How early is too early?
Chair's Message
Boz Bostrom | August/September 2024 Footnote
Editor's note: Updated August 1, 2024
I hope you’re enjoying your summer and are planning to soak up this final month and make some memories with family and friends. A summer highlight for me was throwing out the first pitch at a Minnesota Twins game. Between that and being on the Footnote cover, I have, at times, felt like a rockstar. Sometimes it seems a bit over the top, but I’m OK with that. It highlights accounting to students on my own campus and beyond. Hopefully, it will help trigger interest in our profession.
Regardless of my efforts and the efforts of so many others, the current supply of accountants is lower than demand and that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. We are witnessing a war for talent. I want to take this opportunity to share the way recruiting accounting majors has evolved, so that you may give yourself the best opportunity to land top talent.
You may say, “I will think about that later. It’s still the summer.” Here’s the deal: By the time you receive the next Footnote in early October, many of the very best students will be off the market.
It hasn’t always been this way. Back when I was in college in the early 1990s, only a handful of my classmates had summer internships leading to full-time jobs. The rest of us would go through the interview process in the fall of our senior years and hope to have a job lined up by the new year. Summer internships have become more common and, in the past several years, the timing of interviews for those spots has accelerated. Students previously interviewed for internships during the fall of their junior years.
I remember being shocked when about 10 years ago students began interviewing in the spring of their sophomore years. Now, many students start interviewing in September of their sophomore year and decide in October. You read that correctly. Only a few weeks into their third semester, students with one or two accounting courses under their belt accept internship offers that usually lead to their full-time jobs. Your organization will miss out on many students if it doesn't begin the recruiting process early.
On one hand, I don’t like that. Students could benefit from exploring and meeting with firms and organizations of all types and sizes. On the other hand, students in finance, business and other majors see their accounting friends getting attractive job offers and decide that maybe they, too, should enroll in more accounting courses! Because of that, the acceleration of interviewing has, in my opinion, been a helpful change.
Are there good students still in the market beyond this initial push? Absolutely, and you can increase your odds of landing them if you understand what motivates them.
When my seniors and I conducted research this spring, we asked CPAs younger than 30 why they chose to accept an offer with their current organization. By far the most popular answer was culture, which greatly outpaced pay, flexibility and several other options.
In the hiring process, don’t simply say, “We have great people.” Everybody says that. Also, don’t simply ask who would like to be involved in recruiting. Identify your best people at your organization who can talk with authenticity and passion about the culture of your organization.
You can win the war for talent if you start early and put your best foot forward.
Sincerely,
Boz Bostrom, CPA
