Dragonfly Language Svcs.

I once had an experience where I was contacted by a prospective employer. The recruiter contacted me and wanted to set up an initial screening immediately.

We did the initial screening, and then she called me back a few hours later to see if I could meet with the hiring manager the next day. It was during the holiday season, and I had taken vacation days and had family in town, but I made the choice to make room in my holiday/vacation schedule to meet with the hiring manager, not knowing when I would have clear time to do so once I returned to my regular work schedule.

The meeting with the hiring manager seemed to go very well. It went over the designated time as the hiring manager discussed the role and what kinds of initiatives would happen. I asked many questions, and I had so many more, but I wanted to be mindful of his time and where the team was in the recruitment process. The hiring manager asked me a few questions about general availability and potential next steps. He provided his email address, unprompted, to me in case I had questions.

I have done recruitment and hiring myself, so I know this was no guarantee of follow through to furtherance in the hiring process. But I will say that as a hiring manager, unless I fully intended to bring a person in for the next steps in the recruitment process, I would not necessarily have asked the questions surrounding availability for the next steps.

However, because I have done recruitment and hiring, I never take those questions to indicate that I’m guaranteed to move further in the hiring process.

I was never asked specific questions related to the job requirements, which tested for skill sets that would fit the specific role. Again, as a hiring manager, I always came prepared with specific questions related to the role I was recruiting for and questions that probed for fit for the type of environment in which the role had to operate.

After the interview, I sent separate thank you notes to the recruiter and the hiring manager (because he had given me his email address).

Then, I heard nothing for an entire month. I followed up with another set of notes to the recruiter and hiring manager.

Now, by this time, and with the radio silence, I’m sensing that I’ve not been selected to move on to the next round. That, I’ve got. I understood. There were never any guarantees.

I took exception to not even receiving acknowledgment of my earlier email communications sent to them. I understand that everyone is busy. However, so am I. Responsiveness is part of our jobs. I had applied for an opportunity. It sounded like a good one that I could sink my teeth into. I felt that all my experiences had prepared me for a pivotal role like this.

A simple response: “Thank you for your note. Thank you for meeting with us. We’re still screening and interviewing other candidates. We will let you know when we decide who will move to the next round.” A simple acknowledgment when you have gone beyond the initial screening for the role, I don’t think, is too much to ask. It felt like I had been ghosted. That did not feel great. I could add feelings of humiliation and feeling a little disrespected to the human emotions I felt, which took a little time to process.

Ultimately, I could only accept that the result would have been different if I had been meant for that specific role at that specific location. I know that for the role as described, I was more than prepared to handle the requirements and manage the uncertainty that would come with the future expected initiatives.

It can be difficult to put oneself out there. Rejection does not feel good. Sometimes, it takes several breaths (multiple breaths) and some time to process and separate that rejection from your perception of and confidence in your abilities and to put a positive spin on the experience.

Prompt: In corporate accounting, streamlining processes is key to efficiency. You can start by evaluating your current accounting workflows and identifying bottlenecks. Implementing automated solutions for repetitive tasks, such as invoicing or reconciliations, can save time and reduce errors. Encourage cross-departmental communication to ensure that financial information flows smoothly throughout your organization. By simplifying and automating processes, you’ll improve accuracy and free up your team to focus on more strategic tasks.

Response: While I don’t directly address streamlining the accounting function and processes themselves, my point of view ultimately impacts streamlining the function, increasing efficiency, and reducing waste.

An accounting system is an information system that supports the communication of a business entity’s health at a very deep level, not just superficially.

Corporate accounting supports the communication of financial information outward. A stringent environment dictates the framework within which a business needs to operate, especially for publicly traded companies. That framework supports compliance under varying regulatory constraints.

However, the ability and information needed to manage a business entity effectively come from that same accounting system, which provides information to those who lead and manage the business entity’s activities on a day-to-day basis.

So, there needs to be an element of compromise. The transactions that impact that very same accounting system are generally initiated by the business activities of non-financial employees.

When designing the structure of the accounting system that supports both external reporting needs and internal management needs, one needs to consider the organization of other elements of that system, for example, elements in an account code combination that take into consideration necessary product line reporting, departmental reporting or costs center reporting which reflect functions within a business entity, as well as the ability to include other generative elements within a code combination upon which key business reporting can find their underpinning.

The key here is the ability to combine varying aspects and elements, which I’ve mentioned above, so as not to create multiple static accounts that overpopulate a chart of accounts and ultimately lead to a cluttered general ledger.

Being able to use the accounting system for flexibility to report on operational aspects of the business helps support providing information on operational performance to “the street.”

In many organizations, where careful consideration is not given to the key business reporting needs, painfully time-consuming gyrations exist to obtain good information, which precludes agile and streamlined reporting.

Thinking about and planning to use the accounting system in a manner that allows information to flow smoothly and can be trusted requires serious consideration and a commitment to a strategic approach.

The more complex the business, which includes multi-functional support to produce the offerings being sold in the public market, i.e., in a manufacturing environment, the more need there is to plan, be explicit, set out good strong policies around usage of account categories, and what kind of transaction information they should contain. This will aid in setting up a generative and ultimately flexible structure within which you can place more confidence in the quality of the information being generated.

The above only touches the surface of potential consideration for an accounting system that produces reliable information and serves multiple functions agilely. Having good fence posts around the structuring of the accounting system and considering what reporting needs there are will reduce rework, over-processing, and many aspects of waste administratively as well as in other functional areas of a business, costs of inefficiency and poor quality that we should keep seeking to reduce and eventually eliminate.

Continuation of the original post:

The use of elements or components in an account string is clearly not an original idea that came from me. But it is an idea and a concept that I’ve embraced. I am an accountant who has worked in the managerial accounting spaces from the manufacturing plant to a division to the structure of a business group liaising with corporate FP&A and corporate accounting with the aim to soundly and clearly commuicate the results of business operations. This needed information finds its base in the way the accounting system is structured. I am also a linguist and an ESL teacher and coach. The art of teaching language finds its base in presenting generative concepts that support varying and multiple possible permutations by which to both communicate and understand a language. So it also is with accounting.

In linguistics, specifically in syntax, we embrace the concept of language or utterances of language having a surface structure that we recognize and a deep structure that supports the surface structure. That deep structure supports the ability to choose varying ways of expression, e.g. like tense (time) and how and where in a string of words and within the structure of that string of words is tense expressed.

The accounting system has a surface structure that allows the creation of financial statements, e.g. the balance sheet, the income statement, the statement of cash flows but there is an underlying structure that supports the presentation of those externally facing reports but that also supports the inwardly facing reporting that then provides the information that is paired with the financial statements to provide insights into the health of the business as well as its operating performance.

Experience with Ghosting in Recruitment

Optimizing Accounting System Structure for Reliable Information and Flexibility