The Glass Slipper

If accounting firms were anthills, recruitment—in the ecological sense of the word—would be a simple matter of reproduction.

The exigencies of child rearing, alas, make procreation an unreliable method for building a professional staff, so partners and human resource personnel for years have turned to the incubators of the accounting profession: college accounting programs.

But, observers in the profession say the recruiting process has changed over the last decade. Firms now look for recruits at a younger age, and, more than ever, peer behind the curtain of grade point average and membership in Beta Alpha Psi, the national honors fraternity for financial information professionals.

“When I was in school, recruiting happened in your last year,” said Alex B. Ampadu, an accounting professor at State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo campus, and chairman of the New York State Society of CPAs Recruitment Committee. “Now firms start identifying people in the start of their sophomore year…and these firms are looking for well-rounded students…most firms really like to see professionals with community involvement. Most of them have a weighting system and the grade point average is just one of the things that they are looking for.”

Recruitment efforts vary depending on the size of the firm—from the formal, specialized human resources division of the Big Five, to the small firm that forms relationships with local colleges to find interns and potential future employees. No matter what the firm does, experts in the field say that recruitment is a process in which both the candidate and the firm find the right fit.

“I think students should look at the entire package,” said Joseph Maffia, a partner with Rosenzweig & Maffia, a mid-sized firm in New York City. “It’s not just about compensation; it’s about quality of life. Does the firm fit your temperament, your mutual goals and interests? Some places may be harder to work for than other firms. What’s the environment like?”

According to Ampadu, the onus is on students to research the firms they might want to work for, beginning at an early stage in their accounting education.

“What the students should really do—and it’s very tough telling them that, aside from all their work, they should get to know these firms—is identify firms,” said Ampadu. “They can do this through clubs or go through career resource centers, but they should do their own identification, mainly.”

In this way, the Big Five have an advantage over smaller firms. They typically maintain career resources on their websites with information about their firms, and devote part of their human resources department to college recruitment. They frequently make visits to campuses through accounting societies, clubs and student career offices.

“I attend various campus events: job fairs, ‘Big Five’ nights,” said Natasha Stough, a recruiting manager with KPMG in New York City. “We’re typically on campuses in September and October. What we do is work with career services in the Northeast area and we have students do interviews, and we typically host a dinner or social events before the interviews.”

The firm will identify potential candidates through career offices; the one-day office visits give the candidates a glimpse of life at KPMG, usually in the fall of their junior year, Stough said. The firm will also bring former students back to the campus to speak with students, and, according to Stough, talk about the profession to raise interest in the public accounting arena.

If KPMG is any indication, the Big Five are also moving away from recruiting students with high averages as the most important criterion.

“We’re looking for the best candidates: those that fit with our organization and are qualified,” Stough said. “It’s a combination of leadership skills: the work they’ve done in school, if they’ve been committed to a job at the coffee shop on the corner and are now managing it, how they are working to improve their skills and to improve their career. It’s not so much the GPA, but what other things do you have going on?”

Ampadu connected the more aggressive recruiting tactics of today with a recent trough in the pool of accounting candidates.

“Over the last three or four years, enrollment went down, so I think it looked as if firms weren’t getting people because of the supply,” said Ampadu. “We can talk about the effect of dot coms and the shift to MIS (management information systems), so there weren’t as many students available.”

With the end of the dot com age, Ampadu said, the pool of candidates is on the rise again.

Ampadu and others say smaller firms give the Big Five a run for their money in competition for qualified candidates on campus. The key for them is internships, in which smaller firms develop a close relationship with students. Maffia said his firm takes on a handful of students during tax season to help pick up the slack.

“We’ll hire interns pretty regularly, especially at tax time, when we need a pair of hands and somebody is looking for some experience and some extra money,” Maffia said. “We’re hoping to find someone maybe who when they get out of school wants to work for us. Though it’s tough, everybody loses people up to bigger firms.”

The advantage smaller firms have for interns is that students will get a broader exposure to various functions inside the firm. Maffia said that as a student he interned at KMG, a company that later became part of KPMG.

“I served coffee for the first couple weeks as an intern,” Maffia said. “I think the pros of a large firm are the training programs, but the con is you won’t you won’t be exposed to the bigger picture. You might be a fly on an elephant as opposed to a fly on a lizard.”

Maffia said his firm now employs at least one person who has been there for four or five years after he had interned a year. Ampadu added that smaller firms have taken away some of his brightest students at Buffalo.

But getting to know the firms may be difficult for young students. Ampadu recommends that students join accounting clubs. The NYSSCPA also offers an online “Career Opportunity Handbook” at www.nysscpa.org/prof_library/COH/coh_start.html with information on dozens of firms throughout the state that offer internships.