Hi all,
Hope you have all been enjoying your time with Florian so far.
I’ve got some really exciting news from two our trainees: Renee and Samantha. They both got the same role with the same company as Junior Accountants and they both will start this week. The company is using SAP system and they both will be trained up how to use it.
They provided very detailed feedback regarding their interview process. You all will soon receive the feedback from both of them. Prior to that, I would like to share some experience from my end as a referee.
They applied the roles with the company directly. There are 3 rounds interview: first two rounds face to face with different groups and the last round technical test.
I was notified by Renee beforehand that I might need to do a reference check for her. Not long later, I receive a phone call from the company’s financial controller. Surprisingly, he also mentioned Samantha to me, who is also an intern from Florian. He also ask me whether I can vouch for Samantha as well. It was the first time that I had to do two reference check at the same time over the phone.
We had a chat over the phone for more than half an hour. The conversation covered the following areas:
• What does Florian Accounting do? – As you all know, we are an accounting firm that provides accounting and taxation services to the general public;
• What do interns do during the internship? – They handled Florian Accounting internal accounts and some external tax clients’ accounts;
• The Financial Controller was well aware the internship program is an unpaid program, which explains perfectly why interns need to move on to a full time position from Florian;
• How does Florian ensure the quality of interns’ work? – The internship tasks are all arranged by depth. The degree of difficulty is increasing gradually. When interns complete one task, the assistant accountant and accountant will check their work and give written feedback before they move on to the next task. By the end of the internship, interns will have very good knowledge how to perform to a high standard as an Assistant Accountant.
• Both interns personality, punctuality, major strengths and weaknesses.
• During the conversation, I also realised that there were around 200 applications were received by the company. After the two rounds interview, only a handful were shortlisted and two of them are from Florian. They had really outstanding performance in their technical tests. The financial controller even mentioned that our two interns even beat a lot of candidates with a number of years of experience in the test with only 3-6 months internship experience.
• There is only one position available, who would I recommend? – This question was really tricky. As far as I understand, they are equally competent and it would be a pity to let any of them go. I did give a few examples of how impressive they both are during the internship.
• Towards the end, the financial controller expressed how amazed he was with Florian interns technical skills. He believed this program is really beneficial for those candidates without sufficient local accounting experience.
This morning, I got the good news from Samantha - the company TOOK THEM BOTH ON BOARD! How exciting!
I also want to take this opportunity to thank both Renee and Samantha for showing the employer how competitive Florian interns can be. Also, it should help dismiss the concerns of some trainees that the work experience has to be over 2 years and has to be fully paid employment. Understand that it is not the nature of the experience that decides whether you can get the role or not, it is what you have done and what you can deliver that really counts.
You all will receive their feedback regarding what kind of behavioural and technical questions were asked during their interview.
Good luck everyone.
Keep the positive energy flowing.
Coco Hou CPA
Senior Accountant
Florian Accounting
www.floriancorp.com.au
(02) 8889 4111
0412624948
Renee and Samantha both got the offer. Below is Samantha’s feedback on her interview process.
From: samantha xinjie zhang
Sent: Thursday, 7 June 2012 10:50 PM
To: Coco Hou
Subject: 2nd round interview feedback
Dear Coco:
My 2nd round interview is mainly about MYOB test and accounting skill, there are three interviewers, two from acc team, one is managing director. the question they ask:
1. what's your daily routine?
2. please show me how to issue an invoice?
3. How to make purchase for stationary you bought from Officework, please also code this under right GL code
4. Please run A/R Aging report, once you got this report, what will you do?
5. If there is amount due over 90 days, what should you do?
6, If you have already chased up the overdue amount for many times, but they still not make payment to you, what will you do?
7. Then they pass me a paper, ask me to recognise it is a sales order or invoice?-------- it is sales order actually
8. Can you tell me is there any thing we need to pay attention on this sales order?-----------2 things I noticed, first one, this sales order bill to XXX (which is a distributor), but the end user is another company call XXenterprise, because they ask me who is the end user.
2ndly, the amount is in US dollar, not in australian dollar.
Then they start to ask me the job responsibilities I listed on the resume in Florian, especially for FAR, Accruals, prepayment., cost center analysis. Obviously, those two ladies from acc team don't know anything g about FAR, Accrual, Prepayment, So they keep chanlleaging me
with a lot of questions, even i have already explained to them again and again. questions like why you need to do accrual, why you reverse that accrual journal entry etc... It seems like they still don't understand, probably because their role do not require those part. But I feel very awful at that time, because the managing director was there looking at three of us keep arguing... that is bad thing...i think..
anyway, i suggest that all the trainees should be fully prepared, then nobody can chanllege you...
Good Luck!
Samantha
Renee and Samantha both got the offer. Below is Renee’s feedback on her interview process.
From: Renee CAO
Sent: Monday, 11 June 2012 9:03 PM
To: Coco Hou
Subject: the feedback after offer
Dear Coco,
How are you?
Thank you so much for the reference check. The amazing news is that the company provided Junior Accountant offer both to me and Samantha. This shows that although the competition of job hunting market is fierce, trainees from Florian Accounting are competitive. We will start SAP training for the next following two weeks and get involved in the financial year.
This company is a software wholesaler as well as service provider, and my position includes AP,AR and Bank Reconciliation. It also involves some sales support such as customer relationship maintenance and products quotation to customer.
There are infact three rounds of interviews for this position. I will list as follows:
The first round is actually a questionaire whenyou submit your resume.( This is quite smart because they are testing how much effort and your attitude toward this position, at the same time, it is a filter that brings the person they are looking for)
The questions are : Describe a situation where you had to look for the underlying causes in order to solve a problem.
Describe a situation where the standard of work was not acceptable and you needed to act to improve it.
Describe the most complex accounting project that you have worked on. What was your role?
Describe the most complex budgeting process with which you’ve been involved
All these questions , you have to think really hard back to your experience and your attitude so that you are able to draw their attention.
The second round is the first interview with sales in charge and Managing Director respectively, which in total took me one and half hours.
They did not ask many professional questions but normal chat with your background and experiences. They are quite interested in the sales job I did in China, and tried to persuade me to do the junior sales position. I did not say no directly,but I told them at this moment, I am focusing on the accounting career, and if I get the offer, in the future I do not mind doing any sales assistance for the company. They also asked some information about Florian Accounting, the company background, who are the customer and what I did in Florian Accounting.
There is one questions I hope guys will pay attention to,because I did not think my answer was quite persuading and I did not prepare such a question like that.
They asked me why I chose my accountin major, is that because of the immigration or it is because I really like accounting. They asked that because they do not want to hire someone who gets the job, but fells bored soon. Therefore, the answers should be persuading, sincere, organised, and do not make the employer that you are not stable person.
The third round was technical test. Three persons interviewed me, two accountants and Managing Director. They asked me to finish some transactions in Myob and gave me one PO from their customer asking me to point out the features of that document.The whole process took also one and half hour.
The transactions are:
Entering a sales order
Transfer sales order to invoice.
Allocate the income
Run the bank reconciliation and what if the balance is not zero , what will you do?
Tell me how to do the FAR.
Tell me how to look at how much we owe our supplier.
If you receive one invoice from your supplier sayingi this invoice has been overdue for a long time, what will you do??
Have you done any debts chase?? What is the procedures?
How do you do P&L analysis??
They gave me an paper, which is actually from their customer. I replied with several points:
First of all, it is a purchase order other than invoice because there is only PO number without any invoice title.
Second, the company issuing this invoice is not the end user, actually they resells the software to another company.
Third, there is no GST on this PO. When they asked me why I did not asnwer it well. Because the currency is USD, it is actually an export to America, so there is no currency. ( Please pay attention to all the details!!!!!!!)
From all the questions above, it is obvious that most of them are covered by our training, so take note and getting practice in every details are so important,because you never know where you are going to be tested. I really appreciatd the training because it provides me with the proper procedures in dealing with the situations, and I am able to see the big picture of how a company is running.
I have been applied for accountin positions for almost three months, and I took record of every application I sent. For several weeks, no responses at all, and it was a really frustrated period. I consulted some of my friends, edited my cover letter and resumes as they suggest, and I started to receive feedback again. Meanwhile, I try to practice Myob transactions every day, and make myself in the accounting mood.
I fully understand that keeping applying job for long period is really hard,and somtimes I feel lost, and do not know what to do. However, there is no other options but insistance, practising and improving yourself during every feedback every interview you have.
Thank you again for all the help Florian Accountin has given me, and wish everyone good luck.
Yours sincerely,
Renee Cao
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