Five Cents Ten Cents

Flickr image "Union Station and the Kansas City Skyline" by navycrackerjack74

It’s interesting to note that I have received a couple of emails from readers asking for advice about careers in accounting and the fields of study they should be doing if they want to pursue a career as an accountant.

I thought I’ll write more about it in my series on Diary of a CPA to flesh out the day to day adventures of being an accountant or internal auditor.

Detecting the Right Skills for the Right Job

A CPA can be called upon to be an internal/external auditor, accountant or tax professional. Even within the accountant role there are many different types of jobs that an accountant can do. So how do you detect the right skills for the right job requirement if you are hiring CPAs or would-be CPAs?

I attended an interesting seminar at the Civil Service College by Professor Francis Flynn on “Performance and Talent Management – Insights for Tomorrow’s Workplace”. His talk covered the role of intuition (upsides and downsides) in managerial decision making, and touched on the judgement of talent in organisations.

It was timely because I am in the midst of growing my staff from the small team of 2 (myself and 1 staff) to 3.5 before reverting to a longer-term 2.5 headcount. 0.5 refers to a staff who will be on half-day basis.

It is still a small team but I will be managing 3 direct reports instead of 1 so the people management factor just increased three-fold in a short span of time.

I recruited my 1 staff a few months back and looking back on the recruitment decision, I have to say it could have been done better although my current staff is fitting it.

Interviews and Performance – 0.07

What I learnt during the seminar was that face-to-face interviews are poorly correlated to staff performance at work for most jobs (including internal auditors) but are useful mainly to assess likeability and the general demeanour of a candidate. Thus, recruitment should be based on more factors that just the suitability of the candidate based on the interviews.

The 0.07 reflects how the standard job interview account is able to “predict” around 7% of the subsequent performance by the candidate in the job. Cognitive ability tests (i.e. IQ) gives us around 53% while work sample tests give around 44% validity. This was an eye-opener and made me more aware of how I could consider using work sample tests when the next hiring situation turns up for my team.

In most hiring situations I’ve come across, the grades or academic and relevant professional certifications of the candidate are used for short-listing the candidate. But how I hired my current staff also reflected the prevailing bias exposed by Professor Flynn, i.e. we then tend to disregard the data arising from the results/academic qualifications and rely more on how well the interview went to assess the suitability of the candidate.

This approach is not “wrong”. It just shows that human decision making is that we tend to make use of the information that is available.

Using Work Skills Test and More Structured Interview

An internal auditor needs to be analytical, articulate and approachable and have an eye on improving things. The articulate and approachable factor can be sussed out during the standard job interview. But I realise the analytical part and the eye to detail to improve processes requires a type of mindset that is tough to sieve out during the interview.

Going forward, I will make use of more structured interview questions (i.e. same questions to the candidates) as well as put in a written assignment for the potential candidate to work out based on real world internal audit situations.

How did you manage to clinch your current role in the organisation?

If you are a manager, how did you recruit your staff?

Share with Panzer especially if you are an accountant/auditor.

Be well and prosper.