No matter how technology changes the landscape, the traditional playbook for career development is not replacing retiring CPAs fast enough. The talent shortage in our industry is real, and ignoring the problem won’t make it go away.
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There’s no need to rehash all the reasons why this is happening. What matters is the pain you feel every time you try to fill a senior role either because you can’t find someone or because your unrealistic expectations for how quickly they’ll get up to speed are unmet.
Recruiting experienced professionals can be disheartening and expensive, and leave you sleepless without a solution to dwindling capacity.
Which leaves firms two options:
- Continue to operate as is; or,
- Find a new solution for acquiring and growing talent.
The first path sacrifices your ability to scale quickly and limits new client acquisition, but it does protect your margins and eliminate the cost and risk associated with hiring.
The second path requires a deliberate hybrid model where you invest more heavily in career development planning for your team and take a new approach to outsourced staffing.
As I see it, if you care about growth, only one of these two choices makes sense.
Your future ability to deliver advisory services is at stake
Talking with fellow owners, I’m very concerned with how leaders are viewing the potential fallout of the talent shortage. I hear a lot of, “How are we going to get all these returns out the door?” And very little, “How will we deliver the guidance business owners need to succeed in 2030?”
The work will always get done — we can extend returns, power through, and upgrade our tech stack to fill in the gaps. The real crisis isn’t covering capacity for compliance now, but ensuring we have the bench to deliver advisory tomorrow.
I’m not making light of how many firms are stretched thin and burnt out right now. But the bigger black cloud is the one that grows every time a fully tenured CPA leaves the industry. Without experience, we can’t deliver our highest-value services.
Accelerating professional growth
This is an exciting time to launch a career in our profession. Never before has it been so easy to advance quickly and do meaningful work from day one.
There’s no time to force juniors to grind out years of dues-paying before moving into advisory. As leaders, we must recognize potential faster and provide opportunities to manage client-facing work sooner.
We’ve seen firsthand how quickly individuals can grow if given the chance to take on challenging tasks. All it takes is a willingness to buck tradition, look outside conventional recruitment channels, and provide support and mentoring to people you believe in.
A fantastic example is two members of our tax team who are leading tax planning meetings solo and spearheading internal tax initiatives less than four years after career shifts from entirely unrelated industries. Under the old paradigm, this talent would have been overlooked.
We also have a junior CPA leading complex client-facing strategy sessions and managing final review work because of the mentorship provided by our chief advisory officer.
These results are what everyone wants, but few are willing to make the time for.
Creating space for development
Our approach to adding overseas team members deviates from how most firms do it. We don’t outsource blocks of mechanical tasks to behind-the-scenes teams and treat them like a production fix. We intentionally look for skill sets and psychographics that set up new hires to become fully integrated members of our team.
And just like everyone we hire, we provide time, training, belief and opportunity to our expanded team. From the very first interview, we share that our vision is for every team member to be prepared to lead others. This appeals to candidates that are the right fit and tells them from the beginning there is opportunity to upskill themselves even as they support others.
We don’t treat overseas staff any differently and that makes all the difference. We give them confidence to take ownership, provide input and become leaders to others as we grow.
Practical steps for getting started
- Develop the mindset that the historic accounting career trajectory was artificially lengthened out of tradition, and not because those new to the industry were incapable of taking ownership of meaningful work.
- Prepare everyone on your team to mentor, get them excited about the opportunity to be a leader, teach and share.
- Identify junior staff who are hungry to learn as they deliver the highest ROI for the firm when mentored.
- Utilize written professional growth plans (we call ours Masterplans) to give employees a clear path forward that aligns their goals with the firm’s.
- Identify aspects of their role that will need to be shed as they upskill, so you can roadmap a plan to backfill these tasks.
- Bring on new team members with the aim of directly supporting the staff you’re hoping to develop, while selecting candidates capable of future development. Start by asking candidates to include a two- to three-minute short intro video to gauge their communications skills. Then, beyond their current skills, weigh each candidate’s goals and drive — this is how our vision and belief around leadership helps us hire today for the team we’ll need tomorrow.
- Invest in robust practice management software to best coordinate workflows across new roles — cracks exist where clarity does not, and a team is best set up for success to take ownership when they can see what’s on the docket.
If you’re already having sweet dreams over staffing in our industry, congratulations. But if you’re struggling, like we were just a few years ago, understand that the old playbook for staffing and career development won’t replace retiring CPAs fast enough.
The new playbook we’ve written isn’t just great for the company. Our team loves it, too.
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