Which means it’s time for Imagine Admin: A Festival of Ideas, presented by Topgolf!

No literally, it’s time… like the first session is today at 1:30pm CT… and it’s free… so if you have not registered yet, this is your sign to fix that immediately!

There are 3 sessions this month, and I’m presenting in next week’s, where I’ll be giving away a fabbb pair of italian leather Tieks flats! Professional development is cool and all, but professional development with designer shoes is objectively better!

Anyway! This week, I’ve talked to far too many billiant candidates who were completely blindsided by behavioral interview questions. The dreaded “tell me about a time when…” variety.

So let’s make sure that never happens to you again! Let’s discuss.

Pictured below: you answering that treacherous question before you read this

Did someone forward this newsletter to you?

•Executive Assistant to the CEO – HappyRobot [Apply here]

•Staff Executive Business Partner – GitLab [Apply here]

•Senior Executive Assistant – IonQ [Apply here]

Good luck if you applied!!!!

It begins, innocently enough, with:

“Tell me about a time when…”

And just like that, your mind becomes an abandoned warehouse. No files. No memories. No evidence you have ever held a job.

This is unnecessary suffering, and today I would like to save you from it.

Because here is the enormous, deeply underappreciated hack behind behavioral interviewing: you do not need a different story for every question. In fact, if you are preparing for executive assistant interviews by trying to invent bespoke anecdotes for every possible scenario, you are making this much harder than it needs to be.

What you actually need are three excellent stories.

ONLY THREE!

Three well-chosen, well-structured stories that you know cold, each mapped to one of the three things every hiring manager is actually trying to figure out when they ask behavioral questions:

Nearly every “tell me about a time when” question in an EA interview is just a variation of one of those three themes. Once you understand that, the entire exercise becomes dramatically less terrifying and far more strategic.

Think of these as your interview anchor stories: the three examples you walk into every interview already prepared to tell, adapt, and reframe depending on how the question is asked.

These are not memorized scripts. No one wants to hear a hostage video.

They are polished case studies from your own experience that can flex to fit multiple questions.

This is your “everything was on fire and I did not make it worse” story.

When an interviewer asks:

What they are really asking is:

Your pressure story should demonstrate:

This story is not about perfection. It is about composure under pressure, which is a trait executives value roughly as much as oxygen.

This is your people-navigation story.

As you know, being an exceptional EA is, in large part, the art of managing human complexity without leaving emotional debris behind.

Questions like:

Are all variations of the same inquiry:

Your relationship story should show:

The strongest candidates understand this instinctively: being agreeable is not the same thing as being effective.

This is your “I saw it, I fixed it, everyone’s life got better” story.

Interviewers ask:

But what they really mean is:

Your initiative story should demonstrate:

Executives are not hiring assistants to be passive recipients of tasks. They are hiring force multipliers.

Every one of these stories should follow the same structure:

Situation — Set the scene briefly

Task — Explain your responsibility

Action — Describe what you specifically did

Result — Show what changed because of your actions

And let me emphasize one part of that formula with great affection and urgency:

The action section must be about you.

Not your team.

Not “we.”

Not “the department decided.”

This is not the moment for collectivism.

If an interviewer asks for your example and your answer sounds like a company holiday letter, they still do not know what you personally contributed.

Once these three stories are built, interview prep stops being an improvisational panic sport.

Instead of inventing answers under pressure, you are selecting from a prepared arsenal.

You hear the question.

You identify the bucket.

You pull the corresponding story.

You tailor the framing.

That is the entire game.

Suddenly, instead of being caught off guard by behavioral questions, you look like the calm, articulate, strategically minded professional who has seen this movie before and already knows how it ends.

Which, ideally, is with you getting the offer.

Because nothing says “hire this person immediately” quite like someone who can answer “tell me about a time when” without looking like they’ve just been ambushed in a dark alley by their own resume.

Stuck in your job search? Not sure how to handle a tricky interview question or navigate the hiring process? Submit your question anonymously, and I’ll answer it in an upcoming newsletter.

Was any of this helpful?! Hit reply and let me know :)