4 Ways Poor Hires Hurt Your Accounting Team
Looking to hire employees for your accounting team? Learn why you need to bring pre-employment skills testing into the interview process and how poor hires can hurt your business in more ways than one.
In this article, we’ll share how these types of hiring mistakes can negatively impact your bottom line and why cognitive abilities testing should be part of your pre-employment checklist.
Table Of Contents
The Strength Of Your Accounting Team
Your accounting department is a critical part of your business. They are the powerhouses who crunch the numbers, manage the P&L’s, prepare reports, audit your books, create financial documents, manage payroll, and so much more.
That means you need the right people in the right seats at all times to keep things running smoothly – and legally. Let’s explore the ways poor hires hurt your accounting team.
When Hiring Employees Goes Wrong In The Accounting Department
1) Productivity Suffers
Accountants need a high level of proficiency in a lot of areas. They need to be able to manage their time, comb through minute financial details, and understand how to track everything accordingly.
If you hire someone who can’t handle the fast pace or understand your standard processes- or doesn’t know how to create or implement one – you’re in trouble.
For example, you may find duplicate financial information that skews your reports, spreadsheet errors, and other employees may have to fix the mistakes of this poor hire. Even worse, an error may not get caught until it’s too late. These problems can spiral out of control. That’s why pre-employment skills testing is essential for these key roles.
2) Teamwork Is Lacking
Businesses thrive on teamwork. And when you have employees that enjoy working together, the workload seems to be spread appropriately and the team morale is high. But, if you hire an employee that doesn’t fit the team vibe very well, your cohesive unit may start to crumble.
While you may think it’s impossible to know how someone will work out after they come aboard, there are ways to measure behavioral traits before you actually bring them into your team. Behavioral tests used during the hiring process are one of the key ways you can evaluate potential hires before giving them final approval.
3) Customer Retention Slides
Your customers expect a certain level of consistency and professionalism, and you want client-facing employees to share the same values, respect, courteousness, and attitude toward customers that you personally would have. Without the right service skills, customer interactions could turn sour and poor reviews could come flooding in.
Not only is this dangerous from a public perspective, but it’s disheartening to watch your brand be tarnished by someone who wasn’t the right fit.
4) Compliance Regulations Fail
There’s no way around it: If your company’s record-keeping doesn’t comply with all federal, state, and local authorities, you could be in big trouble. And your accounting department plays a key role in this.
When your accounting team members don’t pay close attention to government regulations, don’t file documents on time, and don’t know which other ways they need to be compliant, your company could suffer fines or other losses.
How To Hire Accounting Employees The Right Way
Implementing pre-employment testing, such as cognitive abilities testing, into your hiring process is one step toward avoiding the probability of such hiring mistakes.
Cognitive and reasoning tests and basic accounting knowledge skills assessments can be useful for prospective accounting hires. An applicant can have the perfect resume listing every skill you’re searching for, but you need to know that they can execute on those skills – or learn them efficiently.
The use of automated, technology-driven processes grows each year, but 57% of accountants found technology literacy to be the most critical skill for accounting staff, according to Sage. You need someone with basic tech skills, at a minimum, to manage your workflows.
While that’s simply one example, if the skills and reasoning abilities aren’t there, pre-testing candidates will save time and will weed out people from your pipeline more quickly.
Saving The Day One Hire At A Time
You want to do everything possible to increase the probability of a successful hire. You don’t want to damage your company’s reputation with staff that don’t represent you well. According to the Department of Labor, the cost of a bad hiring decision is typically around 30% of that individual’s expected first-year salary. That’s huge!
Instead of rolling the dice, pre-employment skills testing makes hiring more data-driven, less opinion based. Testing for cognitive abilities, behavioral traits, accounting knowledge, and overall critical thinking skill will give you more information about each candidate, which will help you make more-informed, data driven hiring decisions.