Industry Insights

This article focuses on helping accounting firms hire and develop people who can effectively act as the “Human in the Loop” when reviewing AI-generated work and implementing AI responsibly. Rather than discussing AI itself, it explains how existing APPQ Personality and Critical Reasoning assessments can identify individuals with the skills needed to oversee AI outputs.

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.

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. 

Hiring offshore accounting staff carries the same risks as in-office hiring—but often with higher hidden costs. A bad hire leads to lost productivity, rework, frustrated managers, and strained client relationships, and these issues can be amplified in remote settings.

AI hiring has entered a new regulatory era. A proposed class-action lawsuit filed in California against Eightfold AI alleges that its hiring algorithms evaluated candidates using hidden scores, sensitive personal data, and opaque processes—without disclosure, consent, or the ability for applicants to review or challenge the results. The case claims potential violations of U.S. consumer-protection laws, fair employment regulations, and, for non-U.S. use, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act.

Accounting firms are turning to AI to ease talent shortages and improve efficiency, but this shift increases—not reduces—the importance of strong hiring decisions. As AI handles routine tasks, accountants must focus more on judgement, critical thinking, ethics, and clear communication—skills that are hard to assess through CVs and interviews alone.