Accounts Jobs – What Are Employers Looking For?

You have probably heard the cliché the person with the right education gets the job. With a degree in your hand, you may find yourself to be the perfect fit for the job advertised. This however is not true when it comes to accounting jobs.

Accounting jobs are tricky. While technical competency is certainly the first criteria for selection, employers look beyond what textbooks have taught you. They want someone who can communicate the technical knowledge to people who cannot translate numbers and figures into information. Instead of perplexing the client with complex industry jargon and technical terms, they want someone who helps information sink in. They are not really interested in numbers. They want to know where they stand, where they are heading and whether or not there is anything that they should be worried about.

For this matter, employers are looking for someone who brings along strong interpersonal skills, and knows how to nurture relationships. Precisely, they want a technical expert with the mind of a business consultant.

Being self-motivated and possessing a positive attitude ensures them that you have an inner drive to keep you motivated to perform day-to-day activities. It demonstrates you require minimal guidance and can work your way out should a difficult situation arise. Supervisors immersed in their own work have no time to spoon feed someone. This means you must possess planning and organizational skills to manage your own affairs.

An accounting job is an amalgamation of various tasks in one go. Depending on your level of superiority, you will be making data entry, issuing checks, posting transactions or preparing corporate budgets, analyzing financial statements and developing financial reports. Your ability to multi-task allows them to gauge how much pressure you can take without being supervised.

They don’t merely focus on how well you will perform the job assigned to you, but whether or not you possess leadership potential to train and lead a junior team as you move further up the ladder. They have the future in their mind and not just the present. They are thinking succession planning. Companies do not spend money training an employee who will be of no benefit to them in the future.

Since financial data is confidential information they are looking for someone with high ethical sense. He will be someone sensitive to important information and wouldn’t spill the beans in public. He can differentiate between what must be discussed in private and what is public information.

You should be someone who pays attention to detail. So that you don’t miss out any critical information or significant sign while reading reports and analyzing financial statements. This is important despite having accounting software in the office.

Audit your resume. Does it portray what it takes to get the job advertised? If not, there is nothing to worry about. You can work on the skills that are missing. Take some skill developing courses or attend a workshop and build your interpersonal skills, work on your written communication and nurture your leadership potential. You will make the best fit!