What a seasonal hire interview should test
Everyone asks which software they've used. It's the one thing on the list you can teach in a week, and it hides the four things you can't.
Twenty to five, third one today, and the CV on the table lists six software packages across two lines. You ask which of them they've actually used. They say all of them, some more recently than others. You nod, write something down, and ask when they could start.
That was the interview. Both of you knew it. The decision gets made on whether they seemed pleasant and whether they'll turn up, which are not nothing, but you had twenty minutes and you spent them on the one part of the job that gets solved by somebody sitting next to them for an afternoon.
Then it's March. They're quick, they're tidy, and you find out in week three that they've finished eleven files without asking a single question.
The software question survives because everybody can answer it
It sorts nobody. Any preparer who has worked a season has touched the main packages, and the one who hasn't will be fine by the end of the first week — someone shows them where things live, and the rest is a menu. It is the cheapest gap in the room to close, and it is the only one you tested.
What you're hiring in a seasonal preparer is a set of instincts about when to stop and ask. Whether they know that a figure looks wrong before they could tell you why. Whether they'll say "I don't know what this is" out loud in a room where everyone else is busy.
All of that is testable in about fifteen minutes, and none of it is on the CV.
Bring a file into the room
Take a finished job from last season — a good one, signed off, nothing embarrassing in it. Strip the client's name. Print it. Hand it across the table and ask what they'd query.
Ten minutes. No stakes, no client waiting, and you already know the answer, which means you can spend the whole ten minutes watching how they work rather than checking whether they're right.
Tell them exactly what it is, too. This isn't a trap, and somebody who freezes at a real file in a quiet room with one person watching is not going to be better at it in March with six of them open.
Four things come out of that ten minutes, and you can't get any of them from a conversation:
- Whether they start at page one and read down, or go straight to the loan account.
- Whether the things they'd query number three or thirty. A junior who queries everything has the same practical effect as one who queries nothing.
- Whether they'll say the words "I don't know what this is" while you're sitting there.
- Whether they can tell you why the fourth thing didn't bother them. That one is the whole job.
The four questions worth the remaining time
What do you do when you get stuck? The answer you want is specific and slightly boring: I'd note it, keep going, and bring three of them at once rather than interrupting someone six times. The answer to worry about is a confident "I'd work it out." The expensive failure in a seasonal hire has never been slowness — it's silence, because a guess arrives in the file looking exactly like an answer, and nobody finds it until review.
Write me the email. Give them a live-sounding gap: you're missing a quarter of statements from a client with two accounts. Watch them write the actual message. Somebody who produces "Could you please send through your bank statements at your earliest convenience" is going to spend your season on round trips, and each round trip is a week. Somebody who names the account in the client's words, names the months, and says in one clause why it's needed has done the harder half of chasing before they've started.
One judgement, defended. Repairs or capital. Deductible or not. Pull something genuinely arguable out of a real file and ask which way they'd go — and then ask what would change their mind. You are not testing whether they land where you'd land. You're testing whether they can hold a position in a domain where a great deal is arguable, and still be moved by a fact rather than by you frowning.
What did last season actually look like? Not "how do you handle pressure." Ask what the last fortnight before the deadline looked like, day by day. Rehearsed answers go abstract within a sentence — high volume, tight deadlines, great team. Someone who lived it names the file, the client who sent forty photos of receipts, the thing that broke at 4:45 on a Friday. Specificity is very hard to fake and takes no skill to detect.
Retire the ones with a known correct answer
Nobody has ever said no to "are you detail-oriented." Same for "tell me about a time you handled conflict." These have one right answer, every candidate has read it, and the only thing they measure is interview practice.
If you want a proxy for care, ask what they got wrong last season and what happened afterwards. The signal isn't the mistake — everyone has one and most of them are dull. It's whether the story is specific, and whether they were the person who found it.
The reference call is worth more than the interview
Ring the practice they worked at last season and ask two things.
Would you have them back? Listen to the pause rather than the answer, because almost nobody says no outright and almost everybody hesitates honestly.
And: by the end of the season, were you checking their work or spot-checking it? That single question tells you what you're actually buying — a pair of hands that needs a reviewer attached, or a pair that frees one up. The gap between those two is most of the value of the hire, and it is invisible from a CV.
What changes when the preparation is already done
Worth saying plainly, since it's our own product: when the bookkeeping-shaped part of the job is done before anyone opens the file, the seasonal role moves toward review. That doesn't make it a smaller job to hire for. Reviewing is the harder task — deciding whether something is wrong requires knowing what right looks like, and a tidy file is much easier to believe than a messy one.
So the test doesn't go away. It becomes the whole role, which is an argument for doing it properly in the twenty minutes you have, rather than asking about software and finding out in March.
A weak seasonal hire doesn't cost you their salary. It costs a senior's March, which is the most expensive month you own.