Finance and accounting personnel play an important role in the development of the business. Therefore, recruiting finance and accounting personnel is the process of finding and attracting the human resources that every business needs. Therefore, enterprises need to develop a standardized accounting and financial management personnel recruitment process in order to achieve the best efficiency in recruiting personnel.
The role of the recruitment process
The hiring process is a much-talked-about journey for any hiring manager looking for top talent. Each step in the process requires careful preparation and businesses need to understand the importance of each step.
Because, the recruitment process not only reflects professionalism, but also helps businesses attract the right candidates, while saving time and money spent on attracting, identifying and hiring. retain talent.
Guidelines for building a professional accounting and finance staff recruitment process
If your business is having a hard time finding top finance and accounting staff, consider some of the factors that influence these results. For example, if you take too long, the recruitment process is prolonged, job seekers will not wait for the slow recruitment process. Or maybe, you did not ask the appropriate interview questions for the finance and accounting personnel position to determine the candidate's qualifications, skills, and suitability for this job...
This is the time when businesses should seriously improve their recruitment process. Follow our practical guide to preparing a professional financial manager hiring process, combined with a streamlined approach to improve your chances of finding the right candidate.
Job planning for recruitment department
Whether it's looking for a candidate for a new finance officer position or a position that has just been vacated, businesses must identify exactly what they need. The job planning process for the recruitment department should begin with identifying the right position, followed by an analysis of the job characteristics, knowledge, skills and experience required.
Therefore, enterprises need to determine the right need to recruit financial personnel according to the following steps:
- Check the workload of the finance and accounting department
- Evaluate and determine the quality and working ability of the current staff
- Identify and synthesize the knowledge and skills lacking in the team, the group of the finance and accounting department
- Identify vacancies and make a recruitment plan
After determining the right recruitment needs for accounting and finance personnel, enterprises need to build a suitable and skilled recruitment team. A well-skilled recruitment team will ensure an efficient recruitment process. The role of the hiring team is important, as one wrong decision can affect the productivity of the entire workforce. Therefore, the recruiting team needs:
- Clearly define the vacancy and the requirements from expertise, skills to people in an ideal candidate
- Detail the qualities required in a candidate, this will help in the candidate selection process.
- Write a clear description to help the candidate understand the job and assess if they are a good fit.
Write clear detailed job descriptions
To make the hiring process as clear and efficient as possible, you need to make sure that your job description is as detailed as possible. It effectively attracts potential candidates to apply for the position you are recruiting. One copy job description is well researched, serves as the first step in a long-term relationship between the business and its employees in the future. Let's study each part of the job description:
- The title is the first thing job seekers notice, so make sure it's specific and uses standard accounting terminology.
- At the beginning of the job description, write a short paragraph about the company and the brand as well as the current accounting and finance position.
- At the heart of the job description is a paragraph regarding overall responsibilities and a short analysis of the day-to-day tasks of the vacancy, preferably organized in bullet points.
- Skill requirements for candidates, remember, skills will fall into two different groups: hard or technical skills and soft skills.
- Make sure the description is brief, identifying required skills and prioritizing skills.
- A LinkedIn study found that 59% of job candidates are attracted to a job description that includes a salary element. However, there are pros and cons to consider before including your salary proposal in a job description.
- Instead of a salary proposal, the company's existing benefits can be included in the job description such as flexible working hours, career development opportunities, free lunch, etc.
Advertisement of recruitment information
Even the most attractive job advertisement may not capture the interest of top candidates, if it is not widely promoted. Therefore, make sure that your business updates job postings across multiple channels. A strong recruitment strategy is the one seen by the most candidates, and at the same time, shows the distinction in the accounting and finance position at the business compared to the similar role being advertised by other companies. .
- Put yourself in the candidate's shoes, make sure the job posting interacts directly with the candidates, giving the first impression that this is the job they are looking for.
- Don't use job title names that are too ostentatious, it can make the candidate not know if the role is relevant to them.
- In addition, these types of titles also do not have high search rankings on search engines.
- Expanding the recruitment network to social networks, which is a highly competitive channel in cyberspace, helps businesses reach a wider audience and have a higher likelihood of being relevant.
- Adding visual elements to job ads, job seekers are often attracted to job postings with visual elements (images, videos), rather than a regular post.
- Considering the source of candidates referred by the people in the business, your finance staff may know a lot of people with the same industry and experience. It is very likely that the most suitable candidate will come from the recommendation of those personnel.
- Take advantage of this rich source of candidates by posting job vacancies on the company's intranet, or set up a separate candidate portal for employees and review the reward program to encourage them. Your people promote their quality relationships.
Review resume
When the company's financial personnel recruitment news is widely advertised, there will be a lot of resumes sent. Next, the recruitment officer is responsible for screening and processing large piles of resumes, it is likely that this task will quickly become overloaded and cause delays in the recruitment process of human resources management personnel. main accounting. So, how to efficiently review applications and speed up the screening process, without missing or disqualifying potential financial candidates?
- Focus on the skills and experience required for a finance and accounting position in your initial resume review. Take a look at their resume and accompanying cover letter for the qualifications and skills the business has identified in its hiring criteria.
- Recruiters will always come across resumes that have all the required skills, at this point, pay attention to the priority skills. Based on the job description, identify the resumes that meet the priority skills in the recruitment criteria.
- Some candidates may meet the company's basic hiring criteria, but if the resume and accompanying cover letter appear to be based on the same template, this implies that the candidate is submitting the same document to the company. Many recruiters, think twice before giving an interview. Try to sift through resumes that clearly target finance and accounting positions at your business. That shows, the candidate really seriously adjusts the profile to match the recruitment criteria at the enterprise.
- It's difficult to gauge a candidate's suitability to your company or work group through a resume, but most likely first impressions will be revealed by the key words on the resume.
- When businesses have identified candidates with the most relevant industry experience and skills. Again, take the time to review their resumes and cover letters carefully, filtering out potential deal-breakers such as unprofessionalism or job hopping.
Plan your interview questions
Planning for comprehensive interview questions is an important part of the accounting and finance manager hiring process. Quality questions will help find key details about the candidate's strengths, weaknesses, and personality.
- Use general interview questions to open the interview like “Tell me about you? Why do you want to apply for this position? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Why did you leave your previous job? What are your future goals?”
- When the company is recruiting for the position of team leader, the head of the department should ask questions such as “Tell me about a time when you led a project at work? How do you handle challenges in your team? Which leadership skill do you find most useful? How do you handle disagreements at work?
- Then ask personal achievement questions like “How did you achieve your goals? What does success mean to you? What is your greatest personal achievement? Do you think you are suitable for the position of finance and accounting?”
- Businesses need a financial person to work in a team, ask the questions “What do you like most about working in a team? How did you work in a team? Have you ever had difficulty working in a team? What role do you play in a group?”
- Not only the position of finance and accounting, no matter what job, it also needs skills to handle situations. Therefore, the most commonly asked questions to learn about this skill are “Tell me about a time when you tried something new and failed? How do you handle conflicts and disagreements at work? When faced with a challenge, what do you do? How do you deal with high-stress situations?"
- Finance and accounting is a job that requires meticulousness and high accuracy, so a candidate for an experienced finance position will not avoid mistakes in the past. Businesses should learn about their mistakes and how to deal with them through the questions: “Have you ever made a mistake at work? Tell me about times when you didn't finish work on time? How do you overcome mistakes and failures at work?
Apply “Interview Techniques”
Recruiters should focus on developing techniques for the interview. Because, it is an opportunity to connect with candidates and determine if a candidate is really qualified for a job. Navigating an interview isn't always easy, but applying interviewing techniques can make a significant difference.
- Candidates are likely to be more nervous than you are, so create an initial friendliness and make them feel comfortable opening up.
- Make candidates feel heard, help them feel confident, relax and express who they really are.
- Ask open-ended questions so candidates can share more
- Capture, take the initiative in the interview, define time frames and control, capture important pieces of information.
- Listening is a key element in interviewing techniques, in particular, recruiters often focus on thinking about what they will say next and miss the candidate's opinion and answer at that time.
- Allow a period of silence, it can feel awkward, but the space for a little silence will motivate the candidate to fill.
- Before the end of the interview, the hiring officer should clearly communicate the date and means of feedback, and thank the candidate for his time. Then, make a commitment to answer each candidate by the scheduled date. It is a courtesy, showing the professionalism of the interviewer as well as the whole organization.
Design documents to assess candidate's ability
After completing all the interviews, you will have to make the difficult decision of weeding out unsuitable candidates to make the final shortlist. This means evaluating candidates based on professional competence, cultural fit and aptitude, plus taking the time to conduct your final selection reference check.
Reference checking is an important part of the hiring process, providing objective insights into a candidate's past job performance and cultural fit.
In addition, there are many candidates who stand out on resumes and appear excellent in interviews, so prepare a reference test for the most accurate candidate selection process.
Prepare well for the candidate interview
A hiring manager will find it difficult to schedule enough time in the day to meet candidates with great resumes. However, job interviews are key to securing the best talent, whether it's face-to-face or online. Therefore, to have a professional interview process, businesses need to prepare:
- Choosing the form of online or face-to-face interviews, in case there are too many candidates and you need to screen them before the face-to-face interview, reviewing online interviews can save time and money. fee.
- Prepare the right questions to uncover the key skills required for accounting and finance jobs. Include key questions relevant to the position and specific questions relevant to each candidate's resume.
- Schedule face-to-face interviews within 1 to 2 days, follow the schedule when the business has decided on the interview time frame. However, be reasonable, don't squeeze too many interviews into the same day, as this can drain you of energy and enthusiasm.
- Set the general criteria of the interview: do not rush to judge the candidate, take notes of the answers. Evaluate each candidate based on the same hiring criteria of the company, such as enthusiasm, body language and suitable personality.
- After the interview, do not rush to answer the candidate, discuss further with the recruitment consultant, schedule a date to announce the decision to the candidate.
Final hiring decision
Once you have completed interviewing finance and accounting candidates and shortlisted the best candidates, it's time to make a final hiring decision. This requires objectivity when evaluating top candidates:
- Apply objective recruitment criteria based on recruitment criteria
- Take the time to check at least one or two references of selected candidates
- Make sure that all parties involved in the vacancy agree, or at least the key decision makers agree, before you send out a job offer.
Make a job offer
The business is satisfied that it has selected a suitable finance and accounting candidate, it's time to officially issue a job offer. Before reaching out to candidates, there are a few things that businesses will need to keep in mind to make the accounting and finance management personnel recruitment process as smooth as possible.
- Do not delay a job offer, as an excellent financial candidate will be sought after by many employers. Any delay could cause the candidate to accept job offers elsewhere.
- Flexible settlement of salary and other benefits agreements will help businesses retain excellent candidates that you don't want to lose.
- Draft a job offer letter to store a detailed, clear, and practical job offer.
- Set a time frame for the candidate's decision, suggest a reasonable response time to receive a job offer in time, and welcome a new employee to your workplace.
Introducing new employees
The importance of introducing and connecting new employees to the organization cannot be underestimated, the hiring manager should strive to connect new employees with existing employees, to achieve integration, environment friendly, the finance and accounting department was engaged from day one.
It is important to ensure that the business has a referral plan in place and takes the time to introduce new members to the organization in a reasonable way.
- Inform them about the company rules and prepare the essentials for new employees: organize their workspace, email, access rights and their employee ID card.
- Gather all the documents they need to confirm and you can send them before they arrive on the first day.
- Create a plan and timetable for anticipated, measurable milestones. The first day, the first week, the first month, the first 90 days, the first six months, and the first year are all major workplace anniversaries to track employee growth.
- Inform your team of the hiring decision, letting your team know the new coworker's name, their role, start date, and how they fit into the team.
- It can also be helpful to ask your team about a welcome plan to help newcomers quickly become friendly and integrated into the team.
