Accountants leaving the profession, fewer people enrolling in college-level accounting programs, and competition from within and outside of the profession have made hiring in CPA firms challenging for years — long before the Great Resignation. So it’s not surprising that our consultants keep fielding questions from firm owners and leaders asking what they can do about the talent gap.
Today, firms tend to have a pyramid-shaped hierarchy, with a small number of partners at the top, a slightly larger number of managers and supervisors in the middle, and many doers/preparers at the bottom.
We’re headed toward a diamond shape in the future. Most of the people in your firm will be strategists, thinkers, analyzers and relationship-builders. Much of the work that had been done by an army of interns and staff accountants will be handled by outsourcing and automation.
Getting there is a process, and you must be wholly invested to do it right.
It starts with process
Addressing the talent gap starts with efficient and effective processes.
Many firms look to technology and automation to solve their issues. While automation can help your people become more efficient and free up capacity, you’ll run into issues if you try to automate inconsistent processes.
According to a study from EY, between
Before diving into RPA headfirst, invest in reviewing your processes, reducing decision points and loops, and optimizing and documenting them. Once you do that work, you can start shaving off those corners of the pyramid.
Outsourcing is an opportunity, not the entire solution
Outsourcing is an opportunity, but it’s not the entire solution. Eventually, every firm will be competing for the same limited resources, and if you wait until the last minute, you’ll likely find that the resources you need simply aren’t available.
Keep in mind that outsourcing isn’t synonymous with offshoring. If you looked into offshoring a decade ago or more and didn’t like the results, now is a good time to take another look, as the options available today are much more expansive — from services like
The key is to buy into outsourcing and start looking at those resources as a part of your team. Many firms want to wade into the outsourcing waters slowly, assigning a small number of tax returns or other projects to freelancers. On such a small scale, it’s rarely worth the disruption to your processes. Outsourcing 1,000 tax returns rather than 100 will yield much better results.
Prepare for the next generation of tech
What’s your firm’s strategic technology plan? To leverage technology and automation, your plan needs to be about more than answering help desk tickets — it needs to address how to become a globally accessible firm.
The next generation of tools will go beyond the existing capabilities of RPA, artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, you can’t just skip ahead to those. You need to take advantage of the tools that exist today to be ready for the tools of tomorrow.
If you’ve done the work of optimizing processes, automating tasks, and outsourcing what you can, you’ll be in a much better position to manage the talent gap. But you can’t wait to get started a few weeks before the next busy season, when you realize you won’t be able to hire the people you need. Have a strategy and a plan to start now. Otherwise, you’ll be left behind.
