Top tips for winning the talent war

With some creative strategies and long-term planning, smaller accounting firms can triumph in the contest for quality employees.

Smaller accounting firms are making impressive hires through the use of innovative tactics despite the skills shortage, Slipstream Group chief executive Sharon McClafferty says.

But Ms McClafferty said that in order to develop effective strategies for acquiring talent, accounting firms needed to start thinking about talent acquisition as an ongoing strategic function.

Shifting the mindset from recruitment to talent acquisition

Ms McClafferty explained that employers in accounting firms need to shift their mindset from reactive hiring to having a strategic plan in place for future talent acquisition.

“I think of recruitment as a short-term, reactive process. We’re going to find a candidate for a specific role or I’ve got a specific problem that I need to find a candidate for. It could be a new role or it could be for a new role or someone has left. We’re going to put people through a funnel and it will end in someone being hired,” she said.

“It’s therefore quite reactive and if you get your timing wrong it can also come across as quite desperate.”

Talent acquisition, on the other hand, is an ongoing strategic function, she said.

“It helps you find candidates both now and in the future. It’s about planting seeds and focusing on long-term strategic goals,” she explained.

Having a long-term business plan that extends beyond three years is therefore critical, she said.

“Talent acquisition is also focused on identifying and fixing difficulties with recruitment. So recruitment is focused on a result whereas talent acquisition might look at why the firm isn’t getting enough applications, why the firm can’t convert from the interview. It’s a long-term view.”

While firms often have a long-term plan for growing their client based, this is rarely the case for growing their team.

“Imagine if we thought about growing our client base the same way that we often think about hiring people, ‘I need a new client available in four weeks time that’s going to pay us $40,000 to do this level of work’,” she said.

“That is how most people think about growing their team but that’s not how we think about growing our clients because that would be like we’re looking for a unicorn to come into our business right away. We know that’s not how client acquisition works so I struggle with why lots of people think that’s how they’re going to grow the team.”

Charting your organisational chart for the future

As part of this longer-term planning, Ms McClafferty said business owners may want to consider charting what their organisational chart will look like in three or four years, which is a strategy her own firm uses.

“That will fundamentally change who you hire,” she stated.

“I encourage everyone to give yourself an hour and have a look at what their chart could look like in three or four years’ time. It doesn’t need to have names in it, it could just be positions and what people are going to achieve.”

Building your employer brand

Some businesses may also need to work on their employer branding, said Ms McClafferty.

“I should be able to get a really good sense of your employer brand without ever talking to you or anyone that works with you,” she explained.

“This is the stuff we’re putting out into the world. It’s what we’re putting out on socials. So if we’re celebrating an internal promotion, that adds to your employer brand. That adds to your employer brand because [the people seeing that think] if I get a job here, it’s not the last position I’ll have, I can move up in this business, they are growing.”

“If you publicise your culture you might find that the people who come into your funnel actually better fit your culture.”

One of the best ways of doing this, she said, is through story driven branding.

“Get quotes from your team about how it feels to work in your business,” she said.

Enhancing your employee value proposition

An employee value proposition falls into three main categories, explained Ms McClafferty. One of those is the contractual parts such as what an employee gets paid and the other benefits covered in their contract.

“There’s also an experience level which looks at the potential career path and employee wellbeing,” she said.

The third part of the employee value proportion is on an emotional level, she explained. “[For example] we work with a client that only has two niches of clients, wineries and Thoroughbred horses. So that firm gets to tell a story about how their employees get to hang out with the people who run these businesses. So they compete on that emotional level, ‘here are the people we help and this is why we help them’,” she said.

Ms McClafferty said she has also seen employee value propositions where the firm has published its training budget.

“For this firm, one per cent of revenue is spent on training every year. They also publish their gender diversity,” she said.

She also predicts that a lot more accounting firms will be offering employee share schemes in the next few years.

Becoming recognised as a Great Place to Work can also form part of your employee value proposition.

“We also previously worked with a firm five years ago that implemented a four day work week for full time pay in order to attract talent from the local city.

“We worked with them for two years to get this business ready to officially go down to a four day workweek. Now, they did this because they had to compete on employee value proposition because they couldn’t repeat compete on location.

Ensuring that these perks or changes are highly publicised is also really important, particularly as these things don’t stay static, she stressed. “Within our business for many years we were adding one per cent to super every year for employees. Every time we added a percent we made a big fanfare,” she said.

Something relatively simple that costs virtually no money that businesses can do, she said, is simply paying super monthly.

“Some firms are also offering a nomad month where an employee can work anywhere in the world they want to for one month a year,” she added.

Talent database

Building a talent database can also be a very effective strategy for firms, she said.

“There’s one firm we work with that’s been collecting the names of every single person who’s applied for a job there for ten years and putting their details in a database. Once a quarter they send an email to this database with a short blog telling the brand story of the business,” she explained.

Ms McClafferty said this database has been very effective at attracting referrals for job positions, with people within that database based often referring their relatives, friends and colleagues.

“For this particular firm, having this talent database has helped them grow from a team of 11 to a team of 45,” she said.

This article was originally published in HR Leader's sister brand Accounting Times.