The short answer
Decide which job you are hiring for first: front of house, back office, or both. Then write down how the people this person will support actually make requests, and hire the office administrator whose working style fits, not just the one with the most experience or who interviews the best. A small firm has no HR department to catch a poor fit early, and a mismatch tends to show up as partners quietly doing the admin themselves.
Why this hire is hard right now
This is a market where finding candidates looks easier than choosing among them. Job Bank rates the Toronto-region outlook for administrative officers, the group that includes office administrators, "limited" for 2025 to 2027. Employment decline will lose some positions, a moderate number will open from retirements, and several unemployed workers have recent experience. In the US, BLS projects employment of secretaries and administrative assistants to fall 2% from 2025 to 2035. It says technology, including AI, lets staff prepare their own documents "without the help of secretaries."
The job is also shifting with the office. Ontario set a five-day office week for its public servants starting January 5, 2026, and Statistics Canada figures reported by The Canadian Press showed 77.6% of employed Canadians working only outside the home in May 2025, up a point from a year earlier. More people in the office on more days means more requests reaching the person who runs it. When several experienced applicants are available, the difference between them is how they handle those requests. Know how your partners make them, write it down, and hire someone whose style matches or complements it.
What an office administrator does
The title hides three jobs, and BLS's duty list covers all of them. Decide which ones this role really includes.
| The job | What the person does | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Front of house | Answers phones, takes messages, schedules appointments, arranges meetings | Tone with a client under pressure, and judgment about who gets through |
| Back office | Handles mail, prepares memos, invoices, and reports, edits documents, does basic bookkeeping | Accuracy, and whether errors get caught before they leave |
| Records | Maintains databases and filing systems | Whether someone else could find a file tomorrow |
BLS puts decision-making first among the qualities that matter, described as judgment in prioritizing tasks. That fits the work: the hard part is rarely any single task.
The job is not one hard task. It is many small ones from several people, and someone has to decide the order.
Working style: write it down first
Neither answer in the table is wrong. The trouble starts when an administrator and a partner hold opposite ones. Answer each row for every partner the person will support, separately.
| Moment | Write down, for each partner | What a mismatch looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Something goes wrong | The phones are down, or a client is waiting and the room is double-booked: do you want to hear at once, or hear it solved? | A missed delivery is quietly rebooked, and you learn about it when the client calls. |
| Instructions conflict | Two partners each say "now": who decides, and should the administrator raise it with both? | The louder request goes first, and the other partner finds out at the deadline. |
| Feedback | Do you say when something was not what you wanted, or fix it yourself? | Partners redo the work rather than say so, and the administrator never learns the standard. |
| Speed against quality | Which jobs need fast and good enough, such as a room booking, and which must be exact, such as an invoice? | Invoices go out fast and wrong, or room bookings wait for perfection. |
Where partners answer differently, that difference is the brief. An administrator who can describe how they adjust is worth more than one who says they are flexible.
What a bad hire costs
The most transparent estimate puts the cost of replacing an employee at about a fifth of salary, and it is probably low. A 2012 review by the Center for American Progress found a median of 21% of annual salary across most jobs, and 20% for jobs paying under US$50,000. Only 2 of its 11 papers counted indirect costs such as lost productivity. The data are historical and American, so read them as an order of magnitude. The larger bill is partner time spent on tasks the administrator should have absorbed.
A mismatch also shows up as strain before it shows up as errors. In a 2008 lab study of 48 mostly student participants answering emails in a simulated office, interrupted people finished faster with no more errors, but reported more stress, frustration, time pressure, and effort. The study was small and artificial, but it points at who pays for an unmanaged flow of requests: the person handling it.
What fit research does and doesn't show
A 2005 meta-analysis of 172 studies found that fit with a supervisor tracked how people felt about the supervisor (corrected correlation .46) and the job (.44), but much less performance (.18) or tenure (.09). Only 5 to 14 studies sit behind each figure. So a mismatch is less likely to make an administrator bad at the work than to make the working relationship worse for both sides.
How to screen for fit
Ask every candidate the same questions and score the answers against what you wrote down. A 2022 re-analysis of hiring research (Sackett and colleagues) ranked structured interviews first, with a validity of .42, ahead of work samples at .33, as summarized by SIOP. The figures cover job performance across occupations, not office administrators specifically.
Questions that surface working style
Ask about a real past situation, then keep asking "what did you do next?" until you hear actions, not intentions.
- Something went wrong: "Tell me about a day when something broke that you did not cause: a delivery, a system, a double-booked room. What did you do in the first ten minutes, and who did you tell?"
- Instructions conflicted: "Two people each told you their request was the priority. What happened?"
- Feedback: "Tell me about a time someone wanted something done differently from how you had been doing it. What did you change, and what did you ask?"
- Speed against quality: "Which tasks do you do fast and let be good enough, and which do you slow down for? How did you learn the difference?"
A 30-minute work sample
Hand over five requests from three partners, written as emails: one urgent, two that collide, one with a missing fact, one that is not the administrator's job. Ask the candidate to say what they would do first, what they would ask, and what they would tell each partner. Watch for:
- Questions before assumptions: strongest.
- A reply that tells each partner the plan: good.
- A silent reorder of the list: a risk, whatever else the answer shows.
References
Ask a former manager: "What did this person need from you to do their best work?" Then let finalists meet the partners they would support.
Canada and the US
| Ontario | United States | |
|---|---|---|
| Usual title | Office administrator, listed under administrative officers (NOC 13100). | Secretary or administrative assistant. |
| Where they work | Toronto region: ambulatory health care and hospitals 16%, professional, scientific and technical services 15%, finance, insurance, real estate and leasing 13%, education 11% (Job Bank). | Healthcare and social assistance 32%, education 13%, professional, scientific and technical services 11%, government 8% (BLS). |
| Median pay | C$29.38 an hour, range C$19.97 to C$45.00 (Job Bank, 2023 to 2024 data). Toronto region: C$30.00. | US$48,310 a year for all secretaries and administrative assistants; US$47,540 excluding legal, medical, and executive (BLS, May 2025). |
| Outlook | "Limited" for 2025 to 2027, Toronto region. | Employment down 2% from 2025 to 2035, with about 314,400 openings a year, all from replacing people who leave. |
FAQ
What does an office administrator do?
BLS lists answering phones, scheduling, arranging meetings, handling mail, preparing memos, invoices, and reports, maintaining files and databases, and basic bookkeeping. At a small firm, decide which of these the role includes before you write the posting.
What is the difference between an office administrator and an executive assistant?
BLS describes executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants as giving high-level support to an office and top executives. The pay differs too: BLS's May 2025 median is US$76,590 for executive roles and US$47,540 for the group excluding legal, medical, and executive.
How much does an office administrator earn in Ontario?
Job Bank's Ontario median is C$29.38 an hour, with a range of C$19.97 to C$45.00 (2023 to 2024 data). The Toronto-region median is C$30.00.
What should I ask in an office administrator interview?
Ask about real past situations: something that broke, two people claiming priority, being told to do it differently, and fast against exact. Use the same questions for every candidate and add the five-request work sample.
Will AI replace office administrators?
BLS projects a 2% decline for the group through 2035 and says technology lets many staff prepare their own documents. Nobody knows how far that goes. The part of the job tools do not do is deciding the order of competing requests and telling people the plan.
Sources
All pages opened October 27, 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (last modified August 27, 2026)
- Job Bank, Government of Canada: Administrative officers (NOC 13100): outlook, Toronto region (2025 to 2027; outlook updated December 10, 2025)
- Job Bank, Government of Canada: Office Administrator (NOC 13100): wages in the Toronto region, Ontario and Canada (Labour Force Survey, 2023 to 2024; updated November 19, 2025)
- The Canadian Press (Rianna Lim) via Global News, August 26, 2025: coverage of Statistics Canada commuting figures for May 2025. The article does not name the survey.
- CP24 (Phil Tsekouras), December 30, 2025: report on Ontario public servants' return to the office
- Mark, Gudith and Klocke (2008), CHI 2008: The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. Lab study, 48 participants.
- Center for American Progress, Boushey and Glynn, November 16, 2012: There Are Significant Business Costs to Replacing Employees
- Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman and Johnson (2005), Personnel Psychology 58(2), 281 to 342: Consequences of Individuals' Fit at Work. Person-supervisor figures from Table 4.
- Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens (2022), Journal of Applied Psychology 107(11), 2040 to 2068, as summarized by SIOP's TIP