How to Hire an Office Manager
Looking for someone to keep your office in order, do clerical tasks and fill-in elsewhere? Here's your guide to the best practices for hiring an office manager.
Bringing an office manager on board might seem like a luxury for a small business. But if you're embarking on a period of rapid growth, need some piecemeal HR help, or are housed in an office that requires plentiful daily upkeep, it could be time to add an office manager to your management team.
"It's more of a luxury to have someone to do that, but if you're doing a lot of running around or selling or meeting investors, you do need someone to be there," says Ellen Rudnick, the executive director of the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
For Caroline Colom Basquez, owner of and designer behind Paloma's Nest, an online hand-crafted pottery store, the realization came suddenly that she needed help running her office space.
"About a year and a half into the biz I was doing everything, and I mean everything – including all the order processing and shipping, marketing, public relations," she says. "The important thing is knowing when to get help and not waiting too long. You know it's time when the volume of work you're doing and the hours per day you are spending is such that you can physically not do more for the business to help it grow."
Before posting a job listing, it's important to identify exactly what the office manager position you'll be hiring entails. The simplest method: take the time necessary to carefully craft a job description and clearly define what you're seeking.
Dig Deeper: What Office Managers Really Do
Hiring an Office Manager: The Job Description
The first item under the job title should be a summary overview of the position. A list of job duties and responsibilities should follow. Depending on what your company needs in an office manager, that list could include a wide variety of tasks, from clerical work to administering payroll and expenses to office maintenance.
Though the nuts and bolts of the office manager job description will vary greatly from company to company, a single consideration is of greatest importance when hiring an office manager: experience. Figure out exactly what level of experience, and in what field, will create the best fit. It is important that the person you choose to bring on board is well versed in a variety of office tasks, personnel and has tremendous people skills. Multi-tasking ability should also be a priority.
When drafting the description, it's key not to forget a catch-phrase line to include additional "duties as assigned," just in case the job morphs over time or something is omitted. "Basically, it's so a hire doesn't come back and say 'that wasn't in my job description," said Roberta Chinsky Matuson, the founder and principal of Human Resource Solutions.
When the job description is clearly laid out and agreed upon by management, it's time to write and post the job listing, for which the foundations are already laid.
Dig Deeper: View a Sample Job Description Template
Hiring an Office Manager: How to Determine Compensation
Because experienced office administrators can be in very high demand, they likely have much steeper salary requirements than those with a lesser degree of experience. Before deciding a salary, it is important to weigh the skill level of the position you need filled with the amount you are prepared to spend and find a balance.
Small companies with a tighter spending budget might want to consider seeking a part-time office manager. Rudnick suggests that graduate students – and even undergrads – make great part-time employees, and can impact the budget less, because they don't necessarily require benefits. A start-up she recently advised has 10 dedicated employees, but only two of them are full-time, allowing the company to keep costs low.
To find a salary that's fair to offer, search other local listings online, and check out what office managers of the experience level you are seeking demand on PayScale.com – where you can search for position plus experience, and take location into account. Searching Salary.com reveals that the median base salary for an office manager in a large city is between $57,000 and $79,000, while in a more rural area, it is roughly $14,000 less on average.
When in doubt, it's also perfectly couth to ask applicants about their salary expectations. Consider benefits, also, as part of that expectation, because there is no gold standard for salary-setting. Applicants' experience levels can be another determinant of salary, which is why it's preferable to set your qualifications in advance of the hiring process.
Dig Deeper: The Right Way to Pay
Hiring an Office Manager: Attracting the Right Applicants
For small companies with an intimate workspace, one of the best bets for hiring lower-level positions is within social networks – both online and in the real world. CEOs hiring entry-level office managers and executive assistants should actively seek referrals from friends and colleagues, as well as being mindful of other people they encounter who impress them with conscientiousness or skill.
Online, turning to social networking can be valuable for finding members of a small core group of employees – but be selective which sites you choose. While posting on Craigslist.org may cause a landslide of resumes, an e-mail over LinkedIn is likely to yield a few qualified professional applicants whom your trusted contacts already endorse.
You'll want to clearly list job responsibilities and a job summary, which can be pulled directly from the job description you've already created. Responsibilities could include data entry, reception duties, motivating and training an administrative staff, and some traditional human resources tasks, such as managing expenses, payroll or training. In some offices, the office manager is expected also to manage the company budget and monitor goal percentages.
In addition to the overview and list of responsibilities found in the job description, a great job listing incorporates desired behavioral characteristics of your ideal hire. If you're not sure about these temporal and experiential traits, Matuson suggests to just look around you.
