Accounting firms have struggled to find staff for over a decade — and struggled even harder still to get them to stick around long enough to join the leadership of the firm, let alone become a partner.
As a result of that struggle, firms of all sizes have significantly upped their game when it comes to recruiting tactics, compensation, benefits, employment policies, work-life balance and more — a trend that's been perfectly reflected in Accounting Today's annual Best Firms to Work For ranking, where the gap between the No. 1 firm and those at the very bottom has shrunk to almost nothing over the past decade, with all of them using almost the exact same playbook to guide their efforts.
The problem is that it has been even harder to recruit and retain top talent, particularly with the Great Resignation, so many firms feel as if they're running faster and faster just to stay in place, constantly rolling out new initiatives and dedicating more resources to find ever-scarcer candidates.
With that in mind, Accounting Today has taken a look at how the top workplaces in the profession — primarily our 2022 Best Firms to Work For, but with contributions from our Top 100 Firms, as well — find and keep the staff they need, and over the next 19 days, we'll share their tips for becoming a workplace of choice in 19 different areas.
To start, though, we'll focus on a few of the major things that every firm absolutely has to do to stay even remotely competitive:
- Competitive compensation. Hiring managers need to be up to date on what the salary market around them looks like, and make sure they're at least matching it. It's also important to review salaries on a regular basis — many members of the Top 100 Firms reported reviewing their compensation twice a year at the height of the Great Resignation.
- Food. The best workplaces in the profession routinely supply their staff with snacks (often with an emphasis on healthy ones, like fresh fruit), as well as with regular meals during busy season.
- Dress for your day. It's more than just a question of the accounting profession abandoning a mandate for business attire: It's becoming increasingly common for top firms to let simply trust staff use their own judgment about how they dress, as opposed to trying to dictate what's appropriate at any given time.
- Socialization. From department lunches, post-busy-season parties, and summer outings, to axe-throwing nights, Halloween and holiday parties, painting parties, and team sports, the workplaces of choice in the profession give staff plenty of opportunities to get together (often with family members invited along) and get to know each other. And for virtual firms or those concerned about COVID, there are Zoom cocktail hours, a surprising amount of digital trivia games, and a host of other online events bringing staff together.
Those are all just the beginning, however: There are a host of other common strategies that we'll explore over the next month, as well as unique new tactics that leading firms are pioneering. Check in daily to complete your 20-day journey to a better firm.
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