Modern--day recruiting: adapting to new technologies to help grow your firm.

• Author: Thornton, Melissa

Public accounting firm hired a record 40,350 accounting graduates in 2012. With 97 percent of public accounting firms predicting that the number of their new hires will remain the same or increase in 2013, challenges facing those tasked with recruitment must be addressed (AICPA's 2013 Tends in the Supply of Accounting Graduates and Demand of Public Accounting Recruits).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Many of the challenges will remain the same: finding well-rounded, articulate CPA candidates with technical mastery, ensuring that CPA candidates become licensed CPAs and retaining the best and brightest CPAs to advance through the profession.

In addition to these challenges, firms must sort through recent graduates who may or may not meet California's new education requirements licensure, face increased competition from the business and industry sector's need for accounting graduates, deal with the changing expectations of the workplace from millennials, as well as the increasingly large role of technology in recruitment and retention of future CPAs.

Further, students are often focused on starting their careers at the Big Four, which have large recruiting teams dedicated to winning over students and campuses across the country. For mid-market firms, simply visiting more campuses is not a likely solution as the costs of travel and billable time lost are often not an option. Added to these challenges facing smaller firms is a labor-intensive campus recruitment process that involves large investments of time spent performing data entry and administrative tasks organizing candidates from multiple schools.

Still, "firms that tailor their approach during these interesting times may actually attract and retain the very best talent by increasing the level of engagement," says Crystal Ekanayake, a partner at Gallina LLP.

Education Level of Recruits

Separating the graduates who meet the new education requirements from those who do not may appear to be the simplest of these challenges to address. Educators and career advisers make it clear to undergraduate and graduate students that their 150-hour readiness should be clearly noted on resumes. However, with budget cuts facing California state schools and understaffed career centers, many students and professors face an uphill battle when trying to convince administrators to increase the number of courses undergraduate accounting students are allowed to take, to add sections of courses now...