Accounting Clerk Interview Questions
When you need your finances organised and balanced, you will want to turn to a skilled accounting clerk for help. These professionals record and organize financial data for tracking, compliance, and planning. Once you have received enough applications from candidates, and narrowed it down to your top picks, it is time to jot down some accounting clerk interview questions to find the right fit.
It’s important to ask interview questions that properly evaluate a candidate’s:
- Experience
- Specific “hard” skills
- Emotional intelligence and “soft” skills
- Accomplishments and progress
- Fit
These sample accounting clerk interview questions will help you get organized as you assess candidates. See Monster’s accounting clerk job description sample for help crafting the perfect job advert.
1. Questions About Experience
Before you get started with any interview, it is important to take stock of your organisation’s specific needs, including the level of experience your accounting clerk may require. Keep in mind that there may be some great but somewhat inexperienced candidates who have transferrable skills. Questions gauging a candidate’s experience may include:
- Tell me about your previous work experience as accounting clerk.
- What were your primary responsibilities?
- How many people did you support?
2. Evaluating a Candidate’s Skills
As with experience, you will most likely require an accounting clerk to have certain specific skills, such as the ability to use certain software programmes and knowledge of confidentiality procedures. Questions that evaluate their skills may include:
- What type of software programmes are you familiar with using?
- How did you maintain confidentiality when managing information?
- Tell me about your computer skills.
- Talk about your maths skills.
3. Behaviour-Based Questions
As with most other occupations, your accounting clerk interview questions should go beyond skills and experience to determine how they might act in a given situation, whether they would be pleasant to work with, and other so-called soft skills that are in many ways more important than hard skills. Behaviour-based questions may include:
- What were the most challenging aspects of your work?
- Tell me about a complex project you were tasked with completing under deadline.
- How did you add value to your role as accounting clerk?
4. Accomplishments and Professional Development
You will probably want someone who is ambitious enough to want to make improvements and learn new techniques throughout their career. Ask questions that reveal their most proud achievements and their ongoing efforts to become better at their job, such as:
- What have you done at your present/last company to increase revenues, reduce costs, or save time?
- What have you done recently to become a better accounting clerk?
5. Determining Whether They are the Right Fit
Even if you have found a candidate with the right experience, skills, emotional intelligence, and drive to perform well in the role, it still may not be the fit for both parties. For instance, they may prefer working at a larger organisation or would rather skip the commute and work from home. Whatever the factors, make sure they are the right fit by asking these questions:
- What makes you a great fit for this position?
- What type of schedule are you looking to work?
- Would you be available to work extra hours if needed?
When hiring an accounting clerk, every interview should be an integrated part of a hiring strategy that enables you to hire great people and avoid hiring disasters. Taking the time to prepare for the candidate interview will help you make every new hire count.
These Accounting Clerk Interview Questions Can Help You Find the Right Fit
We know you wish you could just fast forward through the recruiting process for hiring an accounting clerk and find the best candidate to hire. While we cannot bend time, we can make the recruitment process easier for you. Find out how we can speed up your hiring process by starting with a free job posting and other helpful tools you can use to manage your applicants.