Hiring a Chartered Accountant: Do You Need One, and How Do You Assess One?

Because supply is not the constraint. Candidate choice is. Qualified CAs have varied options open to them, several companies chase the same people, and the result is a long cycle with a high dropout rate rather than a shortage of applicants.

Four things drive it, and they compound.

• Candidates are selective about the kind of company they join, and increasingly about sector, stage and role scope rather than only about pay.
• Many are genuinely undecided. A candidate exploring a startup, a corporate and a Big 4 role in the same fortnight is not being difficult; they are working out what they want, and that takes time you have to plan for.
• Multiple employers are in the market for the same person, so acceptance is not the end of the process. Dropouts after offer, and even after joining date agreement, are common.
• Expectations on compensation frequently run above published averages, because candidates are benchmarking against what peers are being offered rather than against a market table.

Two related shifts worth knowing. In our experience, CA freshers increasingly prefer startups and corporates over traditional CA firms, which has made hiring for practices harder. And freshers continue attending ICAI placements after accepting an offer elsewhere, which is a major source of post-offer dropouts and is not personal, however it feels.

Yes where the role carries statutory judgement, audit defence or tax positions. Frequently no where the role is execution, process ownership or analytical support. Companies default to requiring a CA and then pay for capability the job never uses.

That someone has technical grounding and passed a hard filter. It says nothing about ownership, commercial judgement, stakeholder handling or the ability to work without a manual, and those decide most hires.

What a CA arrives with: accounting and audit fundamentals, exposure to how several businesses run, comfort with scrutiny, and the discipline that clearing the exams requires.

What they usually still have to build: knowing when good enough is good enough, working without a supervising senior, holding a position with someone who outranks them, and managing people. None of that is examined.

Skill sets also vary far more between CAs than employers assume, and the variation traces to specific things: whether articleship was at a small firm, a mid-sized practice or a Big 4; the location and the client base they saw; the scope of work they were actually given rather than the firm's name; and any industry experience afterwards. A candidate from a mid-sized firm who ran full audits for real clients may be better prepared for an operating role than one from a large firm who worked on a slice of a large engagement. Read the work, not the letterhead.

Often, yes, particularly as a first finance hire. Semi-qualified professionals with post-articleship experience are hired when founders want more ownership than bookkeeping but do not yet need statutory judgement in-house.

This is one of the most under-discussed hires in Indian startups and one of the most common. What such a person typically owns: overseeing accounting, running compliance, producing reporting, and coordinating with auditors. In tier-1 cities, candidates with roughly three to six years of experience after articleship are commonly hired in the range of 7 to 10 LPA.

Be realistic about the ceiling. At that level you should not expect due diligence support, investor management, high-end FP&A, or handling assessments and notices. Those need a different person, and expecting them from this hire is how the arrangement fails.

With broader capability and genuine ownership of the function, a budget closer to 12 to 15 LPA is workable. That version works best where a few junior professionals are handling day-to-day accounting and compliance and the hire is overseeing them rather than doing everything personally.

One practical point that matters more than it sounds: hire someone who is not still writing exams. Candidates attempting finals need study leave, may leave to re-attempt, and are understandably prioritising the qualification over your close calendar. Continuity is a large part of what you are buying at this level.

Our note on the first finance hire for a startup covers how this decision sits alongside the alternatives.

More than published averages suggest, particularly in tier-1 cities. Qualified candidates are currently expecting around 12 LPA as a minimum in Tier 1 cities, and the range above that varies widely by sector, stage and role.

Benchmarking properly matters here more than in most searches, and for a specific reason. The cycle is already long, you will interview several candidates, and a budget set below the market means discovering that after six weeks rather than before. The cost of re-running a search exceeds the difference you were trying to protect.

The HireGenie Salary Guide 2026 carries current benchmark ranges by sector and location across India and the Middle East. Benchmark against the type of employer you are, since a funded startup, a capability centre and a domestic services business price the same candidate very differently.

Move quickly and keep the gaps short. Most CA hires are lost to timing rather than to a better offer.

• Schedule interviews promptly and close the gap between rounds. A week of silence is where candidates re-engage with other processes.
• Benchmark the budget before going to market, not after the first three candidates decline.
• Expect dropouts and build a pipeline that assumes them rather than one that treats each candidate as decisive.
• Stay in contact between offer and joining. This is where offers unravel, particularly with freshers who are still attending ICAI placements.
• For bulk hiring, go to ICAI placements directly or run walk-ins. It is faster and cheaper than any search process, and we will tell clients so.

That last point costs us mandates and it is the right advice. Volume fresher hiring is not a search problem.

Ask what they personally owned and decided. The exam has already answered the technical question.

• Walk me through your articleship. Which clients did you actually run, and what was yours rather than the team's?
• Tell me about a position you took that someone senior disagreed with.
• What did you find at a client that the client did not know about themselves?
• Describe something you did outside the audit programme because it needed doing.
• What kind of company do you want to work in, and why this one?

The last question is not filler. Given how much choice candidates have, a vague answer is a reasonable predictor of a dropout later, and asking it early gives you the chance to address it rather than discover it at offer stage.

Most come from treating the qualification as the assessment.

• Requiring a CA for a role that does not need one, then paying for capability the job never uses.
• Reading the articleship firm rather than the work done inside it.
• Assuming a fresh CA can operate without support. Audit training is excellent preparation for assessment and poor preparation for ownership.
• Hiring a semi-qualified candidate who is still writing exams, then losing them mid-year.
• Running a slow process in a market where candidates hold several conversations at once.
• Treating a signed offer as a closed search.

Screening out candidates who cleared the exams in multiple attempts is common, rarely stated openly, and a weak predictor of how someone performs in an operating role.

It is also expensive. The filter removes a large part of the available pool in a market where candidate availability is already the constraint, and it selects for exam technique rather than for ownership, judgement or the willingness to keep going when something is hard.

There are roles where academic pedigree carries genuine weight, and most operating finance roles are not among them. If you are using attempts as a proxy, be clear with yourself about what you think it predicts, and test for that directly instead.

A note from our founder, Ayush Mehta, who is a Chartered Accountant: the strongest finance professionals I have worked with and placed have been distributed fairly evenly across first attempts and later ones. What has predicted performance is whether someone was given real ownership early and took it.

We assess CAs on what they owned rather than where they trained, and we will tell you when the role does not need one.

HireGenie is led by a Chartered Accountant, which is a large part of why we scope roles against the work rather than the qualification. More on how these searches run is on our Chartered Accountant recruitment page.