Investment banks may be cutting jobs, but professional services firms are only getting bigger.
EY is on track to hire around 220,000 people in the 12 months to July 2023, having achieved its highest growth in nearly two decades in the previous period. That's before a potential break-up of its auditing and consulting divisions takes effect, which could further ramp up a recruitment drive that reached about 160,000 in the 2022 financial year.
As part of the push the firm expects to sift through more than 3 million resumes this year, Trent Henry, EY Global vice chair for talent, said in an interview. The company is using automation to help its recruitment professionals and match candidates to job postings, he said.
Its Big Four rivals, as the top accounting firms are known, are on hiring sprees of their own. PwC welcomed 148,000 new joiners in the 2022 financial year and is on target to hire a net additional 100,000 professionals by 2026, the company
The growth underlines the continuing boom in demand for professional services, even as job cuts hit other industries. Wall Street firms including Citigroup Inc. and Barclays Plc have been culling
"While there is a cooling off in the job market overall, accountancy has stood up pretty well," said Simon Wingate, managing director at job search website Reed U.K. "If you look at traditional comparators like banking or legal, accountancy is by far and away the biggest in terms of job postings on our website."
Accountancy job postings in the U.K. in October rose to around 21,000, according to data from Reed U.K. Legal and banking each saw less than a third of that. The sector is on track to overhaul tech to become the platform's top employer. In the U.S. postings are still around their July peak, and are holding up better than other finance roles, separate research from Indeed showed.
Growth, diversification
Growth and diversification help partly explain why the appetite for talent at accounting firms is resistant to market turmoil. Over the last decade, the Big Four have started adding new services as they broaden out their offerings. Deloitte's U.K. consulting arm recently announced it is recruiting
Another part of the answer is a post-COVID staff exodus. Even though the pandemic had a limited impact on the Big Four, the top accountancies freezed bonuses, promotions or pay rises at that time, according to Chris Sale, managing director at Prism, a management consultancy recruiter. That left "an awful lot of very cheesed off people in the Big Four," many of whom became part of the wave of leavers between mid-2021 and 2022, he added.
'Ludicrously large'
The recruitment numbers are "ludicrously large," Sale said. "What they don't tell you is the reason they're hiring 200,000 people is because they've probably lost 50,000."
The Big Four have also pushed up salaries and accelerated promotions to fight attrition, he said.
PwC increased most U.K. salaries
Partner vote
The hiring comes with some 13,000 partners at EY set to begin voting on a possible breakup. If the breakup goes ahead, the firm plans to accelerate recruitment as it will need more staff in areas such as technology, according to Andy Baldwin, global managing partner for client service.
"A demerger creates jobs, it doesn't reduce jobs," he said.
