Executive Assistant to Managing Director

Rams Real estates · India

For an Executive Assistant to the Managing Director at Rams Real Estate, with only ~2 years’ experience, I would focus less on polished EA experience and more on maturity, judgment, ownership and ability to operate in a high-trust environment.

Key areas to assess

Area What you should look for How to test it

1. Executive maturity Comfortable interacting with senior people; composed, not intimidated Put them in a simulated MD interaction with an impatient senior stakeholder

2. Judgment & discretion Knows what is confidential, what can be shared, and what needs escalation Give 5 situations and ask: “What would you tell the MD? What would you handle yourself?”

3. Prioritisation Can distinguish urgent vs important; doesn't simply pass everything to MD Give 8 competing requests arriving simultaneously and ask them to sequence them

4. Ownership Takes a task from instruction → follow-up → closure without repeated prompting Ask for an example where they had to chase multiple people to get something completed

5. Follow-through Excellent at reminders, tracking, pending lists and closing loops Give a mock project with 6 pending actions and see how they create a tracker

6. Communication Crisp emails, WhatsApp messages, calls and verbal updates Give a messy situation and ask them to communicate it to the MD in 3 lines

7. Attention to detail Dates, names, numbers, commitments, meeting details, documents Give a deliberately error-filled calendar/email/document and ask them to identify issues

8. Calendar management Understands that the MD's time is a scarce resource Give a day's calendar with conflicting meetings and ask them to redesign it

9. Proactivity Anticipates what the MD will need rather than waiting for instructions Ask: “Your MD is travelling tomorrow. What would you proactively check today?”

10. Business understanding Interest in understanding real estate, projects, sales, finance and people—not just administration Ask them to explain how they would learn the business in their first 30 days

11. Stakeholder management Can deal with employees, customers, vendors, senior management and external people diplomatically Role-play someone demanding immediate access to the MD

12. Technology & organisation Strong Excel, PowerPoint, email, calendar, Teams/Zoom/WhatsApp, document management; ideally AI tools Give a practical 30-minute task rather than relying on self-rating

13. Energy & resilience EA role can be unpredictable; needs flexibility without becoming flustered Ask about a situation where priorities changed suddenly

14. Personality fit Pleasant but assertive; neither overly submissive nor over-familiar Observe how they disagree or push back during the interview

15. Learning agility At 2 years, this is particularly important Ask: “Tell me something you learnt in the last 6 months without anyone asking you to.”