this year’s hire can be compared with last year’s, is where most people stop.
That is the gap the Core Standard was built to close. Every candidate sits the same realistic working day, sixty to ninety minutes depending on the level, built from scenarios like the three above but deeper, with the curveballs a real Wednesday throws. It is scored against a published rubric by a reviewer who does this every week, and the report is in your inbox within 48 hours. You get the in-tray exercise, done at scale, without the half day.
The in-tray exercise, done for you
Send a candidate’s name and email. They sit a realistic EA working day, scored on the five pillars and expert-reviewed. You get a competency report with a recommendation in 48 hours. Employer pricing from £495 +VAT.
See the executive assistant assessment →Common questions
What is an executive assistant in-tray exercise?
A short, realistic task drawn from the EA role, completed under a time limit and marked against criteria fixed in advance. Inbox triage, a diary rebuild and a drafted reply in the principal’s voice are the classic three. It is also called an interview task or, in the research on hiring, a work sample test.
How long should an EA in-tray exercise take?
Forty-five minutes to an hour if you are building and marking it yourself: long enough to see judgement under pressure, short enough that strong candidates with other offers will still do it. A reviewed assessment such as the Core Standard runs sixty to ninety minutes because it covers a whole working day and a reviewer scores it. Anything over two hours should be paid.
Should I pay candidates for a trial task?
Not for a short, fictional exercise of an hour or less, which is a normal part of a selection process. Yes for anything longer, and always for anything that involves real work on your real business. Never ask a candidate to do unpaid live work.
Is an in-tray exercise better than a psychometric test for hiring an EA?
For predicting how someone will actually do the job, yes. A psychometric describes traits a candidate reports about themselves. An in-tray exercise shows you behaviour. The two are not in competition, but if you only have time for one, choose the one where you watch them work.
Lily Shippen
Founder, The Core Standard
Lily spent over a decade recruiting Executive Assistants and PAs at the highest level, founding Lily Shippen Recruitment at 22, before building The Core Standard to give employers evidence of how a candidate actually works. Connect on LinkedIn.