When he’s not busy running around Fitzroy Gardens, or one of his four children, Robert is mentor and writer for Startup Smart, a committee member at Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, and is involved with numerous startups working with tech incubators and VC’s. Robert has extensive experience working with enterprises and small businesses in varying industries, and a passion for delivering value and savvy financial structuring at all levels of operation.

One of the biggest problems small business owners experience is lack of time. At Krigsman, we’ve identified a few ways of operating that are essential for us to achieve our overall goals and objectives and ensure we are working as efficiently as we can with our clients.

A Flexible Workforce

The number one “no-brainer” solution for Finance leaders like myself, is utilising Contingent staff from an online platform like Weploy and hours, days, even weeks are bought back instantly. We often need to flex up our team for temp work as our clients’ needs change, in order to keep up with the data entry and administrative tasks required.

The War on Talent

In the aftermath of the Banking Royal Commission and increasing ethical obligations for accountants in business, having a sound core value system, appropriate professionalism and confidentiality is so important in our field and ensuring this is upheld amongst all our hires is of optimal importance. The time it takes to search for talent with the relevant qualities is considerable – first I need to write up a Job Description that I hope will attract the right type of candidate and post that onto a site like Seek, Linked In or Indeed. I’ll need to review the applications and negotiate interview times. Then there is the interview process, which in my experience, hasn’t always been a very effective measure of these key professional attributes anyway. Next, there’s the selection process, keeping everyone in the loop to ensure our employer relations are good and applicants have a pleasant experience dealing with us. When our new starter comes in, they’ll need to be carefully on-boarded and educated in our expected organisational behaviours, practice, attitude, and skills, and it is essential for me to feel confident they are absorbing each pillar of the Australian Professional and Ethical Standards Board Code of Ethics. The entire process of a new hire in the Financial services takes an average of 44.7 working days which is time I just cannot afford.

Time-saving solutions

Outsourcing the recruitment process is an essential timesaving hack for any employer in the Finance industry who would rather spend 45 days working on their client deliverables. Not only is it an essential for saving time-to-hire, but using Weploy is a way of of removing the danger of a bad hire. De-risking the danger of hiring temp staff members that do not live up to expectations saves time because each Weployee has already been screened by phone, undergone a face to face interview, and had their Work and Police checks signed, sealed and delivered. By the time they walk into the office – they are ready to hit the ground running. Furthermore, the benefits of using a blended workforce of contingent and full time staff can help support the future innovation and growth of my company. We all know that full-time employees, ones that legally require the payment of benefits, can be very expensive. Furthermore, studies show that temp staff can be more productive than 9-5ers, so swapping out just one of these full-timers for even just one temporary worker, or a shortlist of Weployees who I can select whenever I need, will actually help boost our bottom line, while at the same time increasing overall efficiency. 

Myself and the team at Krigsman Partners have experimented with various timesaving hacks in order to improve the way we work together and increase productivity. We moved away from paper-based systems a good while ago, and are always trialling packages with new digital platforms to automate our processes. But the biggest time saver has proved to be the recruitment piece - and that’s why I think using a digital temporary staffing app like Weploy is a no brainer for anyone in Finance, or in any industry in fact.