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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

New Accounting Mantra: Recruit, Recruit, Recruit

Enron. 9/11. The dot.com bust. These are just a few of the events that have been blamed for what some say is the accounting industry’s biggest challenge,acquiring and retaining personnel. “After Sept. 11, the market shifted. Firms were reluctant to hire. Everyone had a wait-and-see mentality,” said Allan Fisher, owner of Premier Financial Search in Valencia. As a result, accountants began to leave the field to pursue work in other industries. At the collegiate level, accounting majors switched to other disciplines. Now, accounting professionals are in such demand that Fisher, who recruits for accounting firms, has found himself searching as far as the Midwest and the Northeast for talent. “I’ve definitely become a lot more aggressive in trying to find candidates from outside of the L.A. area,” he said. “I’ve got clients that are more aggressive about offering relocation allowances, sign on bonuses.” The reason for the dearth of accountants available for hire is multifaceted, Fisher believes. The effects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the economy is just one of many contributors to the problem. “[Enron] had a huge impact on accounting,” Fisher said. “It went from being a very well-respected profession to being the butt of jokes. People who were in public accounting,a lot of them changed paths.” As you likely know, Enron’s auditor, Arthur Andersen, collapsed during the scandal over the company’s financial reporting. The result was that the Big 5 accounting firms became the Big 4. “Firms started laying off people and didn’t hire the vast number of undergraduates out of school that they have done in the past,” Jonathan Karp, an attorney and accountant who teaches, lectures and represents accounting firms in succession planning, said. In 2002, the economy began to rebound. Then, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or SOX as it is known in accounting circles, largely in response to the Enron scandal. “Sarbanes-Oxley created a ton more work and a need for a lot more auditors, so now we have the economy that’s rebounding, all this extra work that needs to be done. Firms started to realize that they needed more people,” Fisher said. By then, however, accountants were hard to come by and not just due to economic factors. Karp believes that students and young professionals simply didn’t regard the profession as sexy. “For students, for quite a while, the very attractive professions were investment banking and working on Wall Street very high salaries and very interesting, challenging jobs,” he said. “There was the lure of managing financial funds, mutual funds and managing money, working with and representing in mergers and acquisitions and financing.” The World Wide Web also attracted would-be accountants. “A lot of them went into dot.com companies, seduced by reasonable compensation and stock options,” Karp said. Singer, Lewak, Greenbaum & Goldstein partner Sally Aubury doesn’t cite a particular event or time period for the challenges accounting firms have had acquiring and retaining staff. “The challenges aren’t new,” she said. “It’s always been that way in the accounting profession.” Recruited herself by SLGG when she was a twenty-something living in England, Aubury, now 34, has made a concentrated effort to retain and recruit staff. “I’m actively overseeing the college-level recruiting. I’ve done that since the summer of 2005,” said Aubury, who is based in the firm’s Woodland Hills office, which she helped grow from a staff of 12 to 20. “I personally go on campus and recruit at CSUN (California State University, Northridge). We’ve presented to the accounting society. We’ve also made a substantial donation to CSUN as a firm. We’ve had some very, very good students from CSUN, along with prominent schools in the L.A. area.” Fisher said that, while most small and mid-sized firms, won’t hire staff directly out of college, “A handful of firms are big enough that they’ve got the structure to hire entry level staffers. They’re almost establishing their own minor league systems.” He added that some firms have also become more flexible about hiring those in private industry. For new hires, Aubury has created an orientation program in which they learn technical training and the company’s standard policies and procedures. New employees are also paired with particular managers to whom they can turn for help and meet routinely with partners. In addition, each month the company sponsors staff lunches specifically so employees can disclose their concerns and observations. “It gives them a voice and makes them feel part of the team,” Aubury said. Even the work interns are given is heavily considered. “It can’t just be filing,” she explained. Instead, interns might work on an audit or do bookkeeping for a week. “We’ll put them in the training department, so they can see all aspects of training,” Aubury said. According to Karp, these are the appropriate moves to make during an era in which the pool of accountants is running dry. “Everybody knows they’re going to have to pay top salary,” he said, “but recognition of work and reflecting what new younger staff likes is more important, as is exposing them to interesting work and clients.”

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