Accountests directors Giles Pearson, ex-PwC Partner, and Steve Evans (right). Photo / Supplied
Accountests directors Giles Pearson, ex-PwC Partner, and Steve Evans (right). Photo / Supplied
Psychometric testing expert Steve Evans, founder and director of Accountests, talks building a personality questionnaire designed to assess the competency of accountants and why technical abilities are no longer all employers are looking for to fill bookkeeping vacancies.
What does your business do?
Accountests is a business that helps employersof accountants to make strong recruitment and selection decisions by testing accountants' ability to do the technical parts of their job, but also their personality too. It is a world first in terms of a personality questionnaire which is focused purely on accountants and generating reports to see if an accountant is likely to stack up in quite a changed world of accounting.
It was quite a lengthy process to build a personality questionnaire. We started working on it towards the end of 2020 and it took all of 2021 to build. Building the questionnaire is one thing, but you also have to test to find out whether it is as good as you think it is. I got a group of 320 international accountants to take the test so we could build up a reference group, of which future test-takers are compared against. We launched it in January.
Back in 2016 a global professional accounting body the ACCA did a landmark piece of research looking at what the accountants of the future should look like. It was a superb piece of work, and a lot of my background is around candidate testing and assessment so when I looked at this work that told people what they should look for, my obvious first question was why they hadn't told people how to find it.
My background is around personality profiling and psychometric testing so I was keen to see if we could create something that answered that question. We spent a couple of years building up a personality questionnaire using existing questionnaires, from some of the best in the market, to look at the behaviours and traits that the ACCA had identified as being critical.
The international study left quite a big gap - it is all well and good telling people what a good accountant should look like but it didn't actually tell them how to hire and assess if an accountant was likely to fit all of the new desirable traits and behaviours.
Now that the questionnaire is complete we are focused on getting it out there for the world. We're putting lots of effort into contacting all sorts of people who may want to use it, as well as engaging in promotion and marketing as well. We're well-connected with our professional accounting bodies internationally so we are pushing out the message through those organisations and running webinars for people who may be keen to use it.
We're reasonably well-known in New Zealand and Australia so our focus for this year is to push this out into the United States - the rest of 2022 will be spent throwing the kitchen sink at the US market to get it to catch fire there too.
How does Accountests make money?
We charge per item. It is an online business. If you imagine an employer has found a candidate they quite like and they would like to find out more about their personality traits so they drop into our website, buy the assessment online, a link gets sent to them that they forward on to their candidate, the assessment is completed online and then a report drops into the employer's inbox within minutes of completion so they can make a really informed recruitment decision without holding up the selection process.
Candidates are in really short supply internationally so we're really trying to help employers to make good decisions without slowing them up and adding value to their business. We charge $325 for the personality questionnaire per person as they need them, we don't tie businesses up with contracts or anything like that.
Where do you hope the business will be within the next five years?
The business itself has been running since 2016 so we already have about 30 tests but the difference is up until now we have tested technical skills, for example tax or financial reporting; accounting tasks, whereas this latest test is much more personality-focused. We're optimistic that will really fly in the next two or three years.
Why is the accounting industry now concerned about personality types of accountants?
We never say either or; it should be both all of the time. People who are technically skilled but miserable to work with are common for lots of employers in all industries. But I think what drove us to develop the personality questionnaire was because for the accounting world a lot of the traditional work that they used to do that was all about bookkeeping, a lot of that has been automated now through products like Xero and MYOB, and also there has been a real boom in outsourced offshore bookkeeping services, so a lot of that work for accountants has dried up.
Steve Evans, director and founder of Accountests. Photo / Supplied
Accountants nowadays are more trusted business advisers and that is a different set of skills and the personality questionnaire is looking at whether or not your accounting candidate is likely to grasp what is important to their clients and to get inside of those businesses and become a trusted adviser rather than people they see once a year to do year-end financials.
What did you invest to create the personality-focused test?
To get us started it cost us between $25,000-30,000. With these tests, once you have that basic investment in place, it is the time that costs us more. The product development for this took up the whole of 2021, so the cost is one thing but the sheer time and effort to actually develop it was a real labour of love last year.
What advice do you give to others thinking about starting their own business?
Be aware of what seems to be a pain point within an industry and try to see what other consulting businesses or even their professional bodies are trying to do about it, and then see if there is some sort of niche you would be able to add to that, which is what we did with this personality questionnaire.
