Build stuff
People don&#x27;t expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks or (shudder) Oracle. If they&#x27;ve got a personal budget spreadsheet, and have done a few studies in school following tutorials with sample data in a few software packages, but frequently refer to the docs and don&#x27;t know the keyboard shortcuts, that&#x27;s great for an accountant. You teach an accountant the tools your company uses to apply the basic principles they learned in school.<p>They haven&#x27;t spent a whole semester learning Java, they&#x27;ve spent a semester learning <i>about</i> Java. By writing a group project in each of those tools, they prove not that they are ready to start knocking out your Jira tickets on Day 1 - they&#x27;re not, as your experience and their resume proves - but that they are capable of working on unfamiliar software projects in a group, which is what they should be doing in your company.  Take a student who knows how the fundamental function your software performs can be built, and <i>teach them</i> the unique tools your company uses to do that. It only takes a couple thousand hours for someone who knows how to learn to develop good proficiency in your particular stack, and there are so many stacks out there that you can&#x27;t expect everyone to have invested that in yours.