How to Hire The Right Senior Accountant, Business Analyst or Sales Professionals?

How often have you spent quite some time, money, and efforts in searching, screening, assessing, and hiring professionals for senior positions such as senior finance or sales professionals? Have you always been satisfied with the outcomes? Did you think that you could have hired a more apt professional a few months post hiring? This blog helps you identify and address challenges related to hiring for senior roles. Whether you are planning a senior sales executive recruitment, senior accountant recruitment, a senior finance manager recruitment, or a senior business analyst recruitment, this blog is a must-read!

A senior accountant is someone who keeps company accounts, financial statements, income statements, and other financial records up to date and accurate. Are you aware of the keys to hiring a senior accountant for your business? Do you know what tactics to employ to find and secure a top candidate for your company?

Accounting is more than just crushing numbers. A senior accountant should have a range of skills, a good deal of experience, and knowledge of many financial areas. Also, he or she needs to have traits related to proper time management, trustworthiness, flexibility, and instant decision making.

The same questions arise with regards to senior finance manager recruitment, senior business analyst recruitment, and senior sales executive recruitment. Hiring for senior positions today requires more than traditional methods of tests and interviews. There are so many cases of companies making bad hiring decisions despite long and stringent interview and assessment processes that overall recruitment costs increase almost 2x.

We have been offering complete assistance with senior-level recruitments and have helped over 1,000 companies in making their recruitments for senior positions more satisfactory and outcome-rich.

With regards to senior sales executive recruitment, senior accountant recruitment, senior finance manager recruitment, or senior business analyst recruitment, we had discovered the following pitfalls in the companies which had huge challenges in getting the right talent before they contacted us.

Let’s have a look at these pitfalls.

Five Major Obstacles That Can Cause Bad Hiring

Why do firms constantly approach hiring unscientific and informal if improved hiring and better employees bring so much value? What can you do to overcome these challenges?

By leveraging judgments into what qualities make a good senior accountant, you can revamp your hiring activities to be more targeted and productive. After going through the following points, every business can be primed to unbolt a goldmine of value that they might not even be aware of.

High Attention on Academic Background

Worse yet, the high focus on the academic background can be the biggest cause of your bad hiring. We understand that taking account of marks, GPAs, name of institution, and degrees is essential to check a candidate’s knowledge. But making it a priority during the interview will not give your desired results.

High experience, good judgment, ability to manage cash flow, etc., are some of the essential areas that you need to focus on to ensure you hire the right candidate when it comes to senior accountant recruitment, senior finance manager recruitment, senior business analyst recruitment or senior executive sales recruitment.

Judgments That are Highly Focused on Academic Knowledge Rather Than Industry Experience

You might not have a recruiting procedure focused too much on the reputation of an academic institution from where a candidate has studied, but you might be focusing your assessments mostly on academic knowledge. Your technical assessments and interviews might be mostly about theoretical questions.

You need to discover the exceptional skills of candidates while hiring, such as expertise in sales, finance, business, and accounting analysis. For these, you need to choose more pragmatic assessments.

Feeble Interview Format

Interviewing should be based on a SMART approach. By taking every step perfectly, you can make the interview process more productive and outcome-focused.

Often interview formats for senior accountant positions are based on the same traditional approach that the company has been following for years. It is wiser to follow the current best practices in senior accountant hiring rather than sticking to outdated methods of interviewing.

If you need dynamic individuals with abilities such as astute power of judgment, quick analysis skills, understanding of financial data analytics, then frame interview formats in a way that you can assess all these abilities quite well.

Unstructured Candidate Analysis and Scoring

It is one thing to say that you follow fair practices in selecting some candidates over another, and it is quite another thing to prove the same.

Many companies had made senior sales executive recruitment or senior business analyst recruitment based on just a few interviews and the opinions of the interview panels comprising the sales manager and the sales head. You never know when bias could enter into the process in an unintentional way.

By using objective criteria and digital scoring systems to assess each candidate with regards to all required skills, abilities, and aptitude, you could prevent any level of subjectivity and bias influencing the hiring decisions.

Imperfect Background Checks

Background checks need to be quite detailed. Checking the authenticity of all documents provided by a candidate, including experience, academic credentials, training, and certifications, requires expertise and access to the right resources.

When you partner with a recruitment agency for senior accountant recruitment, senior finance manager recruitment, senior business analyst recruitment, or senior sales executive recruitment, you can rest assured of highly detailed and authentic background checks.

Hiring for Senior Accounting, Sales, and Finance Roles – Tips From Alliance International Headhunters

1. Design A Profile Description with Absolute Details For Internal Reference

The profile description for senior accountant recruitment or senior finance manager recruitment should be highly detailed to be able to give recruiters a highly clear picture of the kind of persona that could be ideal for the positions.

Would you need a dynamic, people champion to implement many change management practices successfully and lead people towards increasing performance levels or prefer a quiet, critical thinker who can lower risks and improve financial analysis?

The same kind of detailed profile descriptions is required for senior business analyst recruitment or senior sales executive recruitment. You could get profiles created in Spreadsheets based on traits and attributes identified through people analytic techniques. For every function the position needs to manage, the right skills and experience should be correlated with performance and track records data.

2. Frame Candidate Search Based On The Detailed Profile Description – Focus on Passive Candidate Search

Once you have got the detailed profile descriptions ready, you could use the list of skills, traits, attributes, knowledge, certifications, etc., to frame a custom search criteria.

Your objectives as a recruiter are to find, hire, and enroll top candidates. With so much rivalry among firms in acquiring top talent, finding the ‘best isn’t always a straightforward process. Passive candidate search is more useful in recruiting for senior roles.

3. Use Advanced Tools and Techniques To Receive, Store, Search, Scan, and Screen Resumes

Just like your CRM helps you analyze which customer segments are quick revenue-generators and which are consistent and long-term revenue generators, your recruitment systems and tools should be updated to allow structured data management. Based on a set of skills and experience, you should be able to extract applicant data that best match your search criteria.

You need not invest in expensive recruitment technology when you partner with a professional recruiter for senior sales executive recruitment or senior finance manager recruitment.

4. Use Custom Recruitment and Employer Branding Techniques Based on Age Groups and Geographies

Employer branding is the practice of establishing your organization as the best place to work for a specific group of skilled candidates. People like to work for organizations that value their personnel. They may question in their minds the reliability and trustworthiness of working at your company if you have a bad employer brand.

Check out sites to see what people are saying about you as an employer, and conduct employee and candidate surveys. Then, discuss with your team to determine what needs to be improved.

5. Choose Well-investigated and Scrutinized Interview Formats and Questions

Writing the correct interview questions is a part of the complexity of conducting well-investigated and scrutinized interview questions. The interview questions you ask must be relevant, understandable, and open-ended.

A great sales executive is one who has proved his or her abilities in previous employment and comes with great references. When conducting senior sales executive recruitment interviews, people often stick to questions that are rather staid and boring. Our recruiters recommend well-researched interview formats that motivate highly talented candidates to consider working with the company.

With regards to senior finance manager recruitment or senior accountant recruitment, interview formats should be such that each session should be able to give clear insights into a particular set of skill sets and abilities of candidates. Our recruiters have often conducted recorded interviews and then analyzed the results by running through certain sections of the interviews for verifying any doubts.

6. Be Aware Of The Current Hiring Trends

If you are looking for candidates in their late twenties or early thirties but following recruitment practices that originated before they were born, a number of talented and best-fit candidates could lose interest right from day one of being approached.

When it comes to senior accountant recruitment, with changes in technology, everything from records entry to reconciliation, financial reporting, etc., has changed dramatically. It is more about using the right software and techniques and scrutinizing reports through the latest knowledge systems. Being current in your hiring approaches does carry a positive impact on hiring decisions.

7. Compensation and Benefits Package Should Be Competitive

Compensation and advantageous packages are the additional tasks that come under hiring trends. There is a need to do market research to benchmark compensation and ideal benefits packages. You could then come up with the right terms of the offer.

8. Get Good Professional References And Check Backgrounds

A professional reference check and background checks are essential if you don’t want to waste time interviewing those candidates for the final round of interviews who aren’t suitable.

9. Avoid Delays, Making Professionals Wait For Too Long

Poor time management decreases your chances of getting an appropriate candidate for your job. A high-caliber candidate is often on the wish list of multiple firms. Tardy and unprofessional interview environments could quickly chase away good candidates than anything else.

Conclusion

Hiring for senior positions requires quite a lot of activities that are time-consuming. Also, access to rich talent pools and the ability to attract and motivate brilliant candidates requires recruiters to be highly trained and competent. If your recruitment costs for hiring for senior positions involve a lot of direct, indirect, hidden costs, hiring a recruitment agency could help you get better outcomes at reduced costs.

Alliance International

Alliance International is among the best companies offering comprehensive and customized support with recruitment activities. We have a highly experienced team of recruiters to manage senior-level recruitments.

Our company has completed over 10,000 projects for senior and managerial level recruitment for different practice areas, including marketing, sales, accounting and finance, business development, business analysis, business intelligence, data engineering and analytics, risk and compliance management, among others.

Make your recruitment activities less stressful, cost-efficient, and outcome-rich through our services!