what your imagination did not tell you about celebrity assistants.

What most people want to know first about someone who spends their days next to Hollywood's biggest talents is: How did they get there? As it turns out, it's purely by accident. Most start off with at least a peripheral interest in the entertainment industry, whether that means having aspirations to be a filmmaker or to work in communications. Most take a job because, when you're 22 and living in New York or LA, a job is a job. And then one thing leads to another, a former boss puts you in touch with a new contact, and suddenly you've spent years doing something you had barely heard of.

"I didn't know this industry existed," says Kelly Engstrom, who has spent the last seven as the right-hand woman to former talk show host and Oprah contributor Nate Berkus. "I didn't know that [being a celebrity assistant] was a job you could have. I went to school for communications so I thought I would end up in PR."

That sentiment was echoed several times. One assistant did a semester at NYU's film school and using connections she made there, wound up with a post-college gig working for a prolific director and spending her days on the set of The Sopranos. Another was given a random referral and the next thing she knew was moving across the country to live in Malibu and assist an actress right after her first Oscar win. (A move that, it's worth mentioning, wasn't revealed until she accepted the job.) These placements are so random that the assistants could barely give advice to aspiring celebrity assistants if they tried. "I don't think any of us go to college and say, I'm going to be a celebrity assistant," stressed one person.

What isn't random is the interview process. It starts with full privacy measures to protect the identity of the celebrity—the principal is never revealed and, typically, neither are other details. When Engstrom she received the call for an interview with The Nate Berkus Show, she didn't even know she had applied to that job.

"I remember the posting being very, very, vague," says another assistant. "I replied to a random Gmail account and there was no connection to [the actress]. I didn't know who the job was for, for a long time, and there were several vetting stages and then finally my second-to-last interview was with her current assistant, who I was going to replace. They were holding things very close to the vest, but with good reason—it was really the height of her fame."