Recruiting Market Report - August

​​Find out what we are hearing from candidates and clients and get our predictions for the future of the hiring market in the August 2025 edition of The ASP Team Market Report:

Quinn Finnigan - Recruiting Services Leader

Joss Stokke - Recruiting Services Leader

What are we hearing from candidates?
"I know what I want."
Layoffs and a slowdown in hiring seem to be dominating the news around the job market lately. One would assume that translates into active candidates hectically snapping up whatever opportunity comes their way. This just hasn't been the case with the candidates we work with. Instead, high quality candidates know their worth, are confident in what they want in a new position, and are (still) willing to wait for it. The lesson to anyone who thinks they'll be able to get high quality accounting/finance candidates without working hard to find/attract them is they know what they want and they're sticking to it.

What are we hearing from clients?
"Here we go…again."
After a couple hiring slowdowns and pickups over the past few years we seem to be picking up from yet another shorter-lived slowdown of the last several months. The year began brightly with hope for a post-election ease in tension and anxiety, but hiring quickly slowed and layoffs picked up through a period of high uncertainty. That is, until August when we found a higher volume of companies have mentioned their intent to hire in accounting/finance and at higher level positions than in the first half of the year. So here we go again on the upswing. Let's hope this trend continues longer than the last one.

What am I feeling about the market?
"Selectively amnestic"
Look up 'selective amnesia' and you'll see it's a form of dissociative amnesia, often triggered by trauma, where certain details of a traumatic event may be forgotten, while other aspects are retained. The trauma in this case is running a business in the macro-economic climate of the past ~6 months, which includes the most recent jobs figures released by the BLS. While we are nowhere near the peak hiring period post-Covid, it seems some details of the current environment are being forgotten as our clients recently have increased hiring, whereas the aspects being retained include continued hesitancy to lean into growth-related hiring (most of our clients are using us to backfill departing employees).

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ASP Hiring Statistics
39 - Days to Place (avg.)
$149,167 - Avg. Placed Controller Salary
46% - Percent of Diversity Hires
82% - Percent of time we get interviews for our clients

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Recent Placements
Controller - Home Services - Olympia 
Accounting Manager - Nonprofit - Seattle
Payroll Specialist - Government - Skagit County

View Our Current Openings

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Hiring Smarter with The ASP Team
Check out the latest episode of our accounting and finance recruiting podcast!

How to Find Candidates

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Top Candidates
Take a look at some examples of accounting and finance candidates we are working with currently.

View Our Top Candidates