I'm Beth Whitworth, race car driving, quilt making, CPA firm owning, wife, mom, and boss. I'm here to help you build a business you love by sharing all of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the excellent sides of working in this industry. It's not always easy, but after many years, I can finally say it's worth it.
Let me guide you on your journey to accounting with confidence
Hi everybody and welcome to accounting with confidence My name is beth whitworth and i'm your host and today we have a confidence booster episode relating to hiring tips So we are actively in the process of trying to make a new hire And as i'm doing this and working through all of the steps I thought there were some tips that I could share with you on what has worked for us You And what has made the process a little bit easier.
I will not say the process is easy, but there are things you can do to maybe help it work out for you a little bit better. So why does hiring always feel so hard? We are definitely in a time of That being kind of the norm, is people feel that hiring is hard. It's hard because, you know, there's distrust on both sides, where you feel like you don't know if someone's telling the truth on their resume.
They don't know if you're really going to give them what you say you're going to give them. Or, in some cases, is this even a legitimate Job offer. There's so much a I and scams and all of these things that it starts to put this level of distrust between the parties. There's also that fear that employers have and employees have of making the wrong decision.
So, what if you, you know, you hire somebody, you give them an offer, they come on in, that wasn't the right choice, that, that you find out that this didn't, it didn't work out. And historically, you know, you have those situations and you know, you always hear, you know, hire slow, fire quick. And, but that fire quick is not as easy as people who make that statement realize.
Maybe that sounds like something you should do, but you still have work that needs to get done. And you need that a person to be doing that. And as soon as you say, okay, this isn't a right fit, you're starting that hiring process over again. And that is frustrating. And there is fear that, okay, what if I, if I make the wrong decision, then.
I've set myself back and I have so much time, only so much time in a day. The other reason why it feels hard is it's expensive and that time factor. People have things to do. You have a business to run, you have a job to do, and then when you add in, I need to hire a new team member. That amount of time can be overwhelming.
And can make you put it off. And then of course the cost, if you're running ads anywhere, they're not inexpensive anymore. And it's really difficult sometimes to feel that the cost warrants what you get. And so people are hesitant and feel the process is, is very difficult because of the cost and the time.
But there are things that I believe are reasons why you need to make it hard. You need to make not the process of hiring, but the result of the hiring. You want it to be difficult to get a position with you. You want to be able to eliminate the uninterested people. And so if you make the application process not hard.
You know, then people are going to apply who may or may not have even read your ad. So you have to kind of put some things in there, almost like, you know, Easter eggs and in movies, you know, you have to put something in there that determines that the person actually wants the job before you're spending any of your hard earned time on their application.
The other reason to make it hard is that you have to start to defeat the AI bots that the hiring sites are starting to use. So if they've been around for a couple years and what's happening is they're able to use keywords to apply for the applicant. They find keywords in your ad, they have the applicant that's in the database file as if they applied to your ad.
Some of these people have not even read your ad. And that means you get a whole bunch of people who don't are, they may not be interested. They may be applying because they have a requirement to apply for a certain number of jobs. They may, you know, just have this blanket application that there's like, okay, just find me any job that, you know, has accounting in the name or whatever.
And so you have to come up with a, a way to defeat that and get to the people who actually are looking for positions and want to work for you. The other thing you need to be testing for or to make it hard is you need to test skills. You need to test for tenacity and, and drive. Do they have the desire to go through the steps that you're requiring inside of your application to be a part of your team?
Because I don't know about you, but I don't want somebody on my team who just wants things handed to them, that they don't work hard, that they don't have to have skills or learn new skills. And so we make it a little bit more difficult for people to actually get through those steps before we even interview.
So here's what we do to make it easier. In the job posting, we share the culture and the values of our business. If you're, you value things like faith, you maybe you're a faith based business, share it, don't hide it. If you truly want to attract people who will make. Ideal team members for you, tell them what you're about.
Tell them what they will experience when they start working for you. And because those things that are truly a part of your culture are not something that will be hidden when they get on board. And so if they don't know about it ahead of time, they may have select themselves out if you would have put those things in to your ad.
So we share things like we are technology forward, which means we expect everybody to be able to. Be comfortable working with technology and understanding how to problem solve or troubleshoot. So that's a skill, something that we make sure that we share in the ad. The other thing we make sure we do is that we express what we're really looking for.
So you can say that you want to hire someone, say you're hiring somebody for your accounting department. And okay, you want them to be able to, you know, enter bills and maybe pay bills and understand an account's payable aging. And, you know, there's, those are, are definitely skills, but what you're really looking for, really looking for is probably someone who's going to show up, who's going to be positive, who's going to be friendly, who's going to work on a team, who's going to take, you know, feedback well, you know, all of those things, put it in the job posting.
Because someone who doesn't take feedback well will be like, yep, I'm not applying for this job. The other thing that we do is we have some hidden skills tests. Hidden being, we are testing for things we always need, which is detail oriented. I pay attention to details and I Say that I do that, but let's see if you really do.
So we always have a specific subject line that the applicant needs to send an email to with that subject line. We then filter our email to put those all in the same folder. And so if you didn't put the subject line in correctly, you're not getting looked at because you didn't pay attention to the details.
We also do some personality assessments outside of anything that the hiring platform puts in place. So there's lots of skills tests, there's, there's, you know, random things on are you good at customer service and they can, you know, do a little problem solving. But I actually send links and say, take these free personality assessments.
Is it something that I'm actually. Using to determine if that person would be a good fit, not until after I've hired them, to be honest. But what it is doing is, I have specific instructions. Attach a screenshot to the email with your results. Okay, that's testing to see, one, can they follow instructions?
Two, do they know how to attach something to an email? And three, do they know how to take a screenshot of something? Which is starting to test a little bit towards our technology. So, the other thing that we do is that we request something. We request a video, um, send us a video telling us more about you and why you want the job or what attracted you to the job.
And we give them a time limit, say it's two to three minutes. And we give them a date we need to have it by. And then we use that, that's another kind of a hidden skills test. Do they know how to make a video? And then once we have a video, we can see, are they comfortable talking on video? We're a remote firm, you've got to be comfortable, comfortable being on video.
And then it also, you know, do they have the skill to send that video to us without having to ask us how to do it? Because those are the types of problem solvers we want on our team. The other thing, let's see, I guess this would be item number four on your job posting is be honest. So for me, I am up front and in your face on this is not a job for you.
If you want a full time job, we are a permanent part time Which means if your desire is to get in here and think you're going to work up to 40 hours a week plus overtime, it's not going to happen. And we put that very plainly and very clearly in the posting. We also put things like, Hey, if you're just looking to use us to get some experience and then move on to somewhere else.
It's probably not the job for you. We're looking for some long term individuals to be a part of this team. And so we just put it out there. That's what we're looking for. We're not looking to skill you up so that you can go run your own firm or go be an accountant for someone else. We want you to be on our team.
And then the final thing I will say is what makes it easier is finally having the realization that hiring is not take the time. So you take the time to hire, you define the position, and I will say, Has been really, really eye opening for me is that I define the position every time. So even if I'm hiring another accounting specialist, which we have multiple on our team, I go through and start at the beginning as if I'm writing a new position and I have a template that I fill out of, okay, what are you hiring for?
What responsibilities will they have? What accountabilities will they have? What skills do they need to have? What skills would be not required, but would be an advantage to them? What you don't, you know, you should apply if you're good at this, you should not apply if you don't like this, you know, so there's a lot of steps I run an ad for one to two weeks.
Or until I feel like I have a big enough pool that I need to stop the ad and because that will cut the cost and then review and request the next steps. So we review the resumes. We see if they followed instructions. Did they get the subject line right? Did they get the attachments right or the screenshots or the resume attached?
All of those things. And then we narrow it down to people we would like to request that video from. So, we haven't scheduled an interview at this point. We have just gone to the next step of determining whether or not they are able to follow instructions and then to get a little more information about them.
Then we schedule a Zoom interview and we typically do those no more than 30 minutes. I try to have a member of my team on it with me so that we can save time, but there are times that we may do them separately and then compare notes depending on our schedules. And then we'll do a follow up interview if you've got, you know, maybe a couple of candidates you can't choose between.
And maybe that means that you're having a second interview with someone else or you're having a second interview together with someone from your team, but you need to do a second interview just to narrow that down and understand that this is all happening in weeks, not days. So, when you know that That means if you think you need to hire somebody before your next busy season, you need to be working on that months in advance to get the process done.
Because think about it, you know, if you do find someone and maybe they're currently employed and are required to give two weeks notice or, or, or want to give two weeks notice to their employer, you, you just added two more weeks to the process. Of getting someone in your door, you then have onboarding.
You do then have all of those things that once you have a new employee that you need to be ready for. So just remember, we all know that it's hard. There are reasons that we should make it hard, but not, not, not in the ways that It already is hard, which is the time and the cost and the fear and the distrust, all those things.
But there are reasons why you should make it hard to get a job with you. You don't want to just have anybody working for you. You want the right people and you want to try to get it as close as right the first time so that you don't have to do the process again. So this process has helped me immensely.
I've been working through this process since 2021. and have had some really good results from it. So if you ever have any questions, reach out to me, reach out to me on the link on wherever you're listening to this podcast that I believe gives you the opportunity to text me a message and see if there's something in this that you want more information on, just reach out, I'd be happy to talk to you about it.
So this confidence booster went a little longer than I expected, but I think the information is so valuable and it is something that we struggle with it. If anybody out there is a small business owner, unless you're in the industry of recruiting, I would say we all have a little bit of a hesitation around hiring, a little bit of a bias toward it being hard.
Needing to improve our skills so that we are more confident in our ability to hire the right people. All right. That's all I have. Thanks for listening to this Confidence Booster. I'll talk to you next time. Bye for now.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. My hope is that my experiences can help you navigate the realities of owning and operating your business. Please subscribe or follow the podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform so that you never miss an episode. Feel free to leave me a text by using the send us a text message link in the show description and let me know how I'm doing.