Our founder, Karen Cisnero, will be the first to confirm to you that her early hiring interviews were rough.
Back when she started, an interview could run an hour to an hour and a half, mostly because she was still building a concrete process.
She was figuring it out as she went, and she’s upfront that she made costly mistakes in those early hires.
We own that openly. We think it’s actually the reason our current process works as well as it does.
It took shape over years, through real experience rather than a whiteboard session or an overnight set of instructions.
It was built out of years of learning, one hire at a time, what actually predicts whether someone will thrive on this team.
Where the real process started
Karen’s path here took a few turns. While working as an executive assistant herself, she had the opportunity to serve as an assistant to a department head in HR at an organization based in Australia.
This gave her an early look at what structured hiring could actually look like.
Later, she earned her certification as an Online Business Manager, and one of her own clients paid for her to go through a hiring training program.
That combination changed everything about how we choose the kind of team members we have now in Dream Assistant.
Once she had the training, she had the process, and she knew the right questions to ask…
Just as importantly, she knew how to tell the difference between a candidate giving a rehearsed answer and one giving a real solution straight from experience itself.
Why we ask situational questions instead of yes-or-no questions
Our interviews are built almost entirely around situational questions.
We skip questions like whether someone is a hard worker or handles pressure well, because everyone says yes to those.
Instead we ask things like, Tell me about a time you made a mistake and how you handled the feedback.
Questions like that push a candidate to reach back into an actual memory instead of reciting a scripted answer they think we want to hear.
As our founder sees it, if the candidate can’t tell a concrete story with real detail, that reveals they’re making it up.
The candidates who move forward are the ones who can walk us through a specific moment, step by step.
Because that’s the only way we know a strength is real rather than mere words on a résumé.
This matters even more given who we typically hire. About 90% of the people on our team come in without prior experience as an executive assistant. Karen trains them herself.
Which means the interview isn’t just checking for a skill they already have.
It’s checking for the raw traits that can actually be trained into a great executive assistant, because the technical parts, we can teach.
Sitting comfortably with a client’s chaotic calendar and figuring out what actually needs to happen first, that mindset and work ethic must already be there.
How using data matters most in who we hire
Alongside the interviews, we also use a paid strengths assessment, like Clifton Strengths, on every candidate.
Our founder has paid for this herself because she believes it’s worth the cost.
Over time, she has tracked which specific strengths consistently show up in the people who go on to succeed with our clients.
That means our final hiring decisions aren’t based purely on gut feeling.
They’re informed by a pattern we’ve decoded across years of hires. That’s why we rely on data-driven decisions.
Karen personally conducts every final interview.
Beyond the answers themselves, she pays close attention to body language, how confident someone sounds when they talk, and how quickly they can think on their feet.
That last part isn’t a minor detail. Once someone joins our team, they’re expected to lead onboarding calls directly with clients, often within their first few weeks.
If a client works at a tech company, we also provide baseline training to make sure that new hire can communicate clearly and confidently in English before they’re ever put in front of that client.
Confidence on a call isn’t a nice to have for us. It’s a non-negotiable the client is relying on from day one, from whichever executive assistant we match them with from our team at Dream Assistant.
The four factors we’re actually looking for
Strip away the specifics of any single interview and what we’re really screening for comes down to four factors:
- Dedication comes first. Our founder has said she never has to chase anyone on this team to get work done. Because the people here are intentional and care about the outcome without needing to be followed up repeatedly.
- Excellence comes next. We’re strict about the quality of the work itself, accuracy, the small details that separate work a client barely glances at from work that actually impresses them. Sloppy work doesn’t get a pass here, regardless of how good someone’s intentions were.
- Problem solving comes third, and this one shows up directly inside the hiring process itself. Our trial tasks are left deliberately vague. The goal is we want to see whether a candidate asks the right clarifying questions and uses real judgment, or whether they either freeze or barrel ahead without thinking it. During training, before anyone is even allowed to ask a question, we walk them through a framework for working around a challenge on their own first. Only after they’ve actually tried do we expect them to communicate what they’re stuck on.
- The fourth thing, tying directly back to how we handle vague instructions in general, is exactly that instinct to investigate first before asking. It’s the same quality we look for in how our team operates day to day, and it starts getting tested the moment someone submits their very first trial task.
The story that shows we walk the talk
One story comes up often when we talk about what dedication actually looks like in practice.
A team member was once asked to cover an urgent backlog of duties and ended up going six straight months without a single day off to get through it.
She never complained. During her interview, our founder didn’t hear a single moment of venting about her past work experience, which stood out.
For Karen, it’s rare for a candidate not to vent at least a little about something. All she heard from this candidate was a willingness to do whatever the work required.
That candidate has now been with us for four years at Dream Assistant.
The client she supports was so impressed by her that they expanded their engagement with us from one executive assistant to five.
One person’s dedication became the reason an entire client relationship grew.
What an impressive résumé can’t tell you
We could have kept this simple. Check a résumé, run a basic interview, see if someone seems nice enough, and move on.
Plenty of hiring models work that way. Ours doesn’t, because Karen learned early, through years of trial and error, that a résumé tells you almost nothing about whether someone will actually show up the way a client needs them to during a real crucial situation.
So we test for it directly. We ask for real stories instead of claimed qualities.
We back our judgment with data instead of relying purely on instinct.
We personally watch how someone carries themselves under the pressure of an interview.
Because that’s the closest preview we’ll get of how they’ll carry themselves when a client needs them most.
Most hiring decisions get made on hope. A résumé looks strong, an interview goes smoothly, and everyone assumes the rest will fall into place once the real work starts. We don’t build on hope.
We build on what someone has already proven about themselves, in specific detail, before a client ever depends on them. We don’t promise perfect hires.
We don’t hire on hope, assumption, or charity just because someone needs a job.
We hire on proof, data-driven decisions, and asking the right questions.
And by the time a team member joins Dream Assistant, they’ve already shown us a hard stretch of work won’t break them and they’re not still figuring things out for themselves.
That’s the kind of executive assistant who will support your business, who has the character to do the work and they are willing to step up.