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3 hiring mistakes I’ll never make again
7 years and hundreds of applicants later, these are the recruitment mistakes that cost us - and taught us - the most.
Alastair Barlow
May 02, 2026
The ACCA doesn’t teach recruitment. So when accountants start a business, they’re often catapulted into the roles of talent sourcer, talent assessor, interviewer, manager, and more. And with no official guidance to fall back on, it’s time to sink or swim.
I was fortunate to have done a lot (and I mean a lot) of recruitment at PwC. And yet we still made some hiring mistakes in flinder’s early days (we also got it right too, and actually even our first ever hire, Chris, has stayed with the business 8+ years on!).
On reflection, a lot of the ways we went wrong come down to a lack of resources: lack of cash flow, lack of time.
Given that new businesses rarely have either money or time going spare, I recently sat down with my flinder co-founder, Luke, to discuss what those early years of building the team at flinder taught us and how we’d hire differently today.