Staffing agencies charge anywhere from 15% to 30% of an executive assistant's first-year salary as a placement fee. On a $75,000 hire, that's up to $22,500 out the door before your new EA sends their first email. The good news is you don't need an agency to find a great executive assistant. Plenty of founders and executives hire EAs directly every year, and with the right process, you can find executive assistant candidates without agency help while saving a significant chunk of money.
Why Do People Use Agencies in the First Place?
Agencies solve a real problem: they save you time. They screen resumes, conduct initial interviews, and hand you a short list of vetted candidates. If you're a CEO with zero bandwidth for recruiting, that's genuinely valuable.
But the tradeoff is steep. Beyond the placement fee, agencies often push candidates from their existing roster rather than searching specifically for your needs. You also lose control over how the role is presented and who sees it. If you're willing to spend a few hours on the front end, you can run a better process yourself.
Where to Find Executive Assistant Candidates Directly
The best places to find an EA without an agency are the same places great EAs are actively looking for work. Start here:
- LinkedIn Jobs — Post the role and search for candidates who match your criteria. LinkedIn's job posting tool lets you filter by experience level, location, and skills. Many experienced EAs keep their profiles current even when they're not actively job hunting.
- Indeed and Glassdoor — Still the highest-volume job boards for professional roles. You'll get more applications here than anywhere else, which means more screening work, but also more options.
- Your own network — Ask your investors, advisors, and peer founders if they know any great EAs who might be open to a move. A warm referral is worth more than 20 cold applications.
- EA-specific communities — Groups like the Executive Assistant Network on LinkedIn and various Slack communities for administrative professionals are places where experienced EAs connect and share opportunities.
- Remote job boards — If you're open to a remote EA, platforms like We Work Remotely attract candidates who specifically want distributed roles.
The key is writing a job description that's specific and honest. Vague postings attract vague candidates. Describe your actual working style, what a typical week looks like, and what success looks like in the first 90 days.
How to Screen Candidates Without a Recruiter
The screening process is where most direct hires fall apart. Without a recruiter filtering applications, you'll need a lightweight system to avoid spending hours on bad fits.
Start with a short written application. Ask candidates to respond to two or three specific questions: how they handle competing priorities, what tools they use to manage a complex inbox, and what they'd want to know about you before starting. This filters out anyone who can't follow basic instructions and gives you a sense of their communication style before you get on a call.
From there, a two-stage interview process works well. First, a 20-minute screening call to confirm the basics: compensation expectations, availability, and whether their experience matches the resume. Second, a deeper 45-minute conversation with scenario-based questions. Ask how they'd handle a scheduling conflict between two executives, or what they'd do if they caught an error in a document you'd already sent.
Reference checks matter more for EA hires than almost any other role. An EA has access to your calendar, your inbox, and often your most sensitive communications. Call the references. Ask specifically about discretion, judgment under pressure, and how they handled disagreements with the executive they supported.
What to Look for Beyond the Resume
A great executive assistant doesn't just have the right experience. They have the right operating style for you specifically. The most important things to assess aren't on a resume:
- Do they ask good questions, or do they wait to be told what to do?
- How do they communicate when something goes wrong?
- Do they seem genuinely interested in how you work, or are they just looking for any EA job?
- Can they hold ambiguity without getting anxious?
The best EAs are proactive. They anticipate what you need before you ask. That quality is hard to screen for in an interview, but you can get a signal from how they show up in the process itself. Did they do any research on you or the company before the call? Did they follow up thoughtfully afterward?
Should You Consider an AI Executive Assistant Instead?
Before committing to a full hiring process, it's worth asking what kind of support you actually need. If your biggest pain points are email management, scheduling, and staying on top of your network, an AI executive assistant like River Executive Assistant can handle a significant portion of that work at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire.
River Executive Assistant runs in the background of your work life, drafting replies, managing your inbox, tracking relationships, and surfacing what needs your attention. It's not a replacement for a great human EA, but for many founders and operators, it covers the 80% of EA work that's high-frequency and process-driven. That frees up a human EA to focus on the higher-judgment work that actually requires a person.
Some people end up using both: River Executive Assistant handles the inbox and relationship layer, while a part-time or fractional human EA covers calendar management, travel, and special projects. That combination often costs less than a full-time EA while delivering more total coverage.
Making the Hire Stick
Finding a great EA is only half the job. The other half is setting them up to succeed. Write a clear preferences document before they start. Cover your communication style, how you like your calendar structured, which emails need your attention versus which they can handle independently, and what "done" looks like for the tasks you're handing off.
The first 30 days should be structured. Give your new EA clear feedback on what's working and what isn't. Most EA relationships that fail do so in the first few weeks, not because the EA was a bad hire, but because the executive never made their expectations clear. Invest the time upfront and you'll save yourself the cost of starting over.
Hiring directly takes more work than calling a staffing agency. But it gives you more control over who you find, how you present the role, and what you pay. With a focused process, most founders can make a strong EA hire in four to six weeks without spending a dollar on placement fees. That's time and money that stays in your business.