Why Hiring the Right CA Is Harder Than You Think

On the surface, hiring a chartered accountant should be straightforward. They've all passed one of the toughest professional exams in the country. They all know accounting standards, tax law, and audit procedures. So you'd think any CA could walk into any company and do a good job.

In practice, it's not that simple. The CA who's perfect for a Big 4 audit firm and the CA who's perfect for your 80-person SaaS company are very different people. And getting this wrong costs you more than you'd expect.

The “All CAs Are the Same” Trap

Because the qualification is standardised, there's a tendency to treat CAs as interchangeable. Need someone for GST compliance? Get a CA. Need someone for financial planning? Get a CA. Need someone to handle investor reporting for your Series B? Get a CA.

But these are completely different skill sets within the same qualification. A CA who spent five years in statutory audit at a big firm has very different instincts from one who was the sole finance person at a startup. One is trained to check that everything follows the rules. The other is trained to make things work with limited resources. Both are valuable, but they're not interchangeable.

What Companies Actually Need

Here's what we've learned working with companies across different stages:

• Early-stage companies need a CA who can do everything. Compliance, bookkeeping, tax planning, talking to auditors, setting up systems from scratch. They need someone comfortable with ambiguity who doesn't need a team under them to be effective.
• Growing companies need a CA who can build process. MIS reporting, internal controls, cash flow management, budgeting frameworks. The job shifts from doing everything to building systems that let the finance function scale.
• Larger companies need specialists. Transfer pricing, international tax, IFRS reporting, risk management. Here the depth of technical knowledge in a specific domain matters most.

The mistake most companies make is hiring based on the qualification without thinking about the context. A brilliant transfer pricing specialist will be miserable (and ineffective) as the sole finance person at a startup. And a generalist CA who thrived in a lean environment will struggle in a structured corporate role where the expectation is deep technical expertise.

The Challenges Nobody Talks About

Practice vs. industry is a real gap. CAs coming from practice (audit firms, CA firms) think differently from CAs who've worked in industry (in-house at a company). Neither is better, but the adjustment can be rough if nobody accounts for it. We've seen practice CAs struggle in industry because they're used to checking work, not owning outcomes. And we've seen industry CAs struggle in practice because the pace and client management are completely different.

Soft skills get overlooked. Finance touches every department. The best CAs we've placed are the ones who can explain a complex tax implication to a non-finance founder without making them feel stupid. They can push back on a spending decision without creating conflict. They can work with sales, ops, and product teams without being “the person who always says no.”

Retention is a real problem. Good CAs have options. Lots of them. If they're good, they know it, and they'll move for the right opportunity. Companies that treat finance as a back office function, give their CA no growth path, and don't involve them in strategic decisions will lose them within 18 months. Every time.

Getting It Right

Hiring a CA isn't just about finding someone with the letters after their name. It's about understanding what your company actually needs right now, what it's going to need in 18 months, and finding someone whose experience, temperament, and career goals line up with that.

That takes a recruiter who actually understands finance roles, not just someone matching keywords on a resume. It takes conversations with both the company and the candidate that go deeper than “how many years of experience do you have?”

When you get it right, your CA becomes one of the most important people in the company. When you get it wrong, you cycle through people every year wondering why finance is always a mess.