Episode 213: How to Recruit When You Don't Have a Recruitment Team

Every hire that goes wrong can usually be traced back to one step someone decided to skip. Not because they were careless, but because they were busy and it seemed like the step that mattered least.

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Dani breaks down how to run a proper recruitment process without a recruitment team: working out who you actually need, getting the job ad written in minutes, screening properly, and testing before you commit.

You'll learn:
 ✅ How to decide whether your next hire should be an admin or an accountant
 ✅ The four transferable skills that matter more than qualifications
 ✅ Why hiring admins from outside the accounting industry often works better
 ✅ How to use AI to create job ads, interview guides, and job offers in minutes
 ✅ The job sites worth posting on for local and offshore roles
 ✅ How LinkedIn headhunting builds your talent pipeline before you need one
 ✅ Why pre-screening, reference checks, and testing are the steps you never skip

Hiring on your own takes more time, but done right, it does not have to mean settling for less.

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PS: Whenever you’re ready… here are the fastest 4 ways we can help you fix and grow your accounting firm:  

 1. Download our famous Wize Freedom Map for FREE - Find out the 96 projects every firm owner must implement to build a $5M+ firm that can run without them - Download here 

2. Need to Hire right now? Book a 1:1 FREE discovery call with our WizeTalent hiring coaches to help find your next team member the Wize Way – Click Here 

3. Work with Jamie and our mentors for 8 weeks - Build a custom business plan for your firm - Apply here

Transcript

Welcome And The Promise

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the five 50 minute 445. Just like you. Our wise mentors want to share their journey of how they've scaled and optimized their way to freedom. So you can too. If you're stuck in the grind or you're ready to scale smarter, this is your blueprint. Let's get into the episode.

Recruiting Without A Recruitment Team

SPEAKER_00 0:38

So thanks everyone for joining us today. Today's topic is about how to recruit. If you don't have a recruitment team, but yeah, hopefully everyone gets a little bit out of today's session. And let's get into today's topic. So obviously, most firms don't have a dedicated recruitment team. So you sort of need to know what you're doing on your own so that you can make the right decisions and the right hires and everything like that. It's very similar to what we've sort of spoken about before. You know, the very first thing is you just need to make sure that you know which hire you're actually going to do, like what role you actually want to fill. There's no point in hiring a senior accountant when it turns out you actually need someone like an admin who needs to like take all that work, all that sort of ad hoc stuff away from you so that you can concentrate on doing other stuff. I've had firms in the past who have said to me, you know, I need like an intermediate or a senior accountant or bookkeeper, and then we've actually gone through what they've been doing and everything. And then it did turn out that they needed an admin, which is a completely different role. But it was just because they were so busy they would they're not sure, they weren't sure what to do, like what role that they actually needed and everything, and everything was sort of, I guess, clashing together. So yes, the so the very first thing is just make sure you actually know what what role you want to fill.

Capacity Planning And Resource Mix

SPEAKER_02 2:07

Long story short, it starts with the capacity planner. So just working on on the basis of do you have enough productive capacity to actually get through to work? Okay. And when deciding who we actually need in there, then you would look at the resource mix. So do you have people who are too junior or are too senior? You know, like uh a lot of firms tend to error uh on the start of getting people or two junior and spend years investing in them when they kind of just need the work done. So if you look at your capacity planner first and assess if you've got the right capacity, one, and then two being the resource mix, the mix between junior and senior is right. If that's all okay, then you zoom out to view the rest of the seven divisions. You know, you've got marketing, you've got sales and production, and so forth. And all the way to admin, looking at those categories, their focus is on the chasing up of information, making sure that the bookings are happening, making sure clients are getting onboarded and looking after the CRM. So all these responsibilities here require a dedicated admin to actually handle. So what I'm trying to say here is when you look at your capacity planner and you have negative capacity and you're not getting the work done, yes, you need an accountant. If you have the capacity and you still feel like this doesn't make sense, I'm getting surplus capacity. Why is nothing getting done? It's because your team is stoking up too much admin. Okay, and then having an admin allows you to allow that for that capacity planner to actually make sense. So that's from looking at it from a numbers point of view, and just one last thing, it is it's also recognizing that the task between the admin and accountant is very different. Accountant wants to focus on doing the work and largely wants to be undisturbed and have their work prepped for them. Um they don't do very well with the client interruptions and having to chase up information. Whereas an admin is a person who's designed uh for that role and their focus is on the operations. And again, it's about making sure that you have the right person doing like the right thing instead of like, oh, we've got spare capacity in accounting, let's get them to do admin. You actually end up pushing them to where it's actually a good thing. Whereas the first accountant, they end up soaking your admin so we're so yes, you need a hire, but then we end up not using them for the right thing. We hear this a lot, right? Admin, we don't have enough to this person. This person already can probably already have a full-time job. If you consider the fact that when you they won't take the same amount of time to do something that you do, so don't actually take longer. What for one? And um two, you what you're aiming for with the operations is uh their job is to ensure that uh when you plan out your annual workflow schedule for your firm, that the clients in advance of uh when we plan to do the work, like three months in advance, that they're getting their information checklist, they're getting followed up, information is getting collected based off your list, and then they're there to to to organize it neatly for you and for your accounting team to work on. We even it doesn't matter if it's a lot of clients or a little client, that activity is like 80% of division six calling the constant, like out like the outreach that the firm has to do, the follow-up that the firm has to do. They're that main horsepower.

What Great Admins Actually Do

SPEAKER_00 5:34

So to be honest, with the admin role, when we hire someone, we don't necessarily look for like, I guess, you know, proper qualifications. It's more about transferable skills. But they need to have, and this is something that we test them on, they need to have attention to detail. That's probably one of the biggest things, especially, you know, if they're working for an accounting firm and they're going to be sending out information to different clients and everything. Attention to detail is probably one of the biggest things. And communication skills as well, that's something that we test on. They need to be able to communicate with both you, like both the internal team as well as the clients and everything like that. And then time management is another big one. Like Thomas said, it will probably take them a little bit longer to do tasks rather than if you were to do it yourself. But as Ed says, you know, the five minutes here and the five minutes there, it all adds up. So it is better to just train someone on how to do it, and then that way you don't have to worry about that task anymore because you know that it's you know it's with someone else. So yeah, time management and then there's another, oh, problem solving. So you want someone who's going to be able to problem solve because there will be things that come, you know, come their way, especially around tax time and things like that. And they need to be able to solve the problem without, especially if you're super busy and you you don't have time to be like answering every single question that they have, if they can figure it out themselves, that's super important. Yeah. So when it comes to sort of qualifications, that that's sort of what we're looking for.

SPEAKER_02 7:07

I also think it's worth looking at admins outside of the accounting industry too. And I noticed that the admins outside the accounting industry tend to are also they're different. Like the admin that spent time in an accounting firm, we can imagine what the experience was like. Like a lot of like CRM cleanup, um, a lot of lit going through lists, a lot of routine work. I like the admins from finance brokers, you know, this sort of field, or maybe they work for a real estate agent, because they've been in an environment where it was always like, go, go, go, get the sale, get on it now, and come on, draft the email, make it nicer. Like, come on. It's not just compliance and like here's an email template. And they they're reviewing lots of they have that document review knowledge uh behind them too. Uh yeah, I just wanted to throw that in. It's not a qualification, but uh Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

No, that's good, Thomas. Yeah. That's all right, Stacey. Um there's yeah, I've had firms who have been adamant that they wanted someone with accounting firm experience when they've hired an admin assistant, and then it just hasn't worked out, and that they've hired someone else who's you know, outside of that sort of industry, and they've fallen in love with this person because they realize that they can bring so much more in, like so much more knowledge in rather than someone who, like Thomas said, who's just been in that accounting

Writing Job Ads Fast With AI

SPEAKER_00 8:28

sort of world. So I guess the next step, after you you figured out who you need to hire, you've done your capacity planner and all that, then you've got obviously work on your job ad. Now, if you don't have a recruitment team to be able to do this for you, the easiest thing to do is use AI. Just if you jump into something like Claude, Chat GPT, whatever it is, and you put in exactly what you need. You know, it could be a list of tasks that you need this person to do, and then you just ask AI to basically create a job description for you. Um that will take you less than five minutes to do, and but it'll be exactly what you need. So that's that's probably the next step. And then making sure that you're using the right job sites. You don't want to just post your ad on random ones that aren't going to get any traction. You want to make sure that you're using the right site. So if it's local, I would suggest sites like Indeed, Jorah, Adzuna, Seek. They're all they're all really good ones. If you're looking for someone offshore, something like online jobs is probably one of the best ones. You'll get a lot of applicants coming through. Job Street is really good as well in terms of the amount of candidates. However, the quality of candidates isn't as good. You know, you might be looking for a senior with like seven plus years of experience. You'll get two, you know, two plus years or something like that, because anyone and everyone applies. But another good thing to do if you've got time, I know as firm owners you probably don't have time, but if you can take like 15 minutes, half an hour out of your day and jump on LinkedIn, you can search for people that

LinkedIn Headhunting And Talent Pipelines

SPEAKER_00 10:12

you that you want. So you can put in, you know, that you're looking for an accountant, you can put the location in as well, and then you basically just headhunt these people. I've had firm owners who have found their client managers, senior client managers through LinkedIn, like through headhunting. You know, you you sort of build that relationship with them. And yeah, that's another thing. You might not need someone right this second, but if you start doing things like that with the whole LinkedIn reaching out to people and building those connections, it it'll make things easier when you do actually need to hire someone because you've already built that rapport and you can just sort of reach out to them and be like, hey, I've actually got a position available. Thomas, I can see you nodding what so true.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Everything you're saying is so true, Danny. Like it's so true. It's so true. It's like of all the phone owners we've witnessed and uh or I've worked with over the over the years, the ones who seem to make just an orders of magnitude difference in their progress as like a business, is they always seem to be chatting uh with potential talent. And they they don't hesitate at all to move people on for reasons other than just like they're bad. It's like they it's like they're constantly just wanting the best people in their firm. Not just like I've filled positions and I'll go and think about something else. It's like this constant background thing. And it's the one thing I could point to looking at all these firms over the years, Danny. Like I couldn't say that, oh, it was this marketing technique that made all the difference, or their tax expertise being a that was all the difference. The the one difference was these owners constantly nurtured networks of talent around them and were very quick to make changes to their team. When you need it, you would have people you've already built rapport with too. So that's a huge one. That's like the number one advice I think I've seen, just out of observation in all of why's everything.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

I was um I'm doing a a hire for a firm and well, I can tell you, I'm doing it for for Sky and like Sky Accountants. And I was talking to a candidate, and he was telling me that Jamie had reached out to him about a year ago just on LinkedIn. So, like right there, that was already a connection that was built. Yeah, so that's just a little example. So, yeah, so that's the next thing. And then from there, so yeah, definitely use AI to help you with that sort of stuff because it will make things a lot quicker and easier for

Pre-Screen Calls Before Interviews

SPEAKER_00 12:48

you. And then the other thing is when you're gonna talk to someone, don't just jump straight into an interview, especially if you're gonna do it over Zoom and you allocate an hour to do an interview. If you just jump in without having pre-screen them beforehand, and it turns out that this person's not right and you're you only want to be in there for five, ten minutes, that's gonna look bad for everyone. The candidate's gonna know straight off the bat that they're not good because they're gonna be like, well, you've allocated an hour and you've ended this call after five minutes. That's why it's really important to just jump on a quick phone call with them and actually pre-screen them. And then once you've pre-screen them, if you feel like, you know, this is the right person, then actually organize an interview. And then with the interview guide, again, you can use AI. You know, you put in question, you can ask AI to to create an interview guide that's specific for what you're looking for. Otherwise, you can reach out to me. I'm more than happy to give you what like wise talents interview guide as well. Like with these different processes, it takes time, but you'd rather it take a little bit of time, like a little bit of you know, your time than to sort of rush through everything and then hire someone, turns out it's the wrong person, and then you have to start all over again.

References Testing And Safer Offers

SPEAKER_00 14:05

So you've done your interview, you've done all that, make sure you do the references as well. With the reference checks, I mean, most of you would know that we use XRES to do our references. That saves a lot of time as a firm owner because you're not actually sitting there having to call the person and trying to make a time to speak to them. Because as you would know, if someone tries to call you for a reference, you're probably too busy to be doing it. So you you say to them, call me back another time, and then it's it just takes ages to to find uh a right time to do the reference. So if you can do something online like Xref, where basically it's up to the candidate. You put the candidates' details in and then it's up to them to organize their own reference, and then the manager, boss, whoever it is, will take it from there and complete the survey. And again, it uses AI so you can find out if there are any, you know, any integrity issues.

SPEAKER_02 15:03

On this one, Danny, um, the firm owner who asked me this question is not in this room, but then he he did mention to me and Paulina, he was like, my reference for a hire, and he was trying to do this himself, which I advised against because he was busy with other things, but like he get he put the same number for the references, and it's like, what should I do? Yeah, like immediately, Paulina, it would be like a drop. There's no point finding out. I don't want to find out.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

That's something that you're not gonna be able to find out with just a phone call. And the other thing is you don't know who you're talking to with the phone call. You could be talking to their best friend for for all you know, um, who's giving them this great review. Whereas if you use something like XRef, for example, they have to use like a work email address. Like the the boss has to use, otherwise it comes up with like suspicious activity, like why are they using a personal email address and and things like that. But yeah, so once the reference checks are done, then you you want to do testing. And you've you've heard us talk about this heaps of times with the we've got the tests through like our market tests and everything, the wise market, but there's heaps out there. You could use stuff like Test Gorilla, and that can test things on like the admin, for example. You can do heaps of um admin tests there or marketing if you're looking for someone who does who's going to be doing marketing, bookkeeping. If you're in the US or Canada, Xref's a really good one to use. If you need them to know how to use um Zero, for example, or QuickBooks, you can yeah, use Tess Gorilla because that will be able to test that sort of skill. The other thing is this is just going back to AI, but with when it comes to the actual job offer and things like that, you can put if you've got a job offer template, you can put that into AI and just make sure that let's say it is you are hiring someone directly from the Philippines, you can put that in there and just make sure that it's saying the right things. Your job offer is actually saying the right things and it's not coming across that they are an employee. It's actually making sure that it it states that they are an independent contractor. So that's pretty much it in terms of what I would do if I don't have a recruitment team and I'm you know trying to hire someone on on my own. But I guess the biggest thing is just make sure, and I know this is sort of hard because as firm owners, you're super busy all the time. But if you can try and be really organized, have a set list of things that you need to do. Write everything that you need to do, write it down, and then just follow that checklist so that you make sure that you're not you're not skipping a step or or anything like that. And that's the other thing, don't skip steps. Like, um, you know, someone could interview really well, but if you don't do the testing, you're not going to actually know if they've got the right skills.

Final Checklist And Closing

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Wise Way. If today's episode sparked an idea or helped you see things differently, please don't forget to leave us a review. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast on your favourite platform yet, please go ahead and do that as well. Let's continue the conversation here through YouTube or any other social platforms.com. And just remember, if you're not a subscriber of our weekly Friday tip newsletter, you can get back to your box every week going forward. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, you don't have to do it a lot. Let's build a bit of white. See you in the next episode.