Busy Season Approaches – How Are You Fixed?

As soon as the holiday festivities are over, the practitioner in public accounting starts to brace him or her self for the next traditional season – busy season!

As I write this, it’s early November, and I am still receiving inquiries, on a daily basis, from public accounting firms across the GTA (and now, beyond) with just one question on their mind: “How are we going to get through busy season if we’re still short-staffed come the new year?”

If you have been involved in recruiting for your own firm recently, you’ll probably know how hot the market is right now.

Many candidates are finding themselves in a situation where they have two or even three offers from reputable firms, all offering great career advancement and more responsibility and, with that, higher salaries.

Many practitioners looking to hire are being frustrated at having made a good offer to a promising candidate, only to find that they’ve been beaten once again to a signature on a contract of employment by another firm.

These circumstances all contribute to slowing down the search process, both for head-hunters and for firms struggling to do their own recruiting.

Nobody really enjoys the thought of having to pay a head-hunter a fee for finding them good people, so what can the practitioner do to try to retain the people they already employ and reduce any urgency in their need to attract new blood into the firm?

From my on-going work with public accounting firms, here are a few lessons learned…

· Give regular feedback – I have had clients come to me who have recently lost a highly valued member of staff, for whom they had high hopes of making it to Partnership one day, simply because of a lack of communication.

The employee had never been told that she was doing great work and on track for promotion. She never heard those two little words all employees need to hear when appropriate: ‘Great Job’ or ‘Well done’.

· Play to individual strengths – I sometimes see a ‘great people-person’ (but average technician) relegated to a ‘back-office role’ and left out of the client contact loop, and great technicians (but introverts) be thrust into roles that make them very uncomfortable.

Simply checking-in with your people and offering a safe environment for them to speak freely about the office environment and the type of professional work they are getting can go a long way to helping you create a settled team and good working environment.

· Ask staff what they want – Putting people on a ‘production line’ where they’re simply turning out one set of draft financial statements after another, while they may be very good at it, make few, if any, mistakes, and are very profitable for the firm, if that’s not the type of work they joined the firm to do, can be a recipe for disaster.

Once you’ve asked what they want, you should make every effort to be seen to be trying to satisfy their requests. That is, if you’re serious about wanting to keep them as part of the team.

· Don’t be penny-wise, it’s dollar stupid – What is the point in losing a great candidate simply because your offer was $2,000 dollars short of another offer? You’ll usually spend more than that trying to find an equally good alternate candidate.

Often, with the better candidates, money is not the issue – it’s all about the opportunity. But what if two firms offer similarly great opportunities?

Sometimes, the only way a candidate can judge how much you want them and how they’re likely to be treated in the future, is by the compensation and benefits offered.

· Encourage new learning, new skills and new opportunities – Professional people joined their chosen profession because they wanted to learn, and to be able to help clients.

Establishing a culture of learning and development can be a great investment not just for the existing people at the firm who will benefit, but also as a recruiting tool for tomorrow’s staff.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but merely a good starting point for thinking about how it is possible to create a culture within your practice where everyone has a role to play, understands what it is, feels comfortable in it, and makes a real contribution to the growth and success of the practice.

© 2004, MFA Group Inc