Assistant to a Board Member

We specialised in demanding positions in industry. A fascinating field – but every specialisation creates tunnel vision over time, and you welcome a change.

So I was all the more pleased when a fellow consultant called me, with whom we had already worked on technical searches. She was looking for an assistant to a board member at a DAX-listed group.

This position is often underestimated. In fact, it is a demanding management job: coordinating diaries and the desk is the least of it. The assistant is right hand, filter and firefighter all at once – and sometimes has to explain diplomatically to a government minister on the phone that the board member has no time right now. The pay was correspondingly attractive. One detail of the offer has stayed with me to this day: fresh flowers on the desk every day.

I handled the approach myself. Getting executive assistants on the phone is easy: you ask the switchboard to put you through to management and end up in the outer office. Almost all of them were surprised at first and assumed I wanted to poach their boss. That was quickly cleared up. And then the flowers came into play.

In these conversations I learned something: the flowers were not the reason to move. But they stood for something many people missed in their jobs – visible appreciation for work without which nothing in the executive office runs. Together with my colleague, I filled the position successfully.

What I took away from it: good people rarely move for a few euros more. They move to where their work is seen. Appreciation is one of the strongest arguments in recruiting – and one of the cheapest.