The Office and Administration roles we recruit for vary from Admin Assistants and Office Managers to Personal Assistants (PA) and Executive Assistants (EA). These roles are vital to the smooth running of the businesses they sit within, and the variety of responsibilities is broad, and generally different in any given company. We have also recruited for Facilities Manager jobs at all levels.
The skills and experience needed for Office and Admin jobs vary greatly, yet one attribute that is central to all roles is great organisational and communication skills. Team fit and ‘clicking’ with those colleagues with whom there is a need to work closely are vital. For this reason, many of our clients take advantage of our Personality Profiling service which is available on retained recruitment assignments – the service gives extra insight into what makes an individual tick, and vital pointers with regards to motivators, behavioural tendencies and how they function under pressure.
Cambridge Talent Partnership have extensive experience as an office recruiter across Cambridge, Bedford, Chelmsford, Norwich, East Anglia, Milton Keynes and the East of England, as well as select clients across the UK. We’ve been tasked with sourcing candidates for many forms of administration positions, such as Administration Manager, Office Manager, PA and Receptionist The approach we take for each role is the same, ensuring our clients receive a full market shortlist on every occasion.
Case Study
Office Manager – Construction
We worked with an established client of ours who approached us about recruiting an Office Manager to replace their long-standing Office Manager who was retiring. Having helped the firm recruit for a variety of jobs previously, as well as having a great feel for the company culture, we were also aware of just how central the outgoing Office Manager had become to the day-to-day operation of the business. She had been with the company for over ten years, and during this time there had been huge growth both in terms of revenue and headcount. She had worked very closely with the directors, and as such we felt it very important that the rapport between them and any incoming Office Manager needed to be second-to-none – all too often the first replacement often doesn’t have a chance to show their worth as others around them in the business are critical or constantly comparing them to the person they replaced.
As we had worked with the directors before, we suggested our Retained Recruitment service, which allows us to go above and beyond the service we usually offer. In this case, the first step was to perform an exit interview with the outgoing Office Manager, as well as carrying out a Personality Profile assessment with her. We also started the process of drawing up a Job Description – again, in these situations where a business has grown around an individual, lines can be blurred around roles and responsibilities, and we felt it important to not only make sure the Job Description was accurate, but also that we could feed back to the directors on any overlap.
The next step was to profile the directors with whom the Office Manager would be working closely, along with a handful of other senior team members. This then allowed us to run analysis to identify the types of personality that would work well with the existing team, and those who may struggle to integrate. This extra layer of insight is invaluable when replacing someone who has been in a key role for years – it’s very hard to gauge these kind of things on the back of two or three interviews.
We then moved onto Competencies as we do in all recruitment processes. Again, having access to the outgoing Office Manager was invaluable here as we heard areas where she felt she could have had more support or training, as well as hearing from the director, areas where they felt she was not the strongest – there was some crossover with these, but not exclusively. The findings from this fact-find were then used to help us finalise the Job Description.
With the Job Description in hand, we then set about the search – during the Competencies conversation with the directors it became quite clear that someone with experience of the construction industry really was a key ‘need to have’, so our focus was on this area, and for candidates from a similar-sized company, or one which is slightly larger.
On presenting a shortlist, there were a few concerns about one of the candidate’s fit in terms of personality and ability to adapt to the sector, to the point it was going to lead to a rejection. However, we pushed back and suggested that we continue, and use the Personality Profiling to see if the negative attributes which were mentioned showed up. This is the course we followed, and fortunately – although to us not surprisingly – the candidate’s results came back with what could be seen as a great (although not perfect – they rarely are) fit with the rest of the team. By using Personality Profiling, the company continued to move a candidate through a process who they otherwise may have rejected. When this was the candidate who was finally offered the role, the value of their decision to invest in the profiling became even more apparent.