Congratulations, you have a vacancy in your firm. You’re either growing your firm, or you’ve got a chance to reshape it slightly. (Perhaps not what you were thinking when your team member handed in their notice!)
With the lack of decent qualified or part-qualified accountancy talent out there at the moment, it’s not easy to find good people. Oh, and if you want someone with deep and extensive cloud expertise, you are looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack!
Given the current market conditions, you may be justified in lowering your standards for who you accept for the role. After all, you want the best person for the job, not the best person that hears about your vacancy, or just anybody.
If you are like our club members, you don’t want to spend ages recruiting, and you don’t want to pay for a recruitment agency (I’ve never met a small accountancy firm owner who happily paid for a recruitment agency)! If you are going to avoid using recruiters and get someone in quickly, you need a good recruitment process to help you get the best candidate. Here are some thoughts on how to find a great new team member quickly without using a recruitment consultant.
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How to find employees – the critical step
Let’s assume you can’t see into your crystal ball or you’d buy winning lottery tickets, not run a small accountancy practice. You don’t know who will be the best candidate; you can only make sensible assumptions and rule out ones that are unlikely to be right. The recruitment process is about stacking the odds in your favour, not a guarantee of perfection.
Let’s be honest, you don’t really know what your firm will be like in three years, so you’re looking for the best person to fit something that might change!
So, the important point in your recruitment strategy is to think about your requirements:
- Roles they will be doing
- Roles they might be doing in the future
- Qualifications you need and those that might be nice
- Skills they must have (and those that would be useful).
- How they’ll fit in the team. What sort of personality would be best?
- Attitudes you want.
- Anything else?
Don’t just find employees to replace those who left; think about your firm, its structure, and the roles you need them to fill now and moving forward.
Read:Â 4 big secrets to attract rather than recruit the right accounting staff
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The biggest mistake most employers make
A recruitment process where you don’t define the best person, don’t find enough candidates, and don’t test for what you need is the most common recruitment strategy; it’s called ‘gut feel’ and ‘hope.’ And spoiler alert: it ends in tears!
Behind that is a significant problem in many small professional firms: not considering recruitment until you have passed the point of needing a new person. Even if you don’t need anyone for a few months, you can still network for potential opportunities. A good recruitment strategy is like marketing.
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What goes into a good recruitment process?
We’ve worked with a lot of small accountancy firms and even help plan and source their talent over at The Accountants’ Recruiter, so we know exactly what is needed for a solid recruitment process. Here are eight essentials:
- A definition of what you need, considering what you know about how things might change and the skills in your firm already. You can call this a personal specification and a job description if you like, but it’s a definition of your needs.
- Finding a large number of potential candidates. The days of a “job centre advert” have long gone, if they ever existed. Are you using all the channels available to you?
- Screen out the immediate rejections. A standard method for this is essential, and we recommend that you involve your team in this process.
- Telephone or video call interviews. Short fact-finding discussions can help you narrow down the shortlist without wasting too much time. You’re not looking for the perfect person, just the most suitable one to investigate further.
- Tests. What skills do you need that you should test for? Qualifications and certificates only show they made the grade at some time in the past! Desktop exercises, a short accounting exercise, a quick review of two sets of accounts – what would be appropriate? There are usually ways to test for the skills you seek, so definitely test all the candidates. You may also be able to involve your team here, too, saving you time. The more your team are involved, the more they’re likely to work with and support the new member of staff.
- Social Media. It’s said that people are less likely to lie on their LinkedIn profile than on their CV, and it’s also public information. So make sure to check their Social Media.
- Competency-based interviews. A series of questions aimed at finding out what they have done in the past increases your ability to compare candidates and decreases the dreaded “gut feel”.
- References. No, you won’t find out all their skeletons in the cupboard of their last employer – but you have increased the chances that they are who they said they are!
One tip for your recruitment process
If we have to leave you with one piece of advice for a successful recruitment process, it would be this: get back to them as soon as possible after each stage! The worst thing in the world is finding someone good who goes elsewhere because you didn’t respond within the time they expected. As we said at the beginning of this article, talent is hard to find as it is!
Hopefully, now, you know what goes into a good recruitment process, so you can find a great new team member quickly without having to use a recruiter. Now all that is left is to onboard those team members and get them up to speed as quickly as possible. (Luckily, we have a free onboarding checklist to help you do just that! Download it here.)