5 Skills Finance Job Recruiters are Looking for in Fresh Grads

We all dread the question of “why should we hire you?” in job interviews.

Sure, it’s a question that can be answered in a few sentences, but your response is certainly not easy to think about. After all, you want to impress your recruiter by showing them how you’re a well-rounded candidate fit to do the job. What more if you’re a fresh grad looking for a job in the accounting and finance industry? You know that this is a high-pressure environment that only hires the best candidates so you really want to put your best foot forward.

For this article, Kalibrr browsed through the different soft skills that accounting and finance job recruiters are looking for so you don’t have to! Incorporate these skills into your interview answers to get the role you’re looking for.

Skill #1: Critical-thinking

Mindset is everything. The way you understand situations that come up at work will dictate how you approach them. With critical thinking, you’d be able to elaborate and evaluate the information given to you. As such, honing this skill will need you to open your mind and recognize different perspectives to fully articulate the nuances of a certain subject. In the accounting and finance industry, this is especially useful as you need to interpret the information coming from multiple aspects of the external and internal environments of the business. You are also needed to comprehend and grasp how these aspects intersect with one another to form the present state of the enterprise.

Skill #2: Problem-solving

There’s no shortage of complications and obstacles in the industry. One way or another, there will always be pressing concerns that need to be dealt with accordingly by the top minds of each company. In the accounting and finance industry, professionals are needed to analyze the data given to them and convert these into strategies that will lead to the maximization of profits for the businesses. Hand in hand with critical thinking, candidates who can then effectively express their ability to take a step back and evaluate the situation first to create meaningful strategies and solutions can separate themselves immediately from their competition.

Skill #3: Excellent communication

Concisely communicating your ideas to others is one of the most vital skills one should have in the accounting and finance world. Ensuring that your coworkers and clients completely understand your message can certainly make or break your career as a simple misunderstanding can lead to multiple dilemmas. However, you should remember that communication includes not just the words you use, but also the inflection and tone of your voice, the demonstration of your listening skills, as well as your body language. As such, make sure to take note of all these and demonstrate them to your interviewer! Even simply maintaining eye contact while conversing with them and waiting for them to finish before you start talking can definitely help you land the role!

Skill #4: Attention to detail and accuracy

As aspiring professionals in accounting and finance, you should know by now that finance is the lifeblood of the business. Thus, financial stability is key to the success of any enterprise. As future players in this industry, having attention to detail and accuracy can help you become more efficient and productive with your work by committing fewer mistakes. Especially in your line of work, that deals heavily with money, having a keen eye for ensuring that every decimal is accounted for can help you provide your company with detailed predictions and trends that will ensure its longevity in the long run.

Skill #5: Time management

The philosopher Thomas Carlyle once said: “no pressure, no diamonds.”

In the accounting and finance industry, you will be faced with many tasks that call your attention all at the same time. Maybe your boss first assigned you to organize a spreadsheet then minutes later, you received yet another email from your superior about handling a case for a client. After a while, you have received another message from a colleague asking for help on a certain task. For an entry-level professional, these tasks are the norm yet it doesn’t mean that they can’t be deeply overwhelming. With this, having effective time management skills will benefit you tremendously as you can keep up with the amount of work on your plate. But effective time management is not simply all about creating a to-do list; it’s also about prioritization. Knowing what to prioritize and work on first in projects for work will make you complete your to-do list more efficiently because you’d have more time to be engaged in working on what’s urgent and doing the others afterward! By communicating how you carry this skill with your recruiter, they would have a clearer picture of how you’re able to manage multiple tasks on a daily basis.

Overall, these are the five soft skills that recruiters are looking for in accounting and finance positions. So when you get your first post-grad interview, make sure to demonstrate these skills as your strengths! However, you need to remember that you need to prove that you really possess these skills to the job recruiter by supplementing your words with actual and relevant achievements. Show your recruiter that your words have substance by providing them with more information on how your previous experiences prepared and shaped you to be of value to the people you work with.

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Kalibrr is a recruitment technology company that aims to transform how candidates find jobs and how companies hire talent. Placing the candidate experience at the center of everything it does, we continue to attract the best talent from all over, with more than 5.5 million professionals and counting. Kalibrr ultimately connects these talents to companies in search of their next generation of leaders.

The only end-to-end recruitment solutions provider in Southeast Asia, Kalibrr is headquartered in Makati, Philippines, with offices in San Francisco, California, and Jakarta, Indonesia. Established in 2012, it has served over 18,000 clients and is backed by some of the world’s most powerful start-up incubators and venture capitalists. These include Y Combinator, Omidyar Network, Patamar Capital, Wavemaker Partners, and Kickstart Ventures.

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