Why the “We Need Someone Now” Hire Can Cost Your Firm More Later

There are times when hiring a bookkeeper feels urgent.

Maybe someone gave notice unexpectedly. Maybe your firm has taken on several new clients and the existing team is already stretched thin. Or maybe you have been trying to fill a position for months and finally have a candidate who seems like they could work.

At that point, it is easy for the hiring process to become less about finding the right person and more about getting someone in the seat.

I understand why that happens. When the work is piling up and your team needs help, slowing down feels like the last thing you should do.

But after years of hiring bookkeepers, I have learned that urgency can change the way we evaluate candidates. We start focusing more on the reasons the person could work and paying less attention to the questions we still haven't answered.

Sometimes the time we save by hiring quickly costs us much more later.

Urgency Changes What You're Willing to Overlook

When you have plenty of time to hire, it is easier to be objective. You can compare candidates, ask another question, and look more closely at someone's experience to determine whether it actually matches the work they will be doing.

When you need someone now, those same steps can start to feel like obstacles.

It’s good that a candidate has five years of bookkeeping experience and knows QuickBooks.

Urgency doesn't make that untrue. It just makes it feel like the whole picture.

What gets skipped isn't the resume review or the interview. It's the harder question underneath both: has this person actually corrected a messy set of books, or have they only ever worked in ones that were already clean? Experience and software knowledge don't answer that. They just feel close enough to an answer when you're short-staffed and need someone in the seat.

Suddenly, you have enough reasons to move forward. The problem is that none of those things necessarily tell you how that person will perform when they are working in your clients' books.

I've hired candidates who looked very good during the hiring process and struggled once they were actually responsible for the work. Sometimes the bigger problem was that I had filled in the blanks myself. I wanted to believe I'd found the right person quickly, even though I didn't have enough evidence yet to know for sure.

That is one reason firms have to be especially careful when there is pressure to hire quickly. The more urgent the need becomes, the easier it is to turn assumptions into answers.

I wrote more about what I’ve learned from hiring bookkeepers in my most recent blog: Hiring a Bookkeeper: What 17 Years of Hiring Taught Me if you want to check it out.

The Team Gets Bigger, but the Load Doesn’t Get Lighter

Usually, the reason a firm needs to hire quickly is because the current team needs relief. There is too much work. Someone is leaving. Client responsibilities need to be reassigned.

The new bookkeeper is supposed to solve that problem. But if the person isn't ready for the level of work you hired them to handle, the opposite happens.

Someone has to review their reconciliations more closely. A manager has to answer questions they weren't expecting. Work has to be corrected. Deadlines become harder to manage because another employee is spending time checking or redoing work that should have been completed correctly the first time.

Now the team that was already busy has another responsibility.

This is where the cost of a rushed hire becomes much bigger than recruiting expenses or payroll. There is management time, training time, the cost of errors, and the effect on employees who are picking up extra work.

Someone has to double-check the work that was supposed to already be handled. Someone has to explain the same correction twice, then a third time, because it didn't stick. Someone has to decide whether to keep coaching or start the hiring process over, knowing either path costs time you didn't have to spare.

A rushed hire doesn't just fail to solve your staffing problem. It quietly creates a second one on top of the problem you were trying to solve in the first place.

Depending on the position, there may also be client relationships involved. Bookkeeping work touches financial information that clients depend on. If the work isn't accurate or isn't completed when expected, the impact doesn't necessarily stay inside your firm.

Questions a Resume Can’t Answer

One of the easiest shortcuts to take when hiring quickly is relying heavily on previous experience.

If someone has been a bookkeeper for eight or ten years, it is reasonable to expect that experience to matter. It does. But I have learned that the number of years someone has worked in bookkeeping doesn't tell me enough by itself.

What were they actually responsible for? Were they completing the same monthly tasks for established clients, or were they regularly troubleshooting problems? What happened when the books didn't reconcile?

These aren't questions I always had time to dig into when I needed someone fast. They're also the questions that actually tell me what that experience means.

A resume isn’t useless. I just don't want it answering a question it can't actually answer.

When I want to know whether someone can actually do the work, I want proof before I hire, not after. And I make sure that proof never comes from a client's real books.

Giving a candidate access to real client information creates an unnecessary security and confidentiality risk. You should be able to evaluate someone's bookkeeping skills without exposing client data just to see whether they can do the job.

Find the Unknown and Answer It

If you already need someone quickly, adding another step to your hiring process probably doesn't sound very appealing.

But slowing down isn't about doing more. It's about knowing exactly what you still don't know and choosing the one step that actually answers it.

For a junior bookkeeper, that might mean confirming they can execute the basics correctly and consistently, like entries, reconciliations, and the routine work they'll be doing every day.

For a senior bookkeeper, the question looks different. Instead of just checking whether they know the fundamentals, you’re checking whether they can walk into a messy set of books, figure out what's wrong, and fix it without someone standing over their shoulder.

A good hiring process should help you get the information you need without adding unnecessary steps.

Slowing down doesn't require a longer process, just the right information before you hire.

Can this person complete the type of bookkeeping work the role requires? How do they respond when something doesn't look right? Are their skills appropriate for a junior bookkeeping position, or are you hiring them into a senior role that requires more independent judgment?

Those questions are much more useful than, “Do we like this candidate enough to hire them?”

Before I Say Yes

There is no hiring process that can guarantee someone will work out. But that doesn't mean every hiring decision has to be a guess.

When I feel the pull of “we just need someone now,” the question I've learned to ask instead is simple: what do I still need to know before I'm comfortable making this offer?

That's the decision. Not whether to move fast or slow. Just what's still missing and what it will take to find out.

That’s what turns the offer from a guess into a decision.

If you're hiring a bookkeeper and want more objective information before making an offer, BookkeepingIQ's live-proctored bookkeeping assessments let candidates show you what they can actually do before you decide.