Mapping a career path for attracting & retaining talent; The stakes for finding and keeping finance employees have never been higher. Here are some key stategies to consider.

• Author: Siegfried, Jr, Robert L.
• Position: CAREERS

Demographic trends are likely to keep the world of accounting and financial recruitment highly competitive, as some 64 million baby boomers reach retirement age in the next two years.

The stakes for finding and retaining talent have never been higher. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 made the work of finance departments more technical, stringent and deadline-focused.

And the demand for accountants is expected to grow by 18 to 26 percent by 2014, according to Business Journal, which also found that three-quarters of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' members could retire by 2022.

Meanwhile, almost a third of financial executives surveyed by Deloitte said they were barely able to meet the demand for finance talent, and 8 percent said they could not meet it at all.

Indeed, meeting the demand isn't easy. A PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC survey found that 32 percent of internal auditors are recruiting for openings that have been vacant more than six months.

Until recently, accounting and finance graduates were lured to higher-paying jobs in other areas of financial services. And these graduates have legitimate concerns about corporate scandals and two decades of "right-sizing" in accounting and finance departments.

Alan Blinder, a Princeton University professor of economics and former member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, says powerful social, economic and political forces are reshaping the world in a manner some have deemed "the new industrial revolution."

Companies that remain anchored to past ways of doing business will be quickly outpaced. The alternative, according to Blinder, is to organize people and processes around the unknown, using a new talent-management model where a smaller, but highly productive and talented workforces, are supplemented by a flexible, just-in-time labor force.

Following the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley, PwC increased hiring to more than 6,000 annually, a figure that Bob Daugherty--U.S. sourcing leader for the firm--anticipates will remain fairly flat for the next several years.

Key to PwC's recruitment success has been 10 years of quality tracking that enabled it to set measurement standards that ensure the quality of campus hires. "Beyond just looking at the [grade point averages] in schools that we go to, we look heavily at a values and behaviors framework to see who best fits into our organization," Daugherty explains.

The Siegfried Group looks for people who identify with...