Industry Insights

Proctoring — the act of supervising exams to prevent cheating — has evolved from in-person monitoring to sophisticated online methods. With remote work and online hiring assessments now common, ensuring test integrity has become critical. Employers must confirm that candidates complete tests honestly and without outside help, as misuse of tools like Google or AI can distort results. Accountests notes that cheating attempts are rare but detectable through test data patterns.

Hiring accounting graduates is tricky since they often lack real-world knowledge, so success depends on their ability to learn quickly, think critically, and adapt. A Critical Reasoning Test helps firms spot these traits by showing how candidates handle data, ambiguity, errors, logic, and communication. Without it, firms risk misstatements, rework, missed deadlines, and rigid thinking. Using such tests is an easy, cost-effective way to ensure new hires meet expectations and develop into strong professionals.

Allowing candidates to retake recruitment assessments can increase fairness but also carries risks to test integrity.

Hiring offshore talent can bring huge benefits to accounting firms — but only if you know what to look for in interviews. Offshore candidates often come from different cultural and professional contexts, which means certain “red flags” may actually be normal. Check out the six signs to pay attention to, and how to interpret them

Hiring globally brings valuable diversity but adds complexity, especially when assessing cognitive ability in candidates who speak English as a second language (ESL). Accountests has developed a Bookkeeper and Admin Ability (Cognitive Test) Suite that is accessible and insightful across language backgrounds.

When reviewing resumes (CVs), hiring managers may overlook the growing influence of AI. Job seekers are increasingly using AI tools to tailor their resumes to specific job ads—often by uploading both the job description and their own CV to platforms like ChatGPT for optimization suggestions. This raises concerns about authenticity, especially when 70% of candidates already admit to lying on resumes.

The blog concludes that employers should focus less on credentials and more on testing actual skills and job readiness, using assessments to make fairer, data-driven hiring decisions. In today’s job market, capability outweighs academic qualifications.

The blog emphasizes that customer questions often reflect wider concerns—many people share the same questions. This week’s focus was on a client who had experienced a failed hire for a remote tax senior position and wanted to avoid repeating that mistake.

In public accounting, hiring the wrong person doesn't just lead to financial loss—it causes partner stress and harms team morale. Drawing on 25 years of experience, the blog introduces a Bad Hire Calculator, which helps firms quantify the true cost of hiring mistakes based on specific internal practices (e.g., use of recruiters, firing timeline).

This blog emphasizes the importance of creating a standout first impression to attract and secure top accounting talent, even when the job itself is similar to others on the market. It outlines three simple, zero-cost steps to set your firm apart.

Getting graduate recruitment right has been a hot topic for decades and the subject of countless studies by Occupational Psychologists.  Univers...