How to Recruit and Retain Top Talent in the Accounting Industry 

17 July 2026

Recruiting and retaining qualified accounting professionals has become increasingly challenging as firms compete for talent with strong technical expertise, commercial awareness, and adaptability.

According to Global Talent Trends (2023), several key themes highlight the challenges of recruiting and retaining top accounting candidates in the financial sector.

In this guide, we will take a look at the solutions to each of these challenges and provide the right recruiting strategies that will assist you in finding the best candidates in the accounting industry.

Contents

1. What is the accounting industry?
2. Skills to look for when recruiting in the accounting industry
3. Best tools to hire accounting candidates
4. Accounting industry recruitment challenges
5. Best hiring practices for the accounting industry
6. Roles recruiters hire in the accounting sector
7. Client success stories of hiring in the accounting industry
8. Future of recruitment in the accounting industry
9. Why do employers use Assess Candidates when hiring accounting talent?

Recruiting accounting talent is becoming increasingly competitive. Understanding what attracts top professionals is now a critical advantage for employers.

1. What is the accounting industry?

The accounting industry involves recording, analyzing, reporting, and managing financial information for individuals, businesses, and governments. It supports financial decision-making, compliance, auditing, taxation, and business performance management.

Understand the skills required to recruit your top accounting candidates with the information below.

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2. Skills to look for when recruiting in the accounting industry

Recruiting accounting candidates requires various technical and soft skills expected of your prospective employees to guarantee their success.

Top skills to measure when recruiting accounting candidates

Communication

Working in the accounting industry requires effective verbal and written communication skills in your candidates, as they are expected to communicate with shareholders and clients about their research. Accountants must be able to break down financial concepts to a non-financial audience.

Precision

Accounting candidates must have an acute sense of attention to detail in order to thrive in your organization. This is because they are likely to find themselves reviewing and identifying errors in large amounts of information or data.

Collaboration

Hiring accountants who collaborate effectively with colleagues helps improve accuracy, strengthen teamwork, and support successful project delivery.

Adaptability

Accounting professionals must adapt quickly to changing regulations, technologies, reporting requirements, and market conditions. Accountants should be able to demonstrate adaptability to ensure they can meet tasks, no matter what new strategy they encounter.

Critical Thinking

Your accounting candidates must demonstrate critical thinking during their skills assessment tests, as this ensures they consider situations from multiple angles before drawing conclusions based on the information provided. Critical thinking skills enable your candidates to solve complex challenges without putting the company or clients at risk.

Problem-Solving

Hiring accounting candidates with evidence of problem–solving skills is an important consideration in your recruitment process. This is because your candidates will face financial challenges from clients, requiring effective brainstorming and creative solutions from successful problem-solvers in the accounting industry.

Up next, let us take a look at the right tools that you can use in hiring in the accounting industry.

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3. Best tools to hire accounting candidates

Competition for qualified accounting professionals has intensified, making efficient hiring processes and accurate assessment methods increasingly important.

5 Best tools to use when recruiting accounting talent

1. Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

Applicant tracking systems help you in managing your overall recruitment pipeline, which includes job postings, interview scheduling, and constant communication with your accounting candidates. ATS platforms like Greenhouse, Workable, and Lever allow you to track candidates across the various roles you are hiring for and add the assessment results from the other tools into your candidates’ records.

2. Skills-based Assessments

Skills–based recruitment platforms like Assess Candidates, TestGorilla, and iMocha all assist you in assessing your candidates’ skills through cognitive and psychometric assessments. Skills-based hiring helps accounting employers by evaluating job–relevant competencies rather than judging candidates’ skills based on their CVs and qualifications.

3. Psychometric Assessment Tests

Pre-hire pre-employment assessment test platforms, such as Assess Candidates, SHL, and Criteria Corp, are used to measure candidates’ cognitive abilities and their professional caliber. The tests help you understand how your candidates are likely to approach problems that are related to the accounting industry.

Some of the assessment tests that you should use to test your candidates in the accounting industry are:

• Verbal Reasoning Test
• Numerical Reasoning Test
• Logical Reasoning Test
• Critical Reasoning Test
• Game-Based Assessments

4. Behavioral Skills Tests

Behavioral skills assessments focus on how your candidates are likely to act in an accounting workplace scenario. Platforms like Assess Candidates, Pymetrics, and HireVue assess your applicants’ personality traits and how they behave in real–world situations. 

Some of the behavioral assessments are

• Personality Questionnaire Test
• Situational Judgment Test
• Job Simulations

5. AI-Powered Video Interviewing Platforms

Assess Candidates, HireVue, and AltHire AI use artificial intelligence to conduct and rank interviews with your accounting candidates, assessing their language, response patterns, and cultural fit. These video interviewing platforms apply behavioral science to their interviews when evaluating candidates’ language structure and analysis.

Types of Interview Questions to Ask an Accounting Candidate

• How would you prioritize your workload if you had three deadlines on the same day?
• Tell me about a time you made a mistake at work, how you handled it, and what you learned from it
• Give an example of when you had to learn a new system or regulation quickly
• What kind of work environment helps you do your best work?
• Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a colleague on a financial matter

The next section will further explain the accounting recruitment challenges and how to avoid them.

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4.  Accounting industry recruitment challenges

Accounting employers continue to face significant hiring challenges driven by talent shortages, evolving technical requirements, and increasing competition for experienced professionals.

Top 5 challenges of recruiting in the accounting industry

Evolving Skill Requirements

Roles in the accounting industry are constantly evolving, and recruiters are setting increasingly sophisticated skill requirements that encompass both technical and strategic abilities. An evolving skill set makes it difficult for recruiters to create job descriptions, as the skills needed at one point may differ in the following weeks, leaving them unsure what to test candidates for.

Retention Challenges

Recruiting accounting candidates is not the only challenge many employers face in the industry, as companies have also reported that retaining these staff members is just as difficult. This is because financial organizations fail to address staffing gaps, increased turnover, and burnout among their candidates, leading to empty roles that need to be filled by ideal candidates.

EInaccurate Technical Skills Assessment

Senior accounting roles require specialist knowledge, making it difficult for generalist recruiters to accurately evaluate technical expertise and regulatory competence.

Slow Hiring Process

Slow recruitment processes are among the main challenges in the accounting industry, as companies have lost top candidates to competitors. In a candidate-driven environment like the accountancy sector, a lengthy, multi–round hiring process creates an opportunity for competitors to make offers to your candidates.

Salary Expectations

Financial institutions have reported that employees are most concerned about inflation and its effect on their wages. With few qualified candidates available in the talent market, compensation expectations are rising relative to companies’ outdated pay scales, which is causing candidates to lose interest.

Check out the best strategies to implement when hiring accounting candidates!

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5. Best hiring practices for the accounting industry

To ensure that you attract, recruit, and retain the right candidates in your accounting firm, you have to implement the best recruiting practices in the industry.

 Best strategies to hire in the accounting industry 

1. Prioritize Soft Skills

Though technical knowledge (hard skills) is important when looking for skills in a candidate, it is no longer sufficient on its own. This is why you also need candidates with effective soft skills. Ensure you look beyond CVs and resumes and focus on skills–based recruitment in your hiring process.

2. Use Contract Staff

We recommend considering contract talent acquisitions, as they can be a strategic extension of your core staff, helping with staffing during employee leave or peak seasons. It will be useful for filling gaps in skills or capacity while you search for permanent accounting talent.

3. Invest in Retention

You can shield your company by investing in existing talent, which offers a higher ROI, rather than constantly recruiting. We suggest that you protect critical positions in your organizations from overload and attrition by prioritizing retention investments over constant hiring processes.

4. Hire for AI Fluency

The demand for skills has shifted in today’s skills–based hiring landscape, and more employers are looking for candidates who can combine accounting with AI, data analytics, and automation. Alongside traditional accounting competencies, employers should increasingly assess candidates’ ability to work with AI, automation, and data analytics tools.

5. Offer Flexible Working Arrangements

Candidates now look to companies offering hybrid or remote work models, as finance and accounting organizations are offering hybrid roles to interested candidates worldwide. Firms that treat flexibility as non–negotiable in their employment offers compete with companies that demand full in-house attendance from their candidates.

6. Employee Referrals

Employee referrals have consistently outperformed open job listings in terms of hire quality, and research shows that companies’ best hires come from employee referrals. Your current accounting team likely knows qualified candidates, so build a structured referral incentive program that is also affordable for recruiting.

Wondered about the roles available for recruiting in the accounting industry? We have some listed below.

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6. Roles recruiters hire in the accounting sector

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accounting roles are projected to grow 7% by 2030, with an average of 135,000 vacancies for accountants and auditors annually.

Roles that Employers Hire for in the Accounting Industry 

• Financial Analyst
• Auditor
• Retail Banker
• Chartered Accountant
• Mortgage Advisor
• Stockbroker
• Tax Adviser
• Forensic Accountant
• Bookkeeper

Want to attract and recruit top accounting candidates? Are you unsure which pre-employment psychometric tests to use for successful hiring? Contact us for a detailed review of your assessment methods, and we’ll help you identify the best accounting talent.

Top Employers that hire accounting talent

• EY
• PwC
• Deloitte
• KPMG
• Wells Fargo
• Amazon
• JPMorgan Chase
• Baker Tilly

Interested in knowing what recruiters have to say about overcoming their hiring challenges?

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7. Client success stories of hiring in the accounting industry

Recruiters have shared their experiences identifying and applying strategies to efficiently hire their ideal accounting candidates, thereby avoiding waste of resources during the recruitment process.

1. DPCA

Challenge:

DPCA, a chartered accountancy firm, needed to recruit an accountant manager with strong technical knowledge, operational reliability, and leadership skills. The position was in high demand in the accounting industry, and competitive organizations also made it difficult to find the ideal talent.

Solution:

The company partnered with a recruiting firm, which implemented a structured strategy beginning with role calibration sessions to define responsibilities and expectations. DPCA then introduced a targeted sourcing pipeline across the accounting sector using interviews and standardized assessments.

Results:

• The company experienced a 33% faster time to hire
• Enhanced first-round pass rates through stronger role measurement
• Successfully recruited one candidate, filling the vacant leadership role

2. Property Management Company

Challenge:

A family-owned property management and construction company was in search of a well-rounded accountant with experience in the construction industry. Halfway through the candidate search, they switched to a new industry-specific accounting software, adding another layer of difficulty to the already narrow search.

Solution:

The company added a recruiting agency whose talent sourcing was adapted to the new software requirements. They screened hundreds of candidates obtained through direct recruiting and referrals before submitting the five most qualified and ideal candidates.

Results:

• The company witnessed a 100% success rate
• A candidate who had previously created and implemented manuals for the same accounting software suite was hired
• The company filled three additional open roles after initial successful recruitment

This is where Assess Candidates comes in: we help ensure your candidates are well-qualified, as our pre-employment psychometric assessments measure skills and provide data-driven analytics to inform your hiring decisions.

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8. Future of recruitment in the accounting industry

Hiring candidates in the accounting industry has become skill-specific, as employers must identify the critical technical and soft skills that drive the financial industry’s development.

What is the future of recruitment in the accounting industry?

AI-Driven Recruitment

The future of recruitment will see AI helping organizations recruit candidates faster by using automations to screen candidates, match their skills, and schedule interviews. AI–powered hiring tools will identify candidates with the required technical capabilities, rather than traditional recruiting methods, to improve the speed and accuracy of recruiting new hires.

Focus on Candidate Experience

Having a positive candidate experience is becoming a critical requirement in today’s hiring landscape and is expected to continue to grow. The future of recruitment in the accounting sector will see employers streamline hiring, provide ongoing feedback, and maintain a transparent, fair hiring process for all candidates.

Broadened Talent Pool

Accounting firms will be forced to look beyond their regions to address the shortage of top talent in the accounting industry. Recruiters will need to plan for offshore accounting candidates who meet the job description’s requirements by ensuring cross–border vetting and compliance.

Improved Skills-based Hiring

Employers will focus less on traditional certifications and more on skills and candidates who can demonstrate the skills necessary for the success of the roles. Investing in skills–based recruitment also helps reduce bias in hiring processes, while widening the talent pool and improving DEI outcomes in accounting institutions.

So, why use Assess Candidates to hire your accounting candidates in 2026?

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9. Why do employers use Assess Candidates when hiring accounting talent?

Assess Candidates assists accounting recruiters in making data–driven hiring decisions by providing accurate insights into your candidates’ assessment results, helping eliminate unqualified candidates from the skilled applicant pool.

1. Client Validation: Assess Candidates’ platform has been tested by employers in highly regulated, detail-oriented industries such as the finance sector. The platform is praised for its seamless functionality and an easy–to–understand interface, with clear reports relevant to the accounting sector.
2. Reduces Bias and Supports Inclusivity: Our platform has fairness and inclusivity built into all assessment tests, helping reduce bias and offer candidates an equal opportunity. We also provide accessibility features, such as additional time and screen–reader compatibility, to create a seamless candidate experience.
3. Range of Assessment Tools: Assess Candidates provides tools that go beyond engagement to reveal candidates’ behavioral tendencies. Our platform’s assessments include, but are not limited to, game-based assessments, behavioral skills and personality assessments, and cognitive tests. These tools also reflect the direction in which recruitment in the accounting industry is moving toward greater candidate engagement and assessment development.
4. Rigorous Science: Assess Candidates is trusted by many employers because of our scientific credibility. The assessments we offer are created by a team of chartered scientists, psychologists, and recruitment experts.
5. Predicts Job Performance: Assess Candidates’ pre–employment assessments provide you with an accurate insight into your candidates’ skills that are necessary for the role you are recruiting for. You can use the assessment tests to filter for top candidates and predict their performance in the role.

Conclusion: Key Takeaway

Successful accounting recruitment requires a combination of competitive compensation, skills-based hiring, efficient assessment processes, and strong retention strategies. Firms that adapt to evolving workforce expectations will be best positioned to attract and retain high-performing accounting professionals.