Industry Insights

This article argues that accountants can strengthen their role as trusted advisors by helping clients make better hiring decisions using objective assessments rather than relying solely on résumés, interviews, or personal recommendations.

The article outlines two practical hiring approaches: testing candidates before the first interview or after an initial interview. In both methods, candidates are scored objectively, and testing acts as a gatekeeper to eliminate weak applicants early. This leads to faster hiring, better candidate filtering, stronger legal protection, and fewer costly hiring mistakes.

Even with strong hiring processes, accounting firms will occasionally make hires that don’t work out. Underperformance can stem from many causes — skill gaps, lack of confidence, poor onboarding, unclear expectations, workload pressure, or difficulty adjusting to a new environment. Rather than treating it as immediate failure, firms should identify issues early, provide fair support, and make timely decisions if improvement doesn’t occur.

The blog explains that hiring accounting and bookkeeping professionals is difficult because many strong candidates are already employed and may only be casually exploring opportunities. Employers should therefore focus not just on technical qualifications, but also on understanding a candidate’s real motivations, career goals, and readiness to change jobs.

The blog argues that traditional job interviews are often unnecessarily stressful and ineffective, causing candidates to underperform and interviewers to misjudge true ability. It introduces transparent interviewing, sharing questions and expectations in advance, as a better alternative.

Firms apply far more rigor to buying software or equipment than they do to hiring employees—even though hiring mistakes often carry greater long-term costs. The blog argues that hiring should adopt the same “trust but verify” mindset as procurement, using more systematic, evidence-based methods to reduce risk and improve outcomes.

The author reflects on choosing accounting at a young age and argues that the profession is widely misunderstood and undervalued. While often seen as dull, accounting is actually a diverse and dynamic career involving problem-solving, strategy, communication, and work across many industries.

AI is rapidly reshaping accounting by automating routine tasks like transaction coding and reconciliations. As a result, accountants are shifting from “doers” to “reviewers,” responsible for interpreting and validating AI-generated outputs. While AI improves efficiency, it can still produce errors that appear correct, making human oversight essential. This shift makes curiosity a critical skill.

Performance reviews aim to be objective, but even well-designed processes can introduce bias. One overlooked source is self-assessments done before manager evaluations. Research shows that women—especially women of color—tend to rate themselves lower than men. When managers see these self-ratings first, their own evaluations are influenced downward due to anchoring bias.

When reviewing assessment results, it’s natural to focus on the outcomes — skills, ability, and personality insights.These are valuable and play a key role in hiring decisions. But there’s another part of the process that often doesn’t get the same level of attention — and it can make a meaningful difference: the proctoring report.

A recent LinkedIn post by Queensland recruiter Christine Foggiato highlights a costly hiring mistake that many accounting firms face. A CA-qualified accountant with eight years of experience moved from an $85,000 role to a $130,000 senior position, but was let go after just five months due to underperformance.

Hiring accountants is meant to be objective, but research shows that first impressions—based on faces, voices, and even names—often influence decisions before real skills are evaluated.