Office Administrator

If you have experience, mention the packages you have used. If not, get some training in the most important packages before your interview. Ask your recruitment consultant what are the best packages to learn.

Say that you deal with authority as you deal with customers - with integrity, professionalism and politeness.

When describing your past experience focus on the aspects that directly apply to the job you are interviewing for. Consider the needs of the organization and relate your skills and abilities to these. Carefully study the job description or posting to determine what the employer is looking for and outline how your previous work experience has equipped you for this job.

I used to receive fax, mail and couriers with signing the receipts and maintaining an organized record of each respectively. I used to sort and distribute all incoming or outgoing mail to the relevant departments and executives. It also included maintaining printers and fax machines for retrievals as well as routing incoming fax and also guiding others on how to use the specialized machines for sending fax.

If pushed too far you would consider speaking to your manager about workloads and expectations and try to resolve the situation.

Time management is crucial for any office assistant, who successfully coordinates and carries out many tasks simultaneously. Office assistants are often actively involved in managing the time of other office staff and managers. To be able to do that one must be able to manage his/her own time.

Meeting people and speaking to customers is often a vital part of being an administrator. Say that you enjoy talking to people and that interaction with other people is often what makes the work most interesting.

Say that they are very good and that you can communicate well face-to-face, on the telephone and via the Internet on email. Tell us about a time in your professional career when you went out of your way to complete a task for someone else

Hopefully, you have some real experiences - but you may have forgotten them by now. Think back and try to recall a time that you may have helped somebody when they were under pressure or off sick.

Attending to and completing all the details results in accuracy. Give examples of when you have addressed mistakes in your or other people's work. Focus on following the correct procedures to complete a task and check your work.