The Wize Way

Episode 5: Identifying the best candidates for your practice

• Season 1 • Episode 5

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Episode 5: Identifying the best candidates for your practice

In this episode of The Wize Guys, Brenton Ward, Jamie Johns, and Ed Chan talk about why attitude is the most essential factor to consider when identifying the best candidate in the recruitment process.

Find out more about hiring people onshore and offshore for your accounting practice.

Timestamps:

0:46 - Hiring Onshore vs Offshore employees
1:48 - How outsourcing can help you save more resources
3:51 - The importance of attitude
4:56 - How to utilize technology in the recruitment process

Quotations:

“Absolutely the whole idea of running your business efficiently and to be able to make some profit and about pay your staff a decent wage, and to remain competitive with your competitors in terms of your fees. Everybody's got to win. Your clients are got to get the best price for your services. Your staff has to get paid really well. And you've got to make a profit.” - Ed Chan

“I always think every interaction you have with a candidate reflects their attitude is the most important thing because you cannot train, you cannot generally change someone's attitude.” - Jamie Johns

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Download the full transcript here.


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Episode 5: Identifying the best candidates for your practice

“Everybody's going to win. Your clients are going to get the best price for this, for your services. Your staff has to get paid really well. And you've got to make a profit.”

Brenton Ward: Moving in into the actual recruitment process to give some pointers around. Now that we have identified the team structure and the resource mix, introduce them to the conversation as well. Now, by the way, hire onshore or offshore. Now, this isn't the forum to go too deep into the argument for or against it.

Guys, we've got plenty of resources in the vault on that topic, but if we are deciding to go down that path, a lot of the hiring we've been helping doing recently is with offshore team members. That's something that we need to take into consideration as well, Ed?

Ed Chan: Absolutely the whole idea of running your business efficiently and to be able to make some profit and about pay your staff a decent wage, and to remain competitive with your competitors in terms of your fees. Everybody's got to win. Your clients are got to get the best price for your services. Your staff has to get paid really well. And you've got to make a profit.

So in the spirit of win-win-win, pushing the work down to the lowest cost person is the best way to achieve a win-win-win. So delegating, pushes the work down. And of course, that means outsourcing. So outsourcing, the costs or outsourcer is sometimes one-fifth of what you'd pay locally, and the savings you make from that can feed back into being able to pay your local staff, more money, and also remaining competitive with your pricing. And then you still make a decent profit at the end of the day. So the spirit of this is to run a proper business. And in order to run a proper business, you've gotta be able to push the work down to the lowest cost person.

So I did an ideal situation. If you can push a high-level product down to the lowest cost person would be the ideal situation. So in my situation with Trudy who was my receptionist, and she became a senior client manager, obviously her cost to me was, was much less than me going out there and hiring someone with an MBA or, or a chartered accountant person. So that's in the spirit of pushing the low-level work down to so a higher-level work down to a low-level person, low-cost person, outsources gotta be a part of that solution and that business model.

Brenton Ward: So whether we're looking to offshore, whether we're to add recruit offshore or onshore, Jamie, you want to talk about now, just some of the fundamentals of that recruitment process. And again, I'll point everyone to where they can go on the vault to get more information on this as well. To dive deeper into it, identify the best candidates, and give us some of your best tips on this section of the recruitment process.

Jamie Johns: Yeah. Thanks, Brenton.

Like I guess the person decides, a lot of the time is efficient and saves water. And often the recruiter, the owner of the firm is the fish, and you can sort of go into these with rose-colored glasses. But so to sort of look through that and to see what to see the truth. I suppose that what I found is every point of contact I've had with a candidate reflects your attitude. So you've got some of those dot points there. So often the best candidates that are banned and help them a fan and worked with at Sky that always cooperate. They're always cooperative. They respond really quickly. Any forms, any questionnaires I ask about what would their previous managers, right then, ‘Tell us about your previous two jobs that you had going into detail. What were your strengths and weaknesses? Why did you leave that job?’ In all those questions, won't have a problem answering those questions and I'll do it quickly. And with that process with technology these days, all the best candidates I've come across, they're really efficient with technology. So whether it's, AMR or whatever, it might be it. You can just say that they fly around the computer and they Google the technology. I always show most of the time they'll show attention to detail. So if you ask a particular question, we need to start that job and we need to finish. ‘When did you finish it? And how many direct reports did you have?’ What if we just ask all these questions, they'll answer all these revealing questions and I'll answer them in usually precise data? Often the candidates will ask would question Brenton. So they don't just come in sort of reactive. They come in with questions about your own phone. ‘When did it start? How did you get where you are? Where's your fam going?’ The last few questions about you. 

So, it's often not what we say not what they don't ask. It's what they do ask. Cause a lot of people would just sit there and not ask anything. And you'll just get a general feeling that they're really passionate about trying to work for someone good. They may have had a bad experience previously and they want to take a little bit more time or go that bit further in their effort to find someone that's good to work for. And the last one is they're organized, know they're being organized. They show up on the interview and they just give you the whole impression that they were organized and punctual and all that sort of thing. And a good man is just the basic little things. And I always think every interaction you have with a candidate reflects their attitude is the most important thing because you cannot train, you cannot generally change someone's attitude. And I'll set up the form and I'll sign it.

I think one of, one of the wise members in Ireland, there was a child at accountant and she came back to the fem ion and you'll recall this branch and said, well, what do I have to do these tests? Oh, I'm a child again. And all, then what I need to do these tests, you know?

Brenton Ward: Oh, perfect indicator.

Jamie Johns: So attitudes, everything. That's a big pilot.