Hiring
Post an Executive Assistant opening this week and you will have two hundred applicants by Friday. Somewhere in that pile is a person who can run two executives' calendars like air traffic control, read a room from the hallway, and know about a problem before it becomes one. The pile will not tell you which one they are.
Hiring a great EA in 2026 means getting three things right: paying what the market actually pays, posting into a market that has taught good candidates not to trust postings, and screening for the things a resume cannot show. Here is what we are seeing from inside the live searches we verify every week.
What a great EA actually costs in 2026
Start with the number everyone asks first. The C-Suite Assistants 2026 salary report puts the national median for senior executive support at $110,000, with the top metros running well above it: San Francisco at $144,000 and New York at $141,000. In our home market of Boston, Indeed currently puts average EA base pay at about $92,000, based on 291 posted salaries, with reported pay ranging from roughly $67,000 to $127,000.
Averages flatten the real story. In the searches we verify every week, postings cluster into three tiers, and the tiers describe three different jobs. The exact numbers shift by metro; the shape does not.
Two practical notes on those bands. First, decide which job you are actually hiring for before you write the posting, because a first-tier budget pursuing a middle-tier candidate wastes everyone's month, most of all yours. Second, if your posting still says 'competitive salary,' it is now more than a filter that costs you experienced candidates. Massachusetts and a growing number of other states now require covered employers to disclose pay ranges in job postings. Salary silence is increasingly a compliance issue, not just a recruiting mistake.
Your posting has a credibility problem you did not create
Here is the part of the 2026 market most employers have not priced in. Greenhouse reports that 18 to 22 percent of jobs posted on its platform in a given quarter are classified as ghost jobs, roles with no near-term intention behind them. And in a LiveCareer survey of 918 HR professionals, 45 percent said they regularly post ghost jobs and another 48 percent said they do so occasionally.
We see it from the ground. In one week's check of EA listings in our own market this July, 4 of 7 roles showing as live on job boards failed verification against the company's own careers page. The listing was aged, filled, or never real.
Senior EAs know all of this. They are employed, they are careful, and most have been burned by a posting that went nowhere. Many have quietly stopped applying through boards at all. Which produces the paradox that defines EA hiring right now:
The pile of applications on your desk keeps growing, and the person you actually want is less and less likely to be in it.
That is not a reason to despair. It is a reason to stop treating the pile as the search. We wrote about this dynamic in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Resumes Mean Worse Hires.
Pay is table stakes. Here is what senior EAs actually want.
The C-Suite Assistants survey of senior executive support professionals is blunt about this: candidates now weigh flexibility right alongside base pay, and hybrid is the dominant arrangement in the field. A rigid five-day in-office posting at a market-rate salary is competing against hybrid offers at the same money, and losing quietly.
Beyond flexibility, three things come up again and again with the senior candidates we place.
- Scope, not just title. The same report found title alone no longer predicts compensation. The strongest EAs are running projects, operations, and board communications, and they are looking for roles that trust them with that scope. If your posting reads as pure calendar management, the operators will pass.
- A principal who actually delegates. The interview runs both ways. An experienced EA is assessing whether you will genuinely hand over the calendar, the inbox, and the judgment calls, or hover over all three. They have worked for the hoverer before. Once was enough.
- A posting written with precision. Vague responsibilities and requirement bloat do not read as ambition. They read as a company that does not know what it needs, and they filter out exactly the experienced candidates, many of them women returning after caregiving years, that employers keep saying they want.
How to run the search, and when to hand it off
You can absolutely run an EA search yourself. But if you do, there are four places where we see companies lose the right candidate.
- Define the real job first. If you cannot write down what success looks like at 90 days, you are not ready to post.
- Name the band. In a growing number of states it is the law, and everywhere it is the single strongest trust signal a posting can carry.
- Move fast. Long hiring processes cost you good candidates. Strong EAs who are actively looking are often considering several opportunities at once, and unnecessary delays give another employer time to close them.
- Screen for judgment, not credentials. A resume shows software proficiency and years of experience. It does not show discretion, or the instinct to anticipate. When a search runs on credentials alone, plausible candidates are everywhere and the right one is invisible. That is exactly what we solved at B-Flexion: the full story is in our B-Flexion EA placement case study, and the candidate's side of a great match is in our conversation with Lizzie Starr.
And sometimes the problem is not that you need someone to 'run recruiting.' You just need someone to turn 200 applications into the handful worth your time.
That is what we do. We verify experience, compensation, location and schedule fit, communication, judgment, and the story behind the resume before a candidate ever reaches you. You get a shortlist, not a stack.
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