CohnReznick, a Top 20 Firm based in New York, has been upping its recruitment game to attract new employees during the current labor shortage, improving its compensation and benefits policies to entice new staff.
“I can tell you it’s still a tight market in our field, in audit, tax and consulting,’ said CohnReznick CEO David Kessler. “We continue to hire aggressively as our business expands. The expansion we’re seeing has been awesome over the last couple of years, most of it organic growth.”
Over the past year, the recruitment pool of qualified accountants has contracted, as it has in many industries. “We continue to see a very tight labor market across all of our sectors,” said Kessler. “We continue to hire a lot of people directly out of college, entry level, some 300-plus a year, and continue to accelerate career growth and responsibilities and bring on lateral recruits at all levels, but it’s so competitive, and it’s one of the first years that we’re seeing a reduction in accounting graduates and a reduction in students that are going into accounting as their major.”
He pointed to an effort by the American Institute of CPAs to attract high school students to the accounting profession as one promising initiative. “I spent my whole career at the firm and in our assurance practice and have had a lot of exposure to our tax and advisory practices,” said Kessler. “I can attest to how exciting and engaging it is to be in this business and working with clients. I commend the AICPA for trying to get the word out at a lower level, but we continue to engage with colleges and universities across the country.”
Another way that CohnReznick has been bringing in recruits is international staff.
“We continue to expand our international operations,” said Kessler. “We’ll have close to 700 people in Chennai, India, working with our counterparts in the U.S. on client assignments, and we continue to expand in many different ways and shapes and forms. We’ve launched a global resource management process in our firm, and we’re really looking through all of our service lines, regardless of where somebody physically sits in what geography to align them across our industries and teams throughout the country, so people have an opportunity to get a wide range of experiences and work with many different people.”
CohnReznick has also been expanding with mergers and acquisitions, and the pandemic has enabled the firm to create virtual hubs in geographic areas of the country where it doesn’t even have any offices. “We’ve always had a platform of working nationally,” said Kessler. “What’s unique about us is we’re known for being so deep in the industries that we serve, and that’s allowed us to create national practices across the country and the globe within these industry segments. We’ve always collaborated across multiple offices and geographies. But what COVID has done is it’s opened it up even more, so we’re hiring people. We have hubs of people in Denver, Cincinnati and Dallas where we don’t have offices, and we’re able to build around the industries and service areas that they’re working in.”
The firm has also been rewarding employees with promotions to the partnership. “We’ve had our priorities and sights set on creating a much better and broader employee experience throughout their careers from when they walk in the door to when they’re promoted to partner, of which we may be promoting 21 people, of which so many of them were homegrown to partner, within the next month,” said Kessler.
He’s been getting a lot of help on employee recruitment and retention efforts from Sara Bridwell, chief people officer at CohnReznick, who joined the firm about a year ago.
“We really take a total rewards approach, in thinking about the fact that there is so much that goes into an employee’s decision to work with us,” said Bridwell. “We want to continue to reaffirm that decision on a daily basis. I often say that folks get recruited to CohnReznick and then get re-recruited every single day. Through that total rewards approach, we have made efforts to ensure that our compensation, which is a big piece of that, is market-driven, and we have robust — both variable and base — pay plans. And then our benefits are a part of that. Over the pandemic, we have enhanced our total rewards package to provide a lot of additional support for parents. I think we saw in the pandemic that that support was needed and CohnReznick rose to that. We’ve got a special employee resource group that deals with parents of young children, and we increased our parental leave to up to eight weeks for new moms and dads that are bringing new children into their homes. And we’ve done a lot around mental health and helping our folks rest and recharge.”
One of the firm’s most popular benefits is a subscription to a wellness app called Headspace, which focuses on mindfulness and meditation and helps employees and their children with falling asleep at night.
The firm has been encouraging employees to make the most of their time inside and outside the office without overburdening themselves.
“One of the things we’ve come face to face with is that work isn’t a place we go,” said Bridwell. “It's something we do and ‘CR together with purpose’ really encourages our engagement team leaders and our employees to be thoughtful about where they’re going to work based on what they’re trying to accomplish, who they need to be successful and how they can work most effectively together. We’ve framed out four different locations in which we think work takes place. At clients, we certainly have a number of our clients that we both benefit from being onsite. Both the client benefits and the CR team benefits. A second ‘at’ is @collaboration, and that collaboration can take place face to face in a room, around a whiteboard or virtually as we’re all doing now. A third ‘at’ is @community. CohnReznick’s sense of purpose is to make a difference for our people and for our clients and for the communities we have the privilege to serve. And what we’ve found is, as we’ve emerged from the pandemic, providing opportunities for our folks to build community with each other and with their clients has been incredibly important and very well received and really has served to re-energize us as we’ve begun to get together face to face and in person. And then the last ‘at’ is @concentrate. I think we’ve all come to recognize the real value of sort of closing the door and putting your head down and getting some stuff done when that’s needed.”
Over the summer, the firm announced Focus Fridays, encouraging employees to avoid unnecessary meetings so they can finish their work for the week on time. The firm recently earned a spot on
“The other piece of total rewards is recognizing the need to rest and recharge,” said Bridwell. “Last year, we closed the firm down for a week and this year we’re closing down for Thanksgiving week to give everyone an opportunity to rest and recharge and celebrate family. We’re certainly thankful for all of our people and we know that they need time to celebrate holidays with their family too.”
CohnReznick has been expanding its footprint geographically, in part through mergers, while supplementing its talent in particular specialties and industry segments.
“We’re very industry focused, and we’ve also outlined industries that we’re heavily involved in and those that we’re involved in but want to expand,” said Kessler. “Health care is one of them, and we see a lot of opportunity within renewable energy. Of course, real estate is our largest practice area. It’s about a third of the firm. And we continue to expand in different geographies within our real estate practice. We’re very heavy on the East Coast, up and down from Boston to Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C. metro, Charlotte and Atlanta. We saw a desire to expand in South Florida with all of the activity in the financial services and real estate and technology areas. Those are big practice areas for us, so we’ve relocated several partners to move from the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast area to Miami. We just signed a lease in Brickell in Miami, and we’re hiring people on the ground. We probably have about 35 people now in Miami. That’s an area that we’ve decided we’re going to create the beachhead there and expand. We’ve got a strong client base there already, and we see the same within Texas. We’re in Dallas, Austin and Houston. Right now we’ve got three partners and about 20 people in Dallas and we’re looking to expand there. On the West Coast, we're anxious to expand in L.A. and the Bay Area. We’re in Sacramento and San Diego, and we’re looking to expand in Orange County. We see that as a natural gap for us to fill.”
In terms of specialties, CohnReznick’s transaction and turnaround practice has continued to expand as well as others. “We brought in a group of partners two years ago for our restructuring practice,” said Kessler. “We have a restructuring, bankruptcy, litigation and forensic practice that is really growing strong and focused in a lot of different industry segments. Health care is one of them. And also we’re seeing so much activity with capital and private equity funds in our transaction advisory service doing quality of earnings diligence, and that practice continues to grow. We’re seeing almost a doubling of those practices over the last several years, and our government services practice as well is doubling. That’s at the federal, state and local level with the amount of stimulus that’s been involved. And then that spills over to our government contracting practice where we represent government contractors. CohnReznick is a government contractor, and that practice continues to grow. And we represent other private sector contractors that are servicing the government.”
CohnReznick has also been expanding its technology services for clients and inhouse. “We’ve been able to implement a lot of data analytics technology-oriented solutions for clients, and one of our strategies is to expand our technology usage internally,” said Kessler. “We have what we call an Innovation Office, I Office, and we have a chief innovation officer and a chair of our I Office that will vet various ideas and suggestions that come from different practice areas. Some of them have been phenomenal, particularly in our government services sector and our tax processing and assurance practices, in just taking out thousands and thousands of hours of mundane tasks and automating through robotic processing and AI. It's really enhanced not only the efficiencies within our practice, but the accuracy and also removed some of the lower-level work and created more hours that are available for people to do more challenging things.”
Last month, CohnReznick acquired a firm in Boston, Kevin P. Martin & Associates, doubling the size of its presence there by adding over 100 people with four locations in Boston (
“In that particular combination, the synergy of cultures was really special,” said Bridwell. “What we’ve found in this particular combination is that we gained new team members that were already working in similar industries and in some cases with clients that CohnReznick already had as clients as well. It’s been a really nice experience. The two firms knew each other well enough to participate in that combination. But I think anytime you bring folks into an organization, the most important aspect of that is ensuring that folks can find a common culture.”
Kessler started at the firm soon after graduating from college. “I started my career at the firm in 1985 when we had two offices and eight partners, and now we’re at 24 offices in the U.S. and 300 partners,” he said.
Bridwell joined the firm last year during the pandemic and she has worked to recruit new employees since coming aboard. “I was actually a pandemic hire, as have been hundreds of my best friends at CohnReznick,” she said. “We’ve done a ton of hiring during the pandemic, and my own opinion is that from a people and culture perspective, we do four key activities. We support our partners and managers in recruiting people and re-recruiting them, and developing them and helping them to learn new things. Part of how we recruit them to the firm is helping them understand what they’re going to learn to do here. The third thing that we do is reward talent. A piece of how we recruit people is helping them understand how much money they’re going to get to make. And when they learn new things, then they get promoted, their salary goes up, and when they make contributions, they receive additional dollars for that too. The fourth key thing we do is to help transition talent. We transition folks from being candidates to new employees, and new employees to productive team members. In the case of the combination [with KPM], we took very effectively functioning teams and began to knit them together. We need to do all of those things through the lens of our culture and guided by that purpose of making a difference for our people, for our clients and for our communities.”
The firm has to compete to attract new hires by trying to differentiate itself. “We continue to be excited by the growth that we’re seeing and the ways that we’re creating a differentiation within how we work together within our firm,” said Kessler. “With the labor shortage, there’s benefits, there’s premiums, there’s compensation. We’re doing all that, but really what we want to do as well is create the experience for our employees, the brand, the experience and continue to be able to differentiate the experience that they have with us versus somewhere else that they might be looking at.”
Nevertheless, the firm, like so many others, is fighting for talent. “I do feel like we’ve had some success because of the differentiation that we can provide,” said Kessler. “When somebody looks at how the benefits are comparable or better, and the compensation they’re being offered is a reasonable salary or better, then it’s what else, and it's the people, the connection to the people, the experience and exposure to so many different clients. Some are household names and famous clients in their industries, and there’s exposure to a wide range of experiences and practices, so you’re not pigeonholed. There’s an opportunity to do different things.”
CohnReznick has to compete against much larger firms for accounting talent by offering extra opportunities. “They come because of our people,” said Bridwell. “They come because we're not the Big Four and they know that they can be seen and heard here and developed.”
