A global philanthropic organization working on multiple fronts, from climate change to transforming education, and is building interdisciplinary teams of the world’s brightest minds to take on the challenges.
The organization’s leadership team was growing faster than it could recruit, hire, and train executive assistants. The Vice President of Finance and Operations is responsible for executive support, and they needed to speed things up.
"We found some great traditional recruiters, but we still couldn't hire fast enough," the VP said. "We also wanted to look outside the box of the traditional 1-1 executive to admin model because our executives and their team's needs differ significantly."
The organization’s executives include scientists, educators, academics, investors, analysts, program leaders, and operational staff in HR, events, and other corporate functions. "What appealed to us about Prialto was their team approach—we hoped that Prialto would enable us to scale faster and tailor services for each executive."
Hiring executive assistants one by one was not working, and the company did not want to be in the business of hiring and managing dozens of assistants. The VP liked Prialto's managed service model, where Prialto hires, onboards, trains, and manages remote executive assistants, so the service does not add any HR or management overhead. Executives document their task requirements with Prialto's Engagement Managers, and Prialto adds virtual assistants with the skills and experience they need.
"We were growing faster than we could hire executive support and traditional recruiting couldn't keep up."
--Vice President of Finance and Operations
Prialto worked with the team to identify five executives with distinct types of responsibilities for a pilot program to test the service:
"So many of us were buried in task management and needed support desperately," said the Head of Talent. "I wanted to get help to as many people as possible, but we had to prove the concept first."
"Coordinating meetings with large global teams is incredibly time-consuming," the Head of Talent said. "A lot of them are meeting with very high-profile scientists, government officials, and authors that expect white glove treatment. The Prialto assistants just took it on and ran with it and have been practically flawless."
"It can take one person several hours to plan a long business trip, and then they return with expenses from multiple countries and currencies. Expense account support was the number one need for many of us. Prialto assistants are travel and expense wizards."
"The volume of contacts we're working with is huge, and we use different CRMs for different functions.” The Prialto team seems to have experts for every business tool."
"I can't tell you how huge the value-add has been for us," the Head of Talent said. "We all get a daily report of everything our assistants do and see how much time we get back. We were concerned that it would take resources to get the assistants up to speed, but it required little effort, which is a tremendous relief."
The organization liked what it experienced, and expanded support to nine executives and is standardizing the service for its executives as it grows.
"I can see where every director and above role in the company has a Prialto assistant," the Head of Talent said.
"Our people have been desperate for this kind of support, and we have been desperate to find it so they can spend more time on their people and their projects, and the quality of the service is excellent."