For decades, the administrative professionals on your team were primarily viewed as organizers, coordinators, and gatekeepers. Their success was measured by how efficiently they could manage someone else’s calendar, coordinate meetings, generate routine correspondence, and provide a wide range of personal and professional support to keep busy executives focused on their primary priorities.

Today, that picture has dramatically changed.

As both the business environment and the companies who operate in those environments become more complex, fast moving, and digitally driven, many admin roles have evolved into roles and job titles focused on the operational aspects of running a business. People formerly in roles categorized as executive assistants, office managers, or cross functional coordinators, are no longer simply supporting decision makers, but are performing work that actually shapes what decisions get made and how. 

We are entering an era where traditional admin roles are having a much more noticeable and direct influence on a company’s performance. These changes are requiring a new set of technology skills but, perhaps even more importantly, a new mindset about how a company can reorg the roles of their admin staff to make a difference! 

The changing nature of admin work creates some unique opportunities for smaller businesses!  

While the changes in job content and responsibility levels for admin roles effect organizations of all sizes, the impact is particularly significant for small to mid-sized organizations. In large corporations, responsibilities such as project management, data analysis, communications, technology implementation, and strategic planning tend to be distributed across specialized departments. Complex pay and HR systems often get in the way of changing an employee’s work content on the fly.

Small businesses, on the other hand, have none of those restrictions and rarely have the luxury of segmenting the work done by any one individual. The administrative professionals in a small biz environment are already wearing multiple hats, in an easy place to play a bigger role in an organization’s leadership and connective tissue.   

Particularly in smaller companies, we’re finding that while some job titles have been resistant to change the actual work content of the roles we place are more about operations, project management, technology impementations, and in many cases becoming more involved in strategic initiatives. And the interesting point is that is that they are often able to do these elevated versions of work by using new technologies, like function specific AI agents, to perform all the more routine administrative responsibilities we used to put into a one-dimensional admin bucket. No longer.

We see this as an evolution with both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, it is a change that empowers administrative professionals to take on broader more impactful responsibilities, expanding their career and income earning opportunities. On the other hand, it requires companies to invest more generously in the development of their admin staff to give them an opportunity to become a more integral element of the company’s leadership structure.  

And yes, there’s always AI…

For sure artificial intelligence is accelerating many of these changes in the role of admin professionals. The more routine tasks such as scheduling, document creation, note-taking, and information retrieval are becoming increasingly automated. While some fear automaton will diminish if not eliminate administrative roles, we are finding that AI is allowing job content to become more diverse – with new levels of responsibility, new scopes of work. As technology handles more of the transactional components of everyday admin work, the people assigned this work have the time to focus on higher-value activities. And in the right organizations they get exposed to higher impact work where strategic, critical thinking, customer interface skills, judgment, and decision making are built into their job.  

The rise of artificial intelligence can be particularly transformative for the admin staff in small businesses. A skilled administrative professional who learns how to leverage technology can get involved in projects intended to improve workflows, upgrade access to data or other types of decision focused information, coordinate projects, and enhance how communications happen across the organization.  The administrative professional’s abilities to use their mastery of new technologies and combine it with their operational expertise and finely honed interpersonal skills gives them a competitive advantage when it comes to opportunities for organizational leadership.

For small businesses who need to optimize all of their people resources to be competitive, investing in the development of their administrative talent, not only turning them loose to use AI to its fullest capacity, but to give them access to the more strategic elements of a company’s operations, can turn a support function into a much more strategic contributor.   

The journey from support to partnership!

Today’s business leaders operate in an environment characterized by rapid change, information overload, new forms of staff interactions (ex. hybrid work models) and a constant stream of new technologies they have to master to do their joib. Most executives find and learn to rely on trusted partners who can help them navigate this rocky road – to anticipate challenges, identify opportunities, and get thru increasing layers of technology-based complexity. Their former administrative assistant is in an ideal place to step into the role of trusted partner. 

The job descriptions we have been fielding lately for senior admin or executive assistants typically include requirements for the candidate to have…

• Managed high-impact projects
• Gathered and analyzed information from a variety of sources
• Coordinated information across multiple stakeholders or work teams
• Played an influential role in significant organizational changes or redirects    
• Served as trusted advisors to multiple members of an executive team on a wide range of issues

Selecting the Right Admin Professional

As the needs for and job descriptions for admin professionals change, so have the list of intangible qualities the right candidate needs to bring to the table in order to be selected for a senior administrative role. Here’s our list of some of those requirements and the type of interview questions that can be added to your vetting repertoire.    

1. Business Acumen

To optimize their contribution to a small organization, todays admin professional needs to understand how an organization operates in its business environment. They need to understand business goals, the company’s financial drivers, organizational structures, and bigger picture industry and competitive trends. The ability to connect their daily activities to broader organizational objectives is necessary if their goal is to make more and better decisions on behalf of their organization. 

The kinds of questions that can start to assess business acumen might be…

“How do you think the project you just described support your employer’s overall business strategy?”

“What were some of the decisions you made in your last job that had the most impact on your employer’s business outcomes?”

2. Digital Fluency

The mastery of technology is now considered a core competency not just a “like to have”. Modern administrative leaders are expected to be able to navigate:

• Platforms that facilitate collaborations between people, teams and customers
• Project management software
• Data dashboards
• Workflow automation tools
• Artificial intelligence applications
• Digital communication systems

The hiring process needs to include an assessment of the admin professional’s ability not just to use AI, but to use AI in a way that has improved productivity, streamlined a work process, enhanced decision-making.

“Give me an example of how you used AI to gather up and present information needed by your team.”   

3. Data Literacy / Analysis

A significant business trend is to use more and more data to inform business decisions that get made daily at every level of an organization. Administrative professionals need to be ready to read and interpret reports, perform the kind of research needed to identify trends, create dashboards, and support evidence-based decision-making. While they are not expected to become data scientists, they must be comfortable working with data and translating that data into meaningful insights.

“Give me an example of where you had to do some important research to provide your team with data they could use to make an important decision.” 

4. Project Management

Many senior administrative professionals now oversee special projects or organizational initiatives that extend well beyond their traditional administrative functions. Strong project management capabilities include:

• Planning and scheduling
• Resource identification and coordination
• Risk assessment
• Stakeholder communications and collaborations
• Progress tracking
• Progress measurement

The ability to move projects from concept to completion is a significant factor in an admin professional’s overall contribution.

“Give me an example of a project you handled from the original delegation to project completion.”

5. Influential

Communication remains one of the most valuable skills an admin professional can bring to the table. The expectations for “good communication skills” have expanded to be much more specific and critical to effective performance. Today’s administrative professional must be able to communicate effectively across multiple audiences, including executives, employees, clients, vendors, and external partners. They have to be able to influence others even if they don’t have formal authority. Building consensus, managing relationships, and navigating organizational dynamics are critical capabilities in modern workplaces.

“Talk to me about a time when you had to work with multiple different stakeholders to drive a project forward. What challenges came up for you? How did you address them?”

Looking Ahead

By now everyone in the staffing business knows that the administrative elements of all businesses and the administrative jobs that populate that side of the business are undergoing one of the most significant transformations we’ve seen in the last 50 years. The role of an administrative professional is clearly moving beyond the traditional support functions that have defined those roles in the past and when optimized become more like strategically driven partnerships between senior leadership and their administrative counterparts. These changes have created opportunities for an admin professional to take on more leadership responsibilities and acquire more organizational influence.

Administrative professionals who take the time to develop their business acumen, become digitally fluent, get good at researching and analyzing data, demonstrate an ability to manage projects by tapping into their strong communication skills, etc. will be well-positioned for success. Finding the right administrative professional for your team involves not only identifying candidates who is ready to embrace these changes in their admin role but will partner with you to shape that role for the future.