Personality makes up for inexperience

New Zealand's finance and accounting employers are among the most willing in the world to hire staff with less experience than they want, but who show the right personal attributes, according to an international survey by recruitment specialists Robert Half.

In the Robert Half 2009 Workplace Survey, New Zealand employers said on average one-third of the CVs they received were from unqualified candidates. But 57% of them frequently offered jobs to a candidate with less experience than they were originally seeking.

And the top three reasons for offering the jobs to those candidates have nothing to do with the shortage of suitably qualified and experienced applicants. Instead, employers hire the more junior candidates because they show personal growth potential, are a good fit with the company or have transferable skills.

Megan Alexander, senior manager with Robert Half, said the company's surveys had consistently shown employers really valued personal attributes such as attitude and communication skills among finance and accounting staff.

"Technical skills can be learned, but those personal attributes will frequently make one candidate stand out," she said. "For permanent vacancies, if all the personal attributes are right, New Zealand employers are frequently willing to put some resources into training and development to improve the candidate's technical skills."

However, she said the temporary, or contracting, market was different as candidates needed to be able to hit the ground running and immediately start adding value with little or no training. For these roles, employers did place greater emphasis on technical skills.

When evaluating candidates' technical skills, New Zealand finance and accounting employers rate skills with reporting systems, taxation and transactional systems most highly. They are least concerned with skills in US GAAP and IFRS.

They advise people starting out in a finance and accounting career to specialise in general accounting or tax accounting, which they see as essential core functions that offer the best growth potential.

And despite the financial downturn, 17% of employers said they were still planning to recruit in the next six months - 7% because they expected to replace someone on their existing team and 10% because the company was growing and workloads were increasing.

Among the 20 countries, New Zealand was one of the least affected by budget cuts necessitating redundancies, and where employers did expect staff numbers to decrease they planned to achieve the cuts through attrition -  not replacing staff who left.

But most New Zealand employers (56%) said the recession had not made it any easier to find high-quality finance and accounting staff, with 77% of them saying such candidates were still in short supply.

The Robert Half 2009 Workplace Survey questioned more than 6100 finance, accounting, HR and executive-level managers from 20 countries, including 207 from New Zealand. It was carried out in February and March this year.

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