Big congratulations go to our intern Bonnie. She landed a full-time Junior Accountant Position in a Public Practice Accounting Firm.
We have already had many interns get hired in the past few months. Bonnie is one of the typical examples.She was struggling in her job hunting after graduating. Without any systematic and focused Accounting training and internship work experience, she couldn't secure any job after one year of job hunting. That's why she chose to go with her Masters degree, because that was her only method to remain in the Accounting field. But in her second semester, she found out about our program and she decided not to focus on her Masters study any more.
Now, with Platinum Accounting'straining and local working experience, she finally got her desired position. Bonnie has shared her interview strategy with us, please refer to her interview feedback and keep the positive energy flowing!
Dear interns, if you feel frustrated about your Accounting job hunting journey, please do not hesitate to contact us. We, Platinum Accounting,will always be there for you and help you to build your successful accounting career. In this Australian accounting field,you are not alone, you have us!
Build your technical skills,build your working experience, most importantly, build your confidence!
You will make it!
From: Bonnie *** [mail to: Bonnie ***@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, *** 10:14 PM
To: Platinum Adelaide
Subject: Re: Congratulations for your new job
Dear Scarlet,
Thank you for your kind email. I am still very excited about my new job with this accounting firm. I totally did not expect to secure the employment with them as I think they were actually looking for someone more experience particularly in public accounting area. Below is a brief about the interview process and hopefully this will be helpful for other interns.
I had a phone interview after I sent out my application.Basically, I was asked what I had been doing and some questions regarding my resume. Then I was invited for a face to face interview with the Director of the firm.
I was not asked too much technical questions as they had known that I only had limited experiences, but the internship with Platinum Accounting did bring their interest in me. They asked me what I did at Platinum Accounting.Then I was asked whether I knew how to do companies' and trusts' accounts.Also, they wanted to know what kind of accounting software that I could use.Even though I was not familiar with theirs, being an advanced user of MYOB certainly helped. The last technical questions they asked was whether I could do BAS and Tax Return.
The interesting thing is the Director asked me many Behavioural Questions. One of them was, if the dumbest person you have met gets a score of 0, and the smartest one gets rated 10, what score would you give to yourself? Another very interesting one was, if someone would like to make a movie of your life so far and asked you to pick a movie star/celebrity to play you in that movie. Who would you pick? I think the Director was happy with my answers as he laughed and told me that he liked my answers.
I was also asked my opinions/views to certain things, e.g.religious (this is because I am doing volunteer work for my church) and some other things.
They also asked 'strange' questions such as: where do you live and do you live by yourself or share with others;what do your parents do and soon. I guess maybe they just try to know me in details.
One more thing that is worth to mention is because of my Chinese background, they like that I can speak both English and Chinese which I believe is an advantage to other interns as well.The Director even said to me that I speak very good English, I guess language skill is critical as well.
The interview lasted for between 45 minutes to 1 hour. I was invited for a trial after the interview. The trial was held in one week after the interview and basically it was processing client's bank statement into their system, called hand iLedger. I had never used this software, but because I am familiar with MYOB and other systems, basically they also share some sort of the similarities, I managed to complete my task.Overall, they were happy with my performance even though I was thought to be a bit slow as their work was quite complicated with hundreds of different accounts and with the new system.
Eventually they decided to give a junior accounting position in their firm and would train me up.
By the way, I printed a 'cost centre report' and a 'BAS' that I did and put them into a folder for my interview to show the interviewer. They actually spent sometime on reading the report.
I have worked there for over a week now and must say that things I have done through my internship with Platinum have helped me heaps. I was quite confident of my knowledge, but what I learned comparing to the work I have been doing is still not much.
I would have no idea how to do any of these things without the internship experiences even though they use a different system plus the complexity of their work. Therefore I would strongly recommend other interns to work hard on those internship tasks especially internship file 1 and 2.
This is the whole story. They did not ask for reference, but they did check the information of the places where I worked on my resume. From my past experiences, usually government and employment agents would conduct a very thorough reference check, normal companies care more about what the person could actually do. Also, the interviews I have had so far,most of questions asked were more like behavioural questions rather than technical ones.
Hope this experience will be able to help other interns in their job hunting. Thank you once again for your support.I shall return to complete my internship tasks soon.
Look forward to seeing you and everyone else again.