EMPLOYER BRANDS
Recruiting Top Talent: Why Firms are Getting Serious about Their Employer Brands By Chris Baudler, MBA, MA, CSSBB
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iring CPAs has once again been ranked by Manpower as the 7th most difficult job to recruit for. For almost a decade, demand for high quality accounting talent in Washington has been growing, and firms are experiencing unprecedented difficulty finding experienced and collegiate-level candidates. For most firms this has become an economic recipe for painfully slow growth and missed client engagements. With so much competition for top accounting talent, job candidates are asking two very tough questions, and many firms are struggling to provide answers. “Why should I come work for you?” and “How does your firm stand out from other firms?”
Standing Out in a Competitive Market
We recently asked a firm’s Director of Recruiting why top talent should come work for his firm, and his response was five seconds of dead silence, a long exhale, and an almost imperceptible shoulder shrug. After 14 years leading his firm’s recruiting function, he was at a loss for words to explain how his firm stood out from the competition. Over the last four years his Seattle-based mid-sized firm experienced unprecedented levels of difficulty filling their open seats with high quality and diverse, experienced and collegiatelevel accountants. His firm tried every recruiting and HR best practice they came across to entice qualified accountants to apply. Some of the best practices included offering: • Top-notch training • Flexible work schedules • Above average salaries www.wscpa.org
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• Personalized career paths • Involvement in community outreach • Mentoring programs • Career-life balance • CPE reimbursement • Signing bonuses Unfortunately, despite all of the firm’s efforts there was little change in their number of applications, and the problem only seemed to be getting worse.
Challenges in Recruiting Top Talent
In the last five years we have interviewed hundreds of recruiters, COOs, and partners to better understand how they were managing staff and the challenges they were experiencing. Without exception, every one of them believed their firms were providing excellent workplace cultures that were valuesdriven, collaborative, developmentfocused, community-centered, and very rewarding for employees. Many of these firms were even recognized as
“employers of choice” by Inside Public Accounting’s Best of the Best and Great Places to Work. Also without exception, every one of them was still struggling to recruit talent.
Industry Recruiting Woes
Highly-touted best practices such as those listed above have become par for the course. In fact, in a recent comparison of 340 accounting firms across Washington and the US, we found 95% of them tried to entice potential job applicants with all or some of these benefits. Many firms have once again found themselves struggling to communicate to applicants what makes their job offers unique, but most only find themselves digging deeper in their pockets for more pay or more extravagant perks. Many forward thinking firms are once again reevaluating how they approach recruiting, and looking for a way out of the vicious cycle of “one-upping” competitor’s pay and perks. For some, the future of their firm depends on it. WashingtonCPA Winter 2017
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