In this video, CPA Bill Hanna recounts how he hired a staff accountant candidate within ten minutes of a Zoom interview. He outlines his interview structure—starting with a greeting and company overview, followed by a career walkthrough, an on‑the‑spot accounting quiz, and a final Q&A. The quiz replaces traditional take‑home tests due to AI concerns. He asks two technical questions: (1) recording a $10,000 cash receipt for services not yet performed, which the candidate answers correctly and adds the subsequent revenue recognition step; (2) creating a balance sheet from a trial balance, where the candidate explains how to identify and group asset, liability, and equity accounts, and adds a bonus point about verifying that debits equal credits before proceeding. Bill emphasizes the candidate’s articulation, soft‑skill fit, and detailed communication as decisive factors, leading him to hire on the spot. He also mentions a related tutorial video, thanks new channel members (Controller and CFO levels), and encourages likes and subscriptions.
Chapters
I recently interviewed someone to work for me and I decided to hire them on the spot within 10 minutes into the Zoom call. So I figured I'd make a video about it and walk you through the Q&A and how they answered and what they said that impressed me and made me realize immediately they are the right candidate for the job. So in today's video, we'll walk through the job description, what it was, how was the interview itself, what did I ask, what answers did I get, and so you may use these in your own job interviews. So this candidate said all the right things that made me want to hire them right away. But let me tell you about the position. So the position was for a staff accountant, and this is typically somebody with a bachelor's degree in accounting, um, with about 1 to 2 years of experience. And I had the job posting open for about 2 months and I interviewed about 40 to 50 people and only about 3 out of those 40, 50 people stood out to me and I wanted to move forward with them. But there is one person in particular that I'm going to talk about today and how they answered my questions that made me realize that they are the right person for the job right away. Okay, so let me set up the interview. So the interview begins, the first thing that I do usually is to greet you. So the greeting, right? Ask you about your day. Um, thank you for applying for the position. And then I go from there and tell you about the company and the role. So I give you a brief history of the company and then a description of this role, what I'm looking for, what this person is going to be doing. Next, I'm going to ask you to to walk me through your career. So I'm walking through your career, through the various positions that you've held. And in doing so, you'll tell me, you know, I finished college and then I've taken this internship, I've taken this position. Explain to me what you did on the job. I have your resume in front of me, but I also like to hear from you what you're saying so I can match it up against the resume. In some cases, what I hear from this person on the call doesn't match what's in the resume, which is a big red flag, of course. It means that maybe someone fabricated that resume. Okay. So when you walk me through your career, now you've given me more comfort and now I'm okay with moving forward during the call. Uh, the next step is going to be an accounting quiz. Now in the past I used to give a take-home test. So before I used to give a take-home, quiz, but I don't do this anymore. The reason is because of the advent of AI. Now when I give a take-home test, you can easily plug that into ChatGPT and get the answer. So there isn't a lot of sense in giving a take-home test anymore. So I do this on the spot, an accounting quiz. So we'll get that into the accounting quiz here in a second. That's the most important part because their answer to the accounting quiz is what really, is what really impressed me. Uh, and then the final thing is Q&A. So I open it for you to ask me your questions. Typically the questions are about the company, the trajectory of the business, or some more questions about the role itself. So this is your opportunity to ask me questions about the company. Now let's get into the accounting quiz because this is the part where I got really impressed by— with this candidate. The first question I asked— I asked two questions. The first one is you receive $10,000 in cash. You receive $10,000 in cash and you haven't delivered the service yet. How would you record the debits and credits for this transaction? So you have received $10,000. How would you record that? The answer is easy. So if you receive $10,000 and you haven't delivered the service yet, you would debit cash for $10,000 and credit deferred revenue or unearned revenue for $10,000. So it's pretty easy, right? So I asked this question. The answer that I got really impressed me because they told me the answer like this, and then they went a step further and they said when we deliver the service in the next month, we would debit the deferred revenue and credit actual revenue to recognize the revenue from doing this service for $10K, obviously. So, so not only did he give me the answer, but he gave me the next step for the answer. Okay, so that was the first question that I asked them. Let me tell you about the second question that I asked here, and so you can see how they were able to answer it really, really well. The second question is, I give you a trial balance, so I only give you the TB, right, with the listing of the accounts, and I want you to create a balance sheet. How would you go about doing that? So I'm not giving you an actual trial balance, I'm only asking you, if I give you a trial balance, how would you create the balance sheet from that? And there are so many answers that I get, uh, different types of ways of answering this question that I get from candidates, and And there isn't a specific one way that is the right answer. You can go at this with different angles, but the angle that I like is that a trial balance— and what this person told me— the trial balance is made up of different accounts. These accounts represent the ending balances for every sort of, every respective account. And to create the balance sheet, I will go and identify. So the first thing is to identify, identify the nature of the accounts on the trial balance. Some of the accounts are assets, liabilities, equity accounts. And then once I identify them, I can group them. So I can group together the current assets, long-term assets, and then I go through current liabilities, long-term liabilities, and then group the equity accounts together to create the balance sheet. So not only she understands the theory, and this is the important point here, not only she understands the theory, but she knows how to articulate this and walk me through it, right? Because accounting has a lot of sort of complicated concepts. That the brilliance that you have as an accountant is to simplify what you're talking about and articulate it so that the other person can follow what you're saying. And that's a really important skill. You could have all the accounting knowledge in the world, but if you're unable to articulate what you know, you won't be able to shine and impress the person on the other side of the table or the computer. Okay, so she answered the question with a TB to create the balance sheet. And she gave me a bonus point. The bonus point that she told me is before I go ahead and draft a balance sheet, I will look at the trial balance that the debits equal the credits, right? And that's a very basic concept, but she said if the debits don't equal the credits, I can't trust the report. I have to know what the source of the report is, and if I don't know the source, I need to look at the debits equal the credits, which makes a lot of sense. And that, that wasn't even a thing that I was looking for, but she gave me that bonus point at the end. So that immediately cemented in my mind that this person is the right person for the job because I already checked off all of the soft skills, the way that she speaks, she's very articulate. I like the way that we talk together. We don't overlap in the way we talk. She doesn't talk over me, for example. I don't talk over her. We kind of mesh well together. I can see that she's very detailed in the way she speaks, articulate, all of these things. And now she wowed me with all of this knowledge, with just 1 to 2 years of experience is pretty amazing. So I made the decision right away to, to hire her on the spot. And by the way, I made a video on how to create the balance sheet from a trial balance with an actual real-life example. I'm going to leave a link to it up here. I also wanted to give a big shout out to the channel members, the CFO members. I'm going to leave a screenshot here on the left. These are the new members who joined the channel. And, uh, this channel really exists by the support of members who become permanent members of the channel. These are two levels you can join: Controller and CFO. Go ahead and check it out. If you like the video, give it a big thumbs up, and I'll see you in the next video.
