Take the Risk Out of Hiring
With many accounting jobs now being undertaken remotely, it’s important to make sure your remote hires have the skills and competencies you need.
Hiring the wrong person could risk your reputation, do damage to your team, and be a costly mistake. It has been estimated that a poor hire costs around 30% of the employee’s expected first-year earnings.
In this article, you’ll learn a simple five-step strategy that will help you fully assess candidates for your remote accounting team.
Why Candidate Assessment Is Crucial
Often, a poor hiring decision is because of the need to fill a role quickly. This creates the environment in which other hiring mistakes happen – you fail to identify required skills, make subjective evaluations of candidates, and accept what the candidate tells you on their resume.
With the following assessment strategy, you will ensure that you hire the best candidate available.
Step#1: Identify the Skills Needed (Hard and Soft Skills)
This step saves you time and makes the selection process less draining. It helps you focus on the exact abilities and skills you need from your new hire.
Ensure you have a list of the soft and hard skills you’re looking for – separated into ‘must-haves’ and nice-to-haves’ – and stay true to the list without compromising. This way, you will be more likely to select a competent candidate for remote accounting jobs.
Step #2: Develop a Balanced Scorecard to Assess Skills
A balanced scorecard helps determine how skilled each candidate is. You can assess their proficiency level in the needed skills, and give each a score on a system set by you.
This should be used when reviewing each candidate’s resume and during interviews. This system ensures that you cover all you need to, and that you remove any bias from the assessment process.
Step #3: Review Resumes Against Skills Criteria
The candidate’s resume is usually the first contact you have with them. It’s important that you review the resume against the list of skills you developed in step two.
You may decide to use an applicant tracking system (ATS) to help with this. Be aware, though, that such a system works by scoring resumes against keywords. This means that its effectiveness depends upon the keywords you input and how well candidates have formatted their resumes. You could miss out on the best person for the job.
Discard candidates whose resumes don’t provide evidence of the skills you desire.
Step #4: Test for Skills
Having cut your list of candidates to those whose resumes fit your requirements, you should now test for the technical skills that the candidates have told you they possess on their resumes. You could test these with a self-designed online assessment, or by using a third-party app. You could also test with a ‘real-world’ work assignment.
Once again, any candidate who does not pass this test can be discarded from your hiring process.
Step #5: The Video Interview
The final step is the video interview. This is the final assessment for skills. Ask the same questions of each candidate, and mark them against your scorecard.
The interview is your opportunity to assess each candidate against your cultural expectations. Have they got the personality that makes them a natural fit for your remote team? Do they share your values? Hiring a candidate who aligns with your company and your team is essential.
Shortcut Your Candidate Assessment for Remote Accounting Jobs
While the steps mentioned above will surely help a great deal to hire competent and productive personnel, it’s advisable to use a specialized recruiting agency. By doing so, you save time, stress, and hiring costs – because you will be presented with candidates who have already been assessed.
To hire the next member of your remote accounting team, contact 6 Degrees today.