how accountingfly is revolutionizing the way cpas are hired

business model shifts focus from headhunting for talent to attracting it.

by ian welham
the accounting success podcast

jeff phillips, a former monster.com executive, is changing the way cpa firms find and hire accountants – automating the process, improving results and lowering costs.

related: how summit cpa group is pioneering virtual cfo services  |  more in talent & careers |

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the accounting profession is in the middle of a perfect storm.

on the one hand, the cpa talent pool available to public accounting firms is shrinking. on the other hand, baby boomers are retiring in droves. the result is a talent war, especially for millennial cpas. at the same time, more and more accounting firms are exploring the use of part-time, remote, and project-based workers.

a hiring manager or a partner in an accounting firm basically has two recruiting options: job boards such as monster.com or indeed.com, or staffing agencies such as robert half. each one presents a different challenge.

“the opinion i’ve formed from speaking to clients is that both of these models are broken for the purposes of recruiting financial talent,” says phillips. “the job boards don’t attract cpas. and on the other side, the agencies are extremely expensive. you’re talking about paying $18- to $25,000 per hire, and there’s no guarantee that hire is going to work out.”

as co-founder of accountingfly, jeff has pioneered a new model that’s more valuable than a job board and less costly than an agency. the idea blossomed from insights he learned at monster.com

“i was on the team that helped h&r block recruit the people that filled the tax-prep centers across america during tax season. our task was to deliver enough people so that 25,000 people made it into the tax-prep classes. what i discovered is that people go online to do their research. they don’t want to be sold to. they don’t want to be ‘recruited.’ they want to be informed.”

“our biggest win was not job postings. it was the media and content that we created online that educated lots and lots of people about the benefits of a tax-prep assignment with h&r block. and what we found was the more content we gave the audience, the higher the job postings performed.”

these insights became the foundational elements of accountingfly’s two-step formula:

• help cpas do their research by building a large news website (called goingconcern) that targets cpas with two to 10 years of experience.
• sell the benefits of working at different accounting firms online through content, events, video and other means.

with goingconcern attracting over 185,000 readers a month, phillips has found an effective and efficient solution for clients looking to recruit millennial cpas. this past january, accountingfly launched the next iteration to recruit outsourced cpas looking to work remotely – from working moms to virtual cfos. they’ve found that a remote job will get eight times more applicants than a traditional in-house job.

“the cloud is changing this profession dramatically,” observes phillips. “it seems every firm we speak to wants to have a conversation about hiring virtual talent. salaries for traditional cpa jobs are going up due to demand. but maybe you as the corporate head live in atlanta, which is an expensive market, can hire talent in small towns. these employees are plugged into the cloud. they can get their work done. and it has tremendous impact on the bottom line. plus, i believe that if you are offering a virtual position, it reduces the demand to pay a higher salary because the talent is so grateful that they don’t have to go to an office. this is not theory. we watch the salaries at which accountants are getting hired.”

it’s not just full-time employees who are benefiting from the growing acceptance of remote workers.

“we have encountered many women who left the public accounting field,” notes phillips. “they have a cpa license and excellent experience…. [but] the demanding hours of working in-house has been the challenge for them. so it’s been really exciting to be able to connect these professionals with remote opportunities. the industry is creating a lot of demand for these types of flexible positions, and there is more supply than you’d ever imagine out there.”

many of accountingfly’s clients are mid-market and top 100 firms. but size is not their number one criterion.

“we have a matrix that we look at to identify how attractive a firm is going to be to the talent,” explains phillips. “we know that we’re going to have a much higher chance for placement if they have a few characteristics, including work-life balance. younger cpas want flexibility; that might mean getting to work from anywhere, or it might mean the flexibility of working from home sometimes. they still enjoy audit, or they still enjoy tax work, but they want increased flexibility. the firms that we see leading the way and hiring the best talent are embracing flexible work arrangements.”

accountingfly identified that, in addition to work-life balance, top talent wants to see a sense of mission, vision, and culture inside the firm. they’re also attracted to forward-thinking firms that offer above-the-line services such as advisory services. phillips cites ecommerce accounting firm catching clouds as an example of such a firm. catching clouds has a staff that’s 100 percent remote. clients pay them monthly to do bookkeeping and serve as their in-house cfo. their niche is online retail businesses – in other words, businesses that are in the cloud. it’s a completely remote organization, and it’s thriving.

“you might be thinking that a big-4 cpa wouldn’t apply to a non-traditional cpa employer like that. i’ll tell you, catching clouds routinely gets applicants from the big-4 who look at it like a startup: ‘this looks exciting and interesting and gives me flexibility. i want to help clients, but i want to have work-life balance and work for a company that really has a mission.’ and so while catching clouds is a quote/unquote ‘small accounting firm,’ they’re highly attractive to talent.”

phillips cringes at the money cpa firms burn on their recruitment efforts. the most common mistake he sees is “crisis recruiting.” that’s when firms wait for the audit manager to walk out the door before initiating the search process. in a tight labor market, that’s expensive.

“we call that ‘post and pray,’” says phillips. “that model is dead. and it will not work again. results come far easier when you treat recruiting like a marketing problem. that means being proactive, investing in branding, getting the word out over time, and building a bench of talent you can call on when needed. and yes, we do a lot of that work for our clients, but we have to change their minds and change their behaviors before they’re going to have any success. it’s just like selling a product. if you don’t have a great product, you won’t make the sale.”

many firms restrict hiring season to between april 16 and december 31. phillips says this, too, is a mistake.

“check out the numbers on indeed.com. cpa job searches in february and march are as high as they are in any other month of the year. there’s an unwritten rule that you don’t quit your job during tax season. however, i imagine there are lots of unhappy cpas during tax season who go to job sites to learn about potential employers. so why not invest during tax season when people are most unhappy?

“or maybe they’re tired of the weather up north and they want to move to a southern location. i just talked to a client yesterday in orlando, florida who is running advertisements in ohio and indiana, knowing that they might attract a couple snowbirds that want to move south. you don’t run your marketing only part time; you shouldn’t run your recruiting part time, either.”

 

posted on august 5, 2017