In Pursuit of Profit
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 “Start with the core of the onion.” This is a mantra I use when talking to hiring managers about who they want for their job opening. This means starting with their most ideal candidate and working through different profiles. Most hiring managers are looking for either the next “up and comer” or someone who is established and has a solid 20 years left in the tank. As we work through candidate profiles, inevitably the recommendation is to always hire the person who can add the most value in the position.
In the world of non-executive accounting and finance recruiting, the ‘core of the onion’ answer is never “I’d love someone who is late in their career.” There is often a stigma attached to late-career candidates that is uneducated at best, and at worst tantamount to ageism. But late-career candidates should be considered equally with all other candidates. Understanding why first starts with thinking about a professional’s career trajectory.  Your accountant just gave notice, what do you do now?
Hopefully, your accountant gave you more than the obligatory two weeks, but regardless of what the timeframe looks like, the steps are the same:
Time is of the essence in this situation, especially if it coincides with a closing period or tax season, so you should get started immediately! 9/2/2025 Do You Need a CPA? Recruiters play a unique role in the hiring process for accountants and other financial personnel. We are tasked with fulfilling a hiring manager's requirements and are also deeply in touch with the reality of the candidate market. Often there is a gap between the two that we must navigate.
In finance and accounting recruiting, one request we frequently receive is that candidates hold active CPA licenses. This requirement has come from all industries, all size companies, and all positions from staff accountants to CFOs. Understandably, most companies desire the best person for their position for various reasons – from wanting the most intelligent person to wanting someone to do their taxes to just wanting someone more trustworthy. But do you need a CPA on your accounting team?  Interviewing is a necessary evil in the professional world. Most of us despise it, few of us are good at it, and it’s rarely ever considered fun. It’s an interesting phenomenon because, although it’s necessary to advance in our careers, it’s not something that we do very often, which means we’re typically not practiced at it.
1/16/2024 What Do Salary Ranges Actually Mean?
Companies that post salary ranges may choose to do so voluntarily, in the name of equity and transparency, or be required to do so by law. The idea is that by sharing salary bands job applicants are given a range of earnings to expect, eliminating the disparity that can occur when some groups of candidates are less likely to negotiate for a higher salary. Salary ranges should promote fairness and ensure employees are compensated appropriately for the value they bring to their employer.
So, why are employers and job seekers alike in an uproar about salary ranges? Let’s look at what has gone wrong and how both employers and job seekers can respond to position themselves well in today’s job market.
That figure is staggering but let's focus on your individual calculation. There are many different ways to calculate Cost of Vacancy (COV), but it’s not just the dollars and cents of salaries and benefits that need to be considered (although that is certainly at the forefront of hiring managers’ minds). You can also put real numbers behind morale, burnout, turnover, overtime, and the overall attitude of an accounting or finance department.
The author, Peter Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Warton School of Business, highlighted the ways in which he believes that pursuing financial goals causes businesses distort their hiring and training objectives and deprive employees of the benefits they deserve. His summary for the article was as follows: Many HR practices in the United States are bad for companies, employees, and shareholders. Firms skimp on training and development, for instance, and tightly limit head count even when they’re understaffed. They increasingly move work to nonemployees, like leased workers, and replace pensions with more-expensive 401(k) plans. They do such counterproductive things because U.S. financial reporting standards treat employees and investments in them as expenses or liabilities, which make companies look less valuable to investors. The solution he proposes is to change SEC reporting requirements, which would only help publicly traded companies, though he seems to indicate that these struggles are being felt by a broad array of business types and sizes.
Unfortunately, it seems this article misses one very important point – the ways in which accounting and HR can work together to benefit the overall business. As a result, we’d like to cover that aspect of the discussion to help remind companies that their accountants are not the villains in the discussion of hiring and employee retention.  This is a common story we hear: “We’ve been searching for an accountant for months and just can’t find anyone!”
Clients that come to us with this story are usually weary and desperate for help in finding the right candidate for the specifics of their role. Often times work has been piling up and employee morale is down as other staff tries to cover the gaps. It is at this point that hiring managers begin to wonder if they should settle for less than what they were looking for, using the old “someone is better than no one” rationale. However, under-hiring for a role is often more costly than continued hiring delays.  Pre-pandemic many companies successfully used job boards like Indeed to hire high quality accounting and finance candidates. Due to their heavy advertising during this time, what I like to call the “Indeed Effect” emerged. Companies turned to job recruiting boards like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn in droves to meet their recruiting needs.
Like you, I was seeing the impact of this first-hand: many companies in need of external recruiting help were quickly, easily, and cheaply able to find highly qualified candidates by posting an ad on an online job board. And as time went on, the results got even better as job board technology continued to evolve. The big names in recruiting became extremely transformative to the hiring process during this time, continuously refining their technology to improve the search process. As a result, even recruiters like myself benefitted from the phenomenon, often receiving high quality applicants to our job posts as well. Using these tools became an integral part of our recruiting process. Fast-forward almost two years and the tide has almost completely changed.  After another difficult year, savvy employers have come to realize that supporting their office staff needs to be a top priority to combat labor shortage woes as financial uncertainty continues. With 85% of employees open to new job opportunities (even if they are not actively looking), employers understand how important it is to proactively work to retain employees.
As the year comes to an end, organizations are asking themselves, “How can I support my accounting and finance staff next year?” |
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