Hiring a bookkeeper
The staple hire for a small business, and one where a CV is unusually misleading: ten years in the job might mean ten years of steadily widening responsibility, or ten years of entering the same three transaction types. Nothing on the page distinguishes them.
Tenure is the number everyone reads, and it hides the scope entirely. Bookkeeping CVs lead with years and software names. Neither says whether the person ran the ledger alone or sat inside a finance team, whether they closed a month or only fed it, or whether they have ever handled anything as awkward as a VAT correction or a multi-currency invoice. And the highest-consequence quality — noticing when a number is wrong rather than dutifully entering it — has no field on any CV template.
Sole charge or part of a team? The guide hinges on it
For a finance role Selene asks about tools and volume. That combination narrows the job faster than any amount of experience talk.
The software, the volume, and how alone they are
Selene goes after the tools and the transaction volume — the standard probe for a finance or ops role — and then the question that really sets the level: is there anyone else in finance, or is this person the whole function?
One sentence changes the guide
Almost every bookkeeping ad asks for accuracy and attention to detail. Both are table stakes and neither is measurable from a CV. This answer asks for something sharper — the instinct to stop and query — and it demotes the two things these ads normally lead with: years, and the name of the software.
Exceptional, not just good —
“I want to hear ‘this doesn’t look right’ before I hear ‘it’s done’.”
→ Querying an error was promoted to a must-have, above working unsupervised; ledger software dropped to the bottom of the guide.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria, weighted around a sole-charge role at moderate volume — and note that both software line items sit at the very bottom, which is close to the opposite of how most bookkeeping ads are written. On a company with a finance team above them, half of these would move, which is exactly why the guide is built from the conversation rather than the job title.
No qualification gate — deliberately
Bookkeeping is not a licensed profession, so a formal qualification could be a criterion but is not a hard filter, and treating it as one screens out a lot of highly capable self-taught people running real ledgers. Selene keeps it out of the eligibility questions on purpose: the pile gets read on evidence of the work, not on letters after a name.
Scored on scope, not on years
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
Each criterion returns the evidence behind it with an honest confidence level — which on a signal as subtle as error-catching is the part worth reading.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Working out whether this is sole-charge or part of a team, and building the criteria to match
- Reading all 90 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist, with the error-catching evidence quoted for each
- An interview brief that resolves the ambiguities — like whether they actually filed
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn't post to job boards or source candidates
- References, and any practical test on your actual ledger
- The interview, and the judgment about whether you trust them with the ledger
- The offer, and the conversation about what you actually pay
Describe your books
Sole charge or part of a team, 40 transactions a month or 4,000 — describe it in a sentence and see the guide reshape.