TALENT
for CPA firms, students simultaneously are appreciative of the benefits externships offer. “I attended Engage Leadership with Mitchell Wiggins,” said Tamera Williams, a junior accounting major at Christopher Newport University (CNU). “It was an amazing opportunity to get a behind-thescenes look at what does life look like as a CPA. Not only did I get to see the company culture, but I also got to visit one of their clients, Virginia Homes for Boys and Girls, and learned how Mitchell Wiggins played a role in helping the organization thrive. However, the most significant part of the program for me was just getting to talk to CPAs and ask questions about internships, the CPA Exam, their day-to-day and the things they wish they had known before starting their career.” “When I began my recruiting process, I decided to explore externship options with firms of all different sizes,” said Sabrina Lingenfelter, a fourth-year student at the University of Virginia. “I found this important because the size of a firm not only affected the clients, but it also changed the culture and resources the firm had. By externing with a Big 4 firm, a mid-sized firm and a regional firm I was better able to decide what type of firm fit my personality the best and what I wanted a firm to do for my career.” “As a first-generation college student who switched majors from physics to accounting, I started off oblivious to the different opportunities the accounting profession had,” said Mulatawork Hilton, a 2018 CNU grad. “I took advantage of various externships to ensure I found a firm that was right for me. I had an opportunity to extern with various medium and Big 4 firms my sophomore and junior year, and I realized the job is the same wherever you go, but the culture and environment differs from firm to firm. Though my externships, I was able to find the firm that best fit my needs!”
LEADERSHIP CONFERENCES Leadership conferences or summits are
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another avenue to expose a select group of accounting students to a CPA firm while simultaneously building the students’ leadership skills. BDO offers a summer leadership conference called Pathway to Success during which students attend presentations and networking events that allow them to learn more about public accounting and BDO. To be selected for the program, applicants must have completed the interview process for an internship the following year. As one manager at a large national CPA firm stated, the group of students attending their program provides them with "a head start on interviewing for our summer internships, so it really does give the students an advantage when looking for an internship for the following summer.” DHG Leadership Conference is a two-day event where students learn leadership skills and network with DHG professionals. To be selected for the Leadership Conference, students must submit an application, résumé and unofficial transcript.
CASE COMPETITIONS Case competitions are not frequently used as an early recruiting vehicle, likely because of the time and effort involved in running these competitions, but they also provide opportunities for firms to connect with recruit. When I started teaching at CNU, Goodman & Company (now DHG) sponsored the Goodman Accounting Challenge, a one-day event that required a team of accounting students to research and present solutions to problems commonly encountered in public accounting. The competition attracted teams from universities in Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland and was an excellent way for the CPA firm to establish a relationship with the top students at the participating universities. PWC has a case competition open to freshmen and sophomores in a four-year
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020
program and freshmen, sophomores and juniors in a five-year program. The team consists of four to five members, and at least two must be in or plan to apply to the business school. The team is also encouraged to include a member who will major or minor in a relevant STEM discipline such as data analytics. The team showcases its critical thinking and communication skills and the members gain a broader network of relationships. At KPMG, teams of four tackle global issues in the Innovation and Collaboration Challenge (KICC). The experience of participating in case competitions can be crucial for students’ careers. “KICC is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Fernanda Santanna, who participated in KICC in 2015 in Dubai. “It provided me a chance to collaborate with and learn from peers and KPMG professionals from around the world, think differently about global challenges and solutions, and ultimately kickstarted my career at KPMG.” Santanna now works in risk consulting at KPMG in Brazil.1 As mentioned above, only a few CPA firms use case competitions to narrow the pool of potential new employees and those that do usually focus their effort on the larger schools, which have more accounting majors. Even if case competitions are work-intensive for the CPA firm and likely the professor advising the team, competitions can identify high-quality candidates with excellent leadership potential and critical thinking skills. In my opinion, these competitions attract the most enthusiastic and driven students and should be utilized more to select candidates for subsequent internships and fulltime offers.
DEVELOPING RELATIONSHIPS Establishing relationships with professors and student organizations can give recruiters early access to top candidates. Recruiters use universities’ career centers and Handshake, an online community for students and recent graduates, or