If you scan job listings for executive assistants (EAs) across various industries, you’ll notice something strange: the descriptions are almost identical, regardless of whether the company is a tech startup or a century-old manufacturer. Tasks like calendar management, travel booking, correspondence, and office supply ordering appear in the same order and language, as if copied from a decades-old template.
That should be more alarming than it is. Most business roles have evolved significantly, with job descriptions updating to reflect new technologies and responsibilities. Marketing now requires data analysis; finance demands familiarity with systems that didn’t exist ten years ago. Even receptionist roles have been updated to include digital coordination. Yet, EA job specs remain frozen in time.
A Role Frozen in Place
A job description captures an understanding of a role at the moment it was written. When these descriptions remain unchanged for years, it signals that no one has revisited what the role truly requires. The result is slow, accidental fossilisation: a document copied and reused simply because updating it was never a clear priority.
There’s a deeper reason too. Rewriting a job description properly means sitting down and reconsidering what the role should actually be responsible for, a far more involved exercise than swapping a few words. It means engaging with questions about scope, authority, and value that a lot of organisations have simply never made time for, because the assumption that this is a straightforward support role has never been seriously challenged.
Meanwhile, the reality of the EA role has transformed almost beyond recognition. Today’s EAs manage global stakeholders, synthesise large volumes of information, and exercise significant judgement on behalf of executives. They’re often key players in operational leadership, using sophisticated project management and communication tools that weren’t even imagined in the 1990s. Yet these realities are rarely reflected in job descriptions that continue to be recycled. This frozen language mirrors a stagnant view from leadership: if the description hasn’t evolved, assumptions about the role likely haven’t either.
Why Does This Happen?
Job descriptions rarely get revisited because nobody owns that responsibility clearly. HR departments default to old templates and hiring managers under time pressure reuse the last posting. Because the basics, like diary management and minute-taking, are still technically part of the job, there’s little urgency to change the description. A proper rewrite would mean rethinking the role’s scope, authority, and value, questions many organisations avoid. And so, the gap between the job description and the real work quietly widens.
The Cost of Outdated Specs
Neglected job descriptions do more harm than they seem. They attract candidates looking only for administrative work, filtering out people with the strategic judgment the role now demands. New hires may be misled about what’s expected, leading to mismatched expectations and early frustration. Most importantly, compensation remains anchored to an outdated understanding of the role’s value, because salary benchmarking tends to follow the language in the job spec rather than the reality of the day-to-day work.
An Easy Solution
Unlike many of the deeper structural issues facing this profession, this one has a simple starting point. All it takes is for someone, ideally a senior HR leader or the executive the assistant supports, to sit down with the EA and document what the job actually involves now. In most cases, the gap between the two documents will be substantial, and that gap is itself useful evidence for a wider conversation about scope, title, and pay. Companies that treat this as a quick, low-cost audit rather than a major project tend to be pleasantly surprised by how much clarity it produces, for a task that only takes a single afternoon to do properly.
What an updated version actually looks like
Companies that take this seriously rewrite the job description from the work backwards, starting with what the role actually requires today rather than what a template says it’s always required. They include judgment, discretion, stakeholder management, and operational decision-making alongside the practical tasks, because those are honestly central to the job now, not incidental to it. And they revisit the document regularly, treating it the way they’d treat any other strategic role: as something that evolves as the business does.
This isn’t an argument for inflating job titles or dressing up basic tasks in more impressive language. It’s an argument for accuracy. If the role has actually changed, and in most organisations it clearly has, the description should reflect that, because the words used to define a job determine almost everything that follows: who applies, how they’re evaluated, and how they’re ultimately valued.
The real question worth asking
Next time a job description for an assistant role crosses your desk, ask: when was this actually last rewritten from scratch, rather than lightly edited from whatever came before it? If nobody can answer, that tells you far more about how the role is really regarded than the document itself ever will.
And if you’re the EA whose job spec hasn’t been touched since you started, remember: it’s not a verdict on you or your work, it’s just a document that never caught up. You already know what the role has actually become, day to day, and that knowledge is exactly what makes the conversation about updating it worth having. Raise it. You might be surprised how quickly people listen once someone finally asks.
What if you didn’t have to do this alone, with real support behind the career you actually want?
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