How to hire an Executive Assistant in 2026.

Most EA hires go wrong in the same place. Not at offer. Not at onboarding. At the point the hiring manager is asked to judge, from a thirty-minute interview and a two-page CV, whether a candidate can think. That judgement used to be doable. It isn’t any more, and what has changed in the last eighteen months has almost nothing to do with EAs, and everything to do with how candidates are now writing and speaking about their work.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know what we mean. You’ve had a candidate who interviewed immaculately and collapsed in the first fortnight. You’ve had a shortlist where the CVs looked interchangeable. You’ve had a hire that technically met every criterion on paper and still felt wrong from day three. That experience, the hire that read well and performed badly, is now the norm, not the exception. This piece is an attempt to explain why, and to give you a process that works on the other side of it.

Why the old process stopped working

Three things have shifted at once, and they compound.

First, CVs no longer reveal much. Candidates write their CVs with an AI assistant that does a competent job of mirroring your job description back at you. The language is clean, the bullets are quantified, the keywords are there. What’s missing, the fingerprints of how this person actually thinks about their work, is exactly what you used to read CVs to find. Two candidates with identical CVs can have entirely different operating models. You can’t tell them apart from the document.

Second, interviews have become rehearsable. Anyone serious about landing the role has spent an hour with ChatGPT beforehand, playing out the likely questions and drafting strong answers. The candidate who walks in is a candidate you can’t quite see. You’re watching a performance of competence, not competence itself. The questions that used to pull real signal, “walk me through a time you…”, “how would you approach…”, are now the easiest to prepare for. There are still interview questions that reveal how a candidate thinks, and we have collected the ones we rely on, but they are a supplement to evidence, not a substitute for it. The evidence comes from watching the work, and an in-tray exercise you can set this week is the simplest way to start.

Third, the EA role itself has changed. The line between EA, Chief of Staff, and ops lead is increasingly porous. “EA” at one company means calendar and travel. At another it means running a board pack, owning a rolling forecast, and chairing a weekly leadership meeting. A CV that says “Executive Assistant” no longer tells you which kind. Neither does a thirty-minute interview with a busy principal who doesn’t themselves quite know what they need. (If you suspect the role you are writing might actually be closer to Chief of Staff than EA, it is worth reading our guide to the Chief of Staff assessment before you post the ad.)

These three things together mean that the gap between how a candidate presents and how they perform has widened. Not a small amount. A lot. A senior hiring manager who used to be able to pick a strong EA from a three-person shortlist now picks wrong more often than they’d like to admit.

“The hire that read well and performed badly is now the norm, not the exception.”

What actually needs to happen instead

The answer is not more interviews. It is not more reference calls. It is not a longer CV review. The answer is a proper executive assistant test, one that observes the candidate doing the work under realistic conditions, before you decide.

That idea is old. Engineering hiring has used it for a decade (take-home tasks, paired coding). Legal hiring has used it for fifty years (the drafting exercise). Consulting hiring has used it since the 1960s (the case interview). What’s new, and this is where The Core Standard sits, is bringing the same approach to EA hiring, which is, if anything, a role more dependent on judgement under pressure than the roles that have had this treatment for decades.

A proper EA assessment isn’t a test. It’s a scenario: a realistic working day, inside a realistic context, with realistic pressure. The candidate doesn’t memorise answers, they make decisions, and those decisions are scored against an expert-built rubric. You don’t see a performance. You see an operating model. (If you want to see what this looks like in practice, here is how the Core Standard assessment works end-to-end.)

A process that works: six steps

Here is the hiring process we’d recommend to any founder, COO, or head of operations hiring an EA in 2026. It assumes you have a shortlist of three to five candidates (whether sourced from a recruiter, a network, or an open job ad). It is deliberately lean.

1. Get the role spec right first

Most bad hires start with a bad spec. Spend half an hour answering five questions in writing before you write a word of the job ad.

• Whose calendar does this person own, one principal, a leadership team, or a household?
• Where is the locus of judgement, does the EA make decisions on the principal’s behalf, or refer everything up?
• What’s the minimum written communication bar, internal only, or board-facing?
• What’s the rhythm of the role, steady weekly pattern, or perpetual interrupt?
• What’s the seniority band, and what level does that actually mean for daily judgement?

If you can’t answer these in a paragraph each, you’re not ready to hire. The best EAs will read between the lines of your job ad and self-select out if the answers aren’t clear. The worst will self-select in.

2. Write the job ad to filter, not to attract

A good EA job ad filters down; a bad one fills up. Write the ad for the candidate who will do the job brilliantly, not for the widest funnel. Be specific about: the principal (personality, cadence, working style); the level of autonomy; the balance of diary / inbox / document work; the written communication demands; the hybrid/remote/in-person reality. Resist the temptation to list every skill. The strongest EAs read the cadence of your ad as much as the requirements.

3. Shortlist on fit, not on polish

CVs are weak signal. Use them to screen out, not to rank. Ask yourself the blunt question: “Is there anything in this CV that tells me this person cannot do the role?” If the answer is no, they’re on the shortlist. A shortlist of five candidates from twenty applications is fine. A shortlist of one from twenty is a warning sign.

4. Replace the screening interview with an assessment

This is the core change. Instead of a thirty-minute chat where the candidate performs competence, give them a scenario-based executive assistant test they complete in their own time. A proper assessment takes the candidate sixty to ninety minutes and produces two things: a performance signal (how did they actually do?) and an operating-model signal (how do they think?). Both are more valuable than anything a screening interview could surface.

This is what The Core Standard does. A candidate sits a realistic, multi-module simulation of a working day at the seniority level you’re hiring for. Every decision is scored against a rubric built by experts. You receive a full report, reviewed by a former senior EA, with pillar-by-pillar breakdown, standout moments, red flags, and a reviewer recommendation. The whole cycle takes 48 hours. See how commissioning works.

5. Use the final interview for what it’s actually good at

Once you have the assessment report, the final interview becomes a different meeting. You’re no longer asking “can this person do the job?”, you already know. You’re asking “do I want to work with this person?”. Use the time for what interviews are actually good at: chemistry, values, working rhythm, mutual fit. Cover the ground the assessment didn’t: what motivates them, what they want from the next three years, how they handle the specific human in the principal’s seat.

6. Reference properly, but reference differently

By the time you’re taking references, you’ve already seen the candidate’s operating model. The reference call is for the things the assessment can’t reveal: behaviour under sustained pressure, integrity, how they handle disagreement. Ask for a former manager and a former peer, managers describe who an EA becomes in a one-to-one; peers describe who they are the rest of the time.

What this changes for you, the employer

The process above is shorter than what most companies run. Fewer interviews, not more. Fewer screening calls. Fewer “culture fit” chats with miscellaneous team members. The time is recaptured because the assessment carries the weight that used to be spread across four or five conversations.

It’s also more defensible. When the hiring decision is grounded in a proper executive assistant test (observed work, not inferred from a CV and an interview), it holds up to scrutiny. We’ve seen companies use an assessment report to unblock a split decision between two candidates; to justify a stretch level; to give a declined candidate a reason that isn’t “the chemistry wasn’t right”. All of that matters when you’re hiring at senior levels, and doubly when you’re hiring in regulated or high-stakes environments.

Most importantly, it closes the gap between presentation and performance. That gap is what produces the bad hire that looked perfect. Shrinking it is the single most useful thing you can do as an EA hiring manager in 2026.

What we’d tell a friend

If a friend rang us tomorrow asking how to hire an EA, here’s what we’d say in five lines.

• Write the spec first. Don’t outsource the clarity of thought.
• Don’t trust the CV. It’s AI-polished. Use it to screen out, not to rank.
• Assess before you interview. One sixty-minute scenario tells you more than three thirty-minute interviews.
• Interview for chemistry, not competence. By the time you meet, you should already know they can do the job.
• Reference the peer, not just the manager. Peers see the steady state; managers see the show.

That’s it. The process is shorter, the signal is higher, and the hires stick.

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The Core Standard is a scenario-based assessment for Executive Assistants, Private PAs, and Chief of Staff hires, built and reviewed by experts. Employer pricing from £495 +VAT per candidate. Commission an EA assessment, see how it runs from commission to report, or read the scoring methodology. Hiring a PA rather than an EA? Start with how to assess a personal assistant before you hire.