Best Recruiting Tips For Accounting Firms

Your accounting firm may have a lot to offer, but if you can’t build a team that reliably provides your clients with top-notch service, your whole business may crash and burn very quickly. Sadly, the accounting industry is highly competitive, and top talent is hard to come by. 

Even though recruiting is tricky, it’s not impossible. By making slight adjustments to your staffing practices, you can find candidates that fit your company culture and possibly even retain them for years to come. 

As one of the top accounting recruiting firms, here at Griffin Global Systems, we know exactly what you need to do to position yourself to attract top talent. Here are THE top things you should try:

1. Define The Role

Believe it or not, many accounting firms are ill-informed about the role they’re trying to recruit for. Before you go around writing an effective job description, you should first evaluate the role and figure out what you’re looking for in candidates.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• How does the role fit into your company?
• What does the candidate have to do?
• What skills are an absolute must-have and which ones are a nice extra?

These three questions will help you narrow down the information and provide you with the building blocks for writing a job description that can attract top candidates.

2. Write a Compelling Job Description

Most of the recruiters working in accounting recruiting firms are blown away by the amount of job descriptions posted that are outright bad. What we learned in our experience is that many companies omit information that is crucial for candidates to know, which can actually turn away competent applicants.

So how do you go about changing that?

Easy - consider the details the candidates would want to know when looking for a job. Along with the regular information such as the competencies required for the role, make sure to mention the location, benefits, and most importantly, the salary.

Feel free to inject some personality and describe what a candidate’s day-to-day life in your company would look like. You can also write a few sentences on why a candidate would potentially love working for your accounting firm.

3. Focus on Attracting Gen Z Candidates

Gen Z workers are coming straight out of college and are looking for exciting opportunities. The problem is that Gen Z (and even some of the younger Millennials) are different from other generations. As such, you can’t use the same tactics as you would if you tried attracting an older employee.

When hiring a younger workforce, keep the following in mind:

• Gen Z candidates prefer jobs that provide them with a stronger sense of purpose, which means they care about the values of the company they’re working for.
• Salary is not the only factor for younger candidates when looking for a job and they’re equally as motivated by flexibility, training, and benefits. 
• To attract a younger workforce, you must also offer a clear opportunity for career progression.
  
  

4. Improve your interview process

Improving your ability to attract candidates is certainly a start. Still, most accounting recruiting firms will tell you filtering out all applicants to a single “perfect” employee is equally important in the overall recruitment process.

How can you recognize and narrow down the list to just one person? Simple - boost your interviewing skills and overhaul your interview process. 

The interview is the best opportunity to dive deeper into the candidate’s experience and skills. It’s not just about checking off boxes of a list of requirements - an interview can help you analyze a candidate’s personality and personal values. By paying attention to these things, you can gauge how well they’ll fit into the role and your current team. 

We recommend going beyond the usual “tell me more about yourself” cliche questions that lead nowhere and creating an inviting atmosphere that turns an interview into a friendly get-together - as opposed to a police interrogation. 

By the end, you’ll have a better understanding of whether they’re a right match for you. Plus, the candidate will also appreciate the fact that you’re invested in them, instead of thinking you’re just going through the motions and reading the questions from a list you found online. 



5. Work on your company culture

All the previous tips are something you can realistically implement very quickly. Reevaluating and working on improving your company culture may take a lot of time and effort. 

Let’s go over why this matters. Take the interview as an example - you’re not the one doing all the interviewing as the candidate will also use the interview to gauge your company’s values. In other words, you’re selling yourself in your recruiting process too, and generally speaking, the sales pitch should go beyond just the salary. 

You also have to consider your brand awareness, which is potentially one of the biggest factors in whether you’ll attract the best talent. Candidates in the modern age will scour the internet to learn more about the values of your company and your overall reputation. So make sure that when they do, they can only see information that presents your company in a positive light.

Last, but certainly not least, is what you offer your employees past the basic salary/benefits package. Your company culture is more than just introducing Casual Fridays or offering free snacks in the break room. You should invest heavily in the well-being of the staff, proactively find ways to improve their day-to-day life, and provide them with plenty of opportunities to improve their work-life balance. 

Here are some things you can do on this front:

• Invest in training
• Establish an employee well-being program
• Invest in technology that significantly improves employee productivity
• Allow a flexible schedule or the bare minimum optional ability of remote 

Fine-tune ‘till perfection

Considering the challenges present in staffing in the accounting industry, you simply can’t afford to get lazy with recruiting. A generic approach to this important process will yield subpar results, and even if it works from time to time, it’s by no means a long-term strategy. 

It’s worth stressing that time is of the essence when it comes to doing business, and you may simply not have the resources to tackle the recruitment process from the ground up. There is no shame in this; working with accounting recruiting firms is becoming the go-to method for many companies to source and hire top-tier talent. 

If you get into any trouble implementing these tips, Griffin Global Systems is always on your side. As one of the biggest accounting recruiting firms in the US, we can help evaluate your staffing needs, explain all the current recruiting trends, and reliably source only the best candidates. 

Call (855) 747-4334 or reach us through our contact form to learn more about how we can assist you.