@Merryoldgoat
A fully qualified candidate I recently interviewed couldn’t prepare a payroll journal which blew my mind but it’s why I have to test.
Yep, I've had that too, when I've been recruiting accountants. In my early days, I genuinely expected an accountancy graduate to be able to do simple book-keeping, but quickly found you can't assume that. My son recently did a couple of accounting modules as part of his financial maths degree so I looked at his course lecture notes and can now see why - double entry seems to be taught only as a concept with no practical element, so in theory they may know a bit about it, but in reality, they're studying the "product", i.e. the financial statements, i.e. ratios, margins, etc., rather than the "process" of how to prepare them! In the end, I stopped prioritising accounting graduates over others as they still needed the same level/amount of in house training and experience to be able to actually do the job of accounts preparation, so no benefit in an accounting graduate! (In fact, we also took A level school-leavers at age 18 who could do the same job, same training, etc., with A level Maths, and go onto the chartered qualification studies/exams, etc, so no benefit in a graduate at all).
But, yes, even with recruiting experienced/qualified accountants, I had to do some hard/searching questions in the interview as to just what they could and couldn't do. The thing is, especially for those who've worked only in one or two organisations, they have very little breath of experience. So it's quite possible that someone has never had to do a payroll journal, or a VAT return, etc., as others in the firm would have that task. I did tend to prefer people who'd worked in accountancy practices, who'd have a much broader experience as they'd be working on dozens/hundreds of different clients, experiencing different systems, picking up from client's book-keeping at various stages and progressing with it, etc. I would certainly have prioritised a candidate with, say, 10 years' experience in an accounting practice, over a graduate with just a couple of years post qualifying experience or someone with 20 years experience but only in one role in a single firm.
But having said all that, I never went down the route of making the application process hard. I've always been happy with covering letter and CV. In my latter years of recruitment, I just prepared my own "competency tests" which I asked candidates to do immediately before/after the interview and took about 30 minutes. They were basically either a simple accounts or a simple tax return (depending on job applied for) with numerous mistakes built in, at different levels, some easy/obvious which I'd expect any competent applicant to identify, some less obvious ones but still should be apparent to someone claiming they have experience, and a few devilishly hard to spot ones which would only be spotted by someone with in-depth knowledge/experience. I didn't have a pass mark, I just wanted to gauge how well they'd done in the "test" to compare with the CV and what they said in their interview. To be honest, that simple competence test was far more valuable as it wasn't something they could lie about nor blag. So, I think some level of "testing" beyond covering letters and CV is necessary, but not to the extents that recruiters have gone which is way over the top, especially with stupid online "games" that only seem to test persistence/perseverance etc like stopping a moving object on a specific location that just take time - just because a recruiter can "tick a box" to put that kind of stupid game on the process, doesn't mean it's a good idea!