If you're an HR and you're interviewing candidates for the job of financial analyst or financial manager what would you look at the candidate?
His academics or his projects or his internships or his skills.
I would love to hear from the peeps here. And also how was the experience of the first interviews

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Hello! I love this question - I am an FPA analyst who got hired with zero experience with audit, SAP and modelling skills so I think what I look out for might deviate from normal:

1) Basic excel skills! I think this correlates with ability to use data visualisation tools in future / in absence of, he can be trusted to create templates for forecasting from scratch with some guidance

2) Plus points for candidates who are good communicators (written/spoken) not afraid to learn on the job + confident that they can learn fast. FPA is all about keeping up with the business - it's like a horse so you basically run with it except you can sometimes pull back and get it to head in a preferred direction . So it really doesn't matter if you had prior experience or not especially if you are entering a new industry!

Internships, work experience wise - I guess it helps if you had some modelling exp prior for sure but I wouldnt give a hard pass to candidates without any experience. Hope this helps!

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Thanks for commenting. This was helpful.
Can you be more specific on the excel skills. Which areas are needed the most apart from modelling.
Also for FPA why is the need for SAP?

And did you had any prior experience in any other domain before getting this job?

I have been looking for internships but haven't been able to land on one good enough in Finance. It would be really wonderful if you could help me out here.

Thanks

Hi there! No problem at all - I understand the motivation behind the question. I was in your position just 2 years back before I entered this role.

Basic excel skills that I basically entered with: vlookup, sumifs, pivot tables, locking cells, countifs

It doesn't take much to create 3 statement model!

SAP is where financial data of a company gets stored - same goes for other systems in other companies eg. Oracle. Tons of transaction codes that can be used to dice and slice such data. You will need to get non financial data as well so purposes if you are trying to measure operational efficiency or understand business processes (important for FPA!)

Hmm, nope I didn't have any prior FPA experience at all. Entered with only my accounting degree.

What do you mean by a good internship? Which ones have you come across? These days I would say all finance departments come with an FPA function to fill! Any extra help from interns are definitely appreciated

I'm located in Asia now though so I might not be able to help!

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For me, I would think courses on Udemy for SAP as an introduction could be useful but honestly I didn't get 'started' on it until I learnt on the job from existing accountants. For FPA work, you don't need to pass entries so all you need is a list of codes (e.g. FS10N - for balance checking) etc. to extract data etc. I was honest and said to my manager that I didn't have any SAP knowledge - she assured me that there will be imcumbents around to guide me through and she was right!

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