Allan Fisher, president of Premier Financial Search, an Agoura Hills firm that handles staffing exclusively for CPA and business management firms and their clients, said that his company has worked with Valley accounting firms to find and place out-of-state employees.
The Conejo Valley staffing firm has been instrumental in encouraging its clients to hire remote workers, Fisher said.
“There simply is an unbalance of supply and demand in Los Angeles and there has been for 20 years,” Fisher added. “You take away the geographic parameters and suddenly there is a new world of talent.”
Fisher was straightforward with his assessment of the current situation facing accounting firms that want to hire.
“Without exaggerating, it is the tightest market that we have seen in 25 years,” he said.
That is because there are people leaving the industry because they don’t want to be in an office every day while others are leaving the workforce altogether, Fisher said.
With more opportunities being available on almost every level than there have ever been, candidates are willing to take their time and be more selective, he added.
It’s an opinion shared by Carrie Nebens, owner of Equis Staffing in Calabasas, a firm that places accounting and finance pros in jobs.
“Accounting and CPAs and financial professional people were already tight before the pandemic,” Nebens said. “Now that I feel those employees have more choice, it has tightened it up more.”
It wasn’t necessarily that the supply for finance talent decreased during the pandemic but what did change was that employers began to provide more flexibility with pay and the ability to work outside the office, she added.
“There is a tightness in CPA firms in finding these people and the pandemic has doubled down on making that hard,” Nebens said.
Fisher said that the accounting industry needs to be more progressive and embrace remote working or at least a hybrid model with a mix of work at home and in the office.
Employer mindset
Employers need to stop focusing on the where a potential employee lives and mandating that they be in an office during “quote normal work hours,” he said.
During the early days of COVID when everyone was at home, they adapted their lifestyle to being at home with their children and didn’t have to commute to an office, Fisher continued.
And now that workplaces have opened up again, it is not so easy to just flip a switch and have to find daycare for children and get back into a car for a commute in traffic that is worse than it was prior to the pandemic, Fisher said.
“A lot of people are saying ‘I was just as efficient working from home as I was in the office, so why?’” Fisher added. “They are pushing back on company philosophies that do not match theirs.”
One area where companies have been proactive is with compensation.
For many roles in accounting, Premier saw salaries rise 8 to 10 percent from August to October, Fisher said.
Those increases put upward pressure on salaries and his firm started to see that the salaries that people would take to make a move were not enough.
“They said, ‘I can stay put and use my leverage for an increase,’” Fisher said. “’And therefore if I leave, there has to be an additional premium.’”
Sector recovery
According to a report by Reportlinker.com, a Lyon, France market research firm, the global accounting services market is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion this year, from $1.2 trillion last year.
“The growth is mainly due to the companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the COVID-19 impact, which had earlier led to restrictive containment measures involving social distancing, remote working and the closure of commercial activities that resulted in operational challenges,” according to a release from the company.
The pandemic acted as a restraint on the accounting services market in 2020, Reportlinker.com said in its release.
“However, it is expected that the accounting services market will recover from the shock across the forecast period as it is a ’black swan’ event and not related to ongoing or fundamental weaknesses in the market or the global economy,” the company’s release added.