284 Attracting Better Talent to your Firm in 2024

Business problems are people problems. There is somebody out there in the world that is better than you at every single thing that you do. Stop hoarding all those tasks for yourself so you can sit there and put the world on your back. Or are you going to build the machine that finds talented people? Man, it feels, it feels hard to hire onshore accountants right now. It just does. So that's what we're talking about today. How to make that firm into just a big, big, juicy, exciting place to work. We are spicing up that firm. Come on in, let's talk about it. Let's find you some great new hires. This one came from, frankly, a gwait. A gwait. What a great question. That was totally relatable from Kelly Kissman. Kelly, thank you for asking the question. Just by asking the question like we are getting better because I'm going to share my answer to it. Bunch of people will be able to hear it. They will then reflect and share their experience with me. I selfishly learned from that and everybody just got smarter. Here was Kelly's comment question. What is the most difficult part in finding good employees in the States? Are they not trained well? Lazy? Dumb. What is it that makes finding accountants to employ difficulty? I'm a small firm owner that's looking to hire my first employee. And when I post job ads, I get tons of job applications. Too many really. I'm just starting to interview them. How can I assure that they're actually quality employees? Man, most job boards, it is just you get an unbelievable number of applicants, yet somehow it's still exceptionally hard to hire. Right. You're getting everybody in their mom who doesn't have qualifications. You're also getting really, really low effort applications. Get a whole ton of offshore folks, like people that do not fit the bill of. Here is what I'm looking for in this onshore hire. That has been my experience, especially posting remote job listings. In fact, even when I posted like in person local job listings, we just got inundated with people who are looking for something remote. I'm like, no, that's not even. That's not what we're looking for. Okay, I got eight tips for you to spice up that accounting firm, make it a killer place to work and hopefully attract your next great hire. Number one. Don't expect those great hires to jump in the boat. I don't know if this is how it used to be in accounting firm days of your. If you could just put out a job post and all these incredibly talented people just flocked to you but buddy, that is, that has never been my experience. But people still talk about it as if it should be that way. So you put out a job post and some people will sit back and just, just be mad when really good people don't come flocking to them. I, I experienced this with some of my partners, I think, when it used to be more that way than it was now. And they were hung up on this frustration of like, why is it not like this anymore? And I'm like, I, I mean, a million factors and honestly, I don't really know. But, but none of that really impacts what we gotta do today. And so we were doing stuff like hiring recruiters for the first time and paying signing bonuses and all these different things that were just unthinkable for, for past partners that they've never had to do before, but they still had that mindset that like, those fish would just jump in the boat. And the sooner we can accept that isn't the case, the better we can get over those blockers and just look at it, you know, more explicitly as a business problem to say, okay, this, this stinks. It's not what we thought it was going to be. What tools do we have to overcome this now? This is definitely the case for onshore hiring. I think it is. It has accelerated the number of people in the case for hiring offshore because arguably, depending on the market that you are hiring offshore, it is more jump in the boaty. It's definitely much, much easier to find people. But. But today we're talking about onshore. I have a. They talked for a long time about like the software company, the tech sort of talent war where tech companies were spending outrageous amounts to swoop up any sort of, you know, vaguely talented software folks. And I can maybe get a little bit more of an understanding and appreciation of that now when there's just so much scarcity in hiring, maybe not in hiring in general, but in hiring, like the really, really talented, capable, reliable accountants, because that won't be everybody that you hire. So first tip, don't expect them to jump in the boat. You're just setting yourself up to be bummed out. Second tip, be for someone like, who are you a good firm for? We talk a lot about attracting a more specific type of client and the fact that most firms are still very general in nature and you can build a general firm. And the fact that you can is often used as an argument for why would you do anything else? But as I argue, and a lot of other folks do, the more specific your firm gets, the more painful the problems that you solve for those people are, the better advisor you are because you're advising around a more specific domain. But then the more those people will pay because those pains are more painful. So I can do more or less the same work, be a better advisor and get paid better if I can just find a more specific type of client. And in an age where everybody has a website and there's lots of accountants out there and it's hard perhaps to differentiate yourself if you're not some sort of, I don't know, online influencer or something like that for, for beekeepers or truckers or whoever you're going after. If it is hard to differentiate yourself out there, all of those things on the, on the client side, I would argue the same are true on the hiring. And on the staffing side, we're not thinking about who are we going to be for. Can we set up our firm in a way to where employees of a certain profile, maybe that's experience, maybe that's what makes them tick. Can we set up our firms in a way that ensures, like, this is a really attractive place for this type of person to come and work the same way? We're thinking about that for our clients. Let's think about that for the type of people that we attract. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. I love spreadsheets. Yes, I do. I love spreadsheets. How about you? But you know what spreadsheets don't do? Integrate with anything. Like anything all the other tech that we use software has to integrate. Stuff like that's just a requirement now for software. But hum, humhow, humhouse, spreadsheets have been left off the hook. And so you end up doing this hokey pokey CSV export over here, CSV import over there, big high copy paste mess. Which isn't good when spreadsheets are a part of recurring workflows like month end closes, stuff like that, where you literally rely on the worksheet to make make a work paper every week or every month. And gang, that is where LifeFlow becomes the Swiss army knife that gives your spreadsheet Jim Belushi superpowers. It's a plugin for your Excel or your Google Sheets that'll pull any data in from your client's QuickBooks files. Don't even have to go to QuickBooks, just bippity boppity boop. Couple clicks from inside of your spreadsheet and you got Data from that QuickBooks file into the spreadsheet. You can pull it in Once you can pull it on ongoing basis, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. And that spreadsheet, it's gonna, it's never gonna stop and keep on updating and I don't know, there's just something about that that I guess it becomes a conversation of legacy. What do you want to leave behind? And will your spreadsheets keep updating even after you're gone? Cause you know what, with Life Flow, they will link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Team Up Story time. Gather around. Sit in a circle. Jonathan. Happy team up customer. See if this story sounds, sounds relatable. Clients were beating down Jonathan's door. He was growing so quickly he couldn't keep up. The problem was he couldn't find anyone in the US at a salary that he could really afford. Then he had an experience that opened his eyes. He hired his first accountant in the Philippines. Couldn't believe how good she was. Not only did she do the work well, she was fast. So he hired another. This time a senior accountant. He wanted her to be in charge of quality assurance. He needed her to do things like set up special funding accounts and make sure equity accounts are correct. Things he struggled to get his US staff to do well and went so well with a senior accountant, he hired another and then in a few months, another. Now not only is client work getting done on time, he has room to grow. Good for you, Jonathan. Here's a quote from Jonathan. We've hired very high level accounting talent stateside. I have to say that our Philippines based team is outperforming most of our US based staff. How dare you, Jonathan. I was absolutely blown away with the type of candidates that we got from our job posting. Team up really helped us navigate the things we weren't sure of. This Jonathan's story. A real live accountant just like you. For some reason we have this thing in our head. Maybe it's an American thing where you think when you hire somebody that's not in your country, they're not going to be as good as somebody in your country just because their power plugs look different. But that, you know, that just doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? If you're exploring hiring folks in the Philippines, if you are stuck on your US hiring strategy, hit up team up link down in the show notes to help you find some super talented accountants in the Philippines. You'll get that client work straight out the door on time. Tip number three, consider your purpose. Increasingly folks coming into the workforce, I know it's A thing with millennials like me, I think it's even more of a thing with zoomers. They're thinking about, how am I going to leave an impact on the world? And ultimately what is the purpose of the work that I'm doing? And accounting on a whole, like, it is. It. It's a little bit of a tricky one to tie back to, like, how am I benefiting the world? There's ways that perhaps I'm benefiting capitalism and, and the transparency of information people have when they make investments and stuff like that. But is that something that a zoom is going to come along and be like, yeah, that's. That is. That's what I want to enable for the world. Now, in my case, I can tell you what I was passionate about was enabling small business owners, because I love small business. I own small businesses myself, and that's just such a fun thing, such an impactful thing. But the reality of launching a small business is as soon as you do, you're picking up a whole lot of jobs that have nothing to do with that passion you had that led you to start that small business. And my job as an accountant and in my accounting firm was to eliminate those, those accounting and compliance related blockers to entrepreneurship. I was able to come into a place where a business owner would say, man, this is not what I signed up for. They were stressed, they were frustrated that becoming an entrepreneur was not at all what they thought it would be. Where they could spend all day focusing on their passion. Instead, they're focusing on, like, taking out the financial garbage. And we could come in and be like, man, we got it. Like, we'll take care of this stuff. And the before and after for so many of those people is so profound that you're like, oh, yeah, that's what we're doing is we are enabling all these entrepreneurs to go out and do amazing things because they don't have all this stuff holding them back. That was my purpose. That was what got me excited about turning up every day. Yours might be different. You might work with a specific type of client. You might work with nonprofits. Like, your purpose and what makes you passionate about what you're doing is your own. But what we don't do is we don't talk about it. At no point on my website did I spill my beans like I just did there and say, this is like what I'm super passionate about. And if I did, it was a cheesy one liner under like a bio or something like that. I love enabling entrepreneurs. Most of Us have one, but we don't really communicate it consistently. And I would argue dudes especially are going to struggle with this because it requires a bit of vulnerability. But for people that are looking for a job that has a purpose, how are they ever going to figure out what yours is unless you talk about it? Another example where your firm actually niching down on the clients that it serve can make it more attractive to a specific type of employee. If that's a niche that they're interested in. If there's, there's an element of like mission to that what you're doing on the client side can, can even help to clarify who you're going to be great for on the employee side. Tip number four. Look at that careers page on your website. What's that look like right now? Is it even a page? Is it a careers at. @your email.com I can tell you what most of them look like. They are the equivalent of the we help people have peace of mind landing page. The basic vanilla I lifted all this copy from somebody else's website sort of careers page. That does absolutely nothing to differentiate you, differentiate you from, from someone else. It's another example of where we think about the client side more. We think about the employee side. If you look at 10 other firms you know in your county or something like that, and you compare everybody's landing page, what is on your landing page that is going to make someone stop and say oh, this is the one that's for me. Now do that with your careers page. In all likelihood, there's absolutely nothing there that is making somebody stop, hit the brakes and say oh, wow, this one jumped out. This is for me. And it takes more than a design aesthetic. So, so many, so often when, when people are like, oh, I love that site. It is a product of oh, oh, that's a design that I like, not it's saying something meaningful. And the bummer here is if I build a website where I love the design that is very, very specific to me, and in most cases, whether a prospect likes that design or not and has the same design taste or not, in all likelihood that's not going to really have much of a bearing on are they going to be a good client. Now there's some big like kind of macro things from like is this very obviously super, super old school or something like that where you sort of got to watch out for those things. But if you Visit those same 10 accounting firm websites in your county and you look at every single careers page, what would the ideal person need to see there. Like, what would you want them to stumble into? What would be the statement that you make where you're like the perfect fit for us will be like, oh, I like, I like the sound of that. And I'm not looking for, it's a family environment. Like I'm looking for real things. When people are shopping for a job, they are very practical, but they're also thinking, is this a place I can envision myself like pouring myself into for a decade? Is there purpose there? But also, can I have some time off when I have a baby? Well, my wife has a child. Like, can I take some time away? Am I going to be working 80 hour weeks during tax season or 50 hour weeks? Got to have both sides like that, mission side, but also the practical side. Tip number five are the responsibilities of the role that you are hiring for. Something that people will still get excited about. I'll give you an example. We got into delivering bill pay services for our clients. Turned into a pretty profitable service because we could pair it with cash planning, which was this sort of like light advisory that, that was super valuable for my clients. But it meant having to pay somebody to sit there and process bills and like hound clients. When it's like, oh, I think you didn't send us this bill this month and respond to vendor inquiries and stuff like that. That is something that's totally fine to learn and do for two or three months, but boy, it is hard to find somebody who will happily turn up to work every single day and manage a big volume of bill pay for a whole bunch of clients. In fact, it was so hard that it pretty much just couldn't find anybody onshore who was willing to do this. And this was one of the things that actually like accelerated us to hiring offshore and long term. Like in my opinion, like putting an offshore person in that seat was absolutely the right move to do because there was an entirely different level of expectation of what was valuable work. I guess, like I could hire somebody and put them in that seat to do that five years and they would happily do that. But finding somebody onshore who was willing to do that long term was nigh on impossible. And so there is this moving target of what's interesting for people, like what's fulfilling right now. That's things that maybe feel a little administrative, like bill pay. But I would argue we're probably going to be creeping into things like entry level bookkeeping. Like there are more things that people used to hang their hat on and we used to have more pride in than we do today that folks coming in and considering a new role may not find attractive enough to be like, can I really do that for the next five years? And that's a force that is bigger than any of us. And it's one of those things that might piss you off and be like, boy, like, when I came up doing this stuff, I would have loved that job, which is too bad. But none of that changes where we are today, how society has changed, and how the brain of that potentially, like, really talented person who could come into your firm, like, how they are wired. I definitely had that friction coming up. In the firms that I was at. There were certain things that, like, my partners thought should be exciting to me. Like the folks who were my bosses, they were like, you don't realize what a great opportunity this is. And I was like, you don't realize how much I don't give a hoot. Because it just. It wasn't challenging. It wasn't a fulfilling thing. That is a moving target. Like, I had. I had. I had partners who came of age, like, footing things with a 10 key. That was their job. And they did that for years. Reality is, you can't hire people to do that anymore, by and large. So if it's something that's particularly hard to fill, that's something that we got to be realistic about. Who's the type of person that will be excited about this, be able to do it long term? Is there tech that can help with it? Is this something that may be nigh impossible to hire an onshore person to do? This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about client billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't. You can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing because it's. It's icky. You let things slide. You don't get paid. You waste time. Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just. I didn't want to waste time chasing them. And so I would just. I just eat it. Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accountants and professional services. When I was running my firm firm, Ignition wiped out our ar, it's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients, saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year because they didn't have to build all that stuff manually. Man, with Ignition, we want more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustle and hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment up front or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com put a link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Genwise. Have you ever wanted to hire like a CTO or a coo? But that's a thing you can't do because you run a firm, a small firm, you don't hire chief executive, anything. Genwise gang, they're going to come in, they're going to, they're going to fill that role for you. Be that cto, be that COO partner. All that stuff you dream of doing where like, that's a good idea, Jason, let's go and implement that. Or I want to explore that tech further that could help us. And then you never ever do. Imagine having a little buddy, little buddy alongside you where you could be like, hey, hey, Mr. Or Mrs. West, could you come on in? Can you do this thing that we're thinking about doing for us? I do it myself, but whenever I say I will, I don't. Gen Ys are not just consultants. That arm's length agency, they're gonna work in the trenches with you through the good stuff and the bad stuff to actually make those changes happen. The system stuff, the hard people stuff, they're gonna be with you through all that. They get their hands dirty. To ensure that change is managed effectively. They do this via weekly work sessions and asynchronous improvements. They've got. They got backdoor relationships with most of the powerhouse tech in the accounting space, so they can usually move the needle faster than a firm could on their own. Okay. Dirty hands and needle movers. And the result is all those things that you always want to do that you never get to, they happen. Finally. Wow. Okay, where to start? You start with Genwise's efficiency assessment, which is designed by to help everybody understand exactly what needs to be improved inside your firm. Every assessment culminates in a firm roadmap that outlines all the efficiency improvements they'd recommend along with an implementation timeline and estimated costs. Just like that. But wait, there's more. Sign up now to get 25% off your efficiency assessment. Normally 3 1/2 K discounted down to 26, 25. And then this entire value is gets discounted from an annual engagement if your firm decides to engage them in a larger capacity like an onboarding project. It's a paid onboarding project, but it gets discounted against the ongoing if you become a full blown client kind of thing. Pretty cool. If that's been a blocker for you, check out the link in the show notes to Genwise. If this hasn't been a blocker for you and you do all the things that you always say that you're going to do, then you are lying. Tip number six show don't tell man. I'm such a big advocate of trial days. They helped me avoid a number of hires that would have been bad hires, but we had no idea through the interview process. So trial days are before you make a hire doing a trial project with someone. I've shared on social Media, we've done YouTube channel videos about it, how I approach my trial days. Basically we had a six hour day where we would pay them really well to come in and do a day of work with us. This is kind of at the last step when we're going to make a hire and we'll pull like two to four favorites into a trial day. We dodged some real bullets with these trial days, but most folks that were coming into that actually super appreciated it because it's a two sided thing. We learn a lot about them, but they're also learning a lot about us. They have to agree in the end that they want to come to work for us. And oftentimes these folks would have multiple options talking with other firms and most of them super appreciated that vibe check. They would actually get a, you know, it's a controlled environment. So it is. Is it a perfect representation of going to work for you? Absolutely not. But it's a whole lot better information than nothing. Throughout the course of that trial day, they would meet a number of the people that they would be working with every single day. They would join a meeting with a number of us so they could kind of get a sense of the vibe of like the banter and that sort of thing. And that made a difference when it came down to are they going to work for us or are they going to work for somebody else? Now there are counter arguments to trial days like are we asking too much of somebody and, and are there going to be people who don't like that or don't want to do that? Potentially. But I'm willing to make that risk because in my experience the vast majority of people actually loved it and really appreciated the opportunity. We're not asking for free work. They got very well paid for a part day of work. When that was a struggle from a schedule standpoint due to current job, due to kids, stuff like that. Sometimes we would break it up across several days. We try to facilitate that. But the ability to show them what it's like to work with you and not just tell them when it comes down to that last step of are they going to accept the deal? I think it helps a lot. Tip number seven, think outbound instead of inbound. I think most of us will put out a job listing and we just sit back and we're like, everybody come to me and I think we'll find somebody great. If that's not working, you just got to flip the script. You got to get more aggressive in how you find those folks. That could mean for the first time going out and hiring a recruiter. Even if, boy, it really hurts to think of paying that expense. You can't find anybody. It's like, all right, what is the least bad of, of kind of all of my bad options, right? So think of, think of any ways that you could go on the offensive. Maybe if you're looking for an entry level person, maybe that's getting super involved in a, in a local university or something like that, rather than just sitting back and relying on inbound, think about how we can do outbound and actually go after somebody. Number eight, the last tip here is, man, just, just be visible. Nobody's going to come to work for, for you if they don't even know that you exist. It doesn't mean that you're an influencer or you have to build this big online following or something like that. In my opinion, these days you are just being a citizen of the world when you are posting online. Virtually everyone spends their idle moments scrolling algorithms. This is a new development in the last five years. That's how people learn. It's where they build relationships. It's oftentimes where they make business decisions. And if we are not present there, we're missing an opportunity for folks to be aware of us. They would otherwise not even know that they, that we exist. And it doesn't mean having to be thought leader or put novel ideas out there or anything like that. All it means is you're turning up consistently and just talking about what you do. And I'm telling you the benefit of doing that over the course of years is this incredible compounding benefit where you meet all sorts of people that will enable connections for you. And in a few years time you are in like oftentimes a place that you could not have ever imagined. Because we're so, so into willing things into existence. I'm going to put the job posting out and everybody's going to come and they're going to love it. We're so ROI focused. And I think it's because many of us are so anchored in the hourly billing model and how time equals money. And I got this thing sitting on my desk and if I would just work on that, I'd get paid for it. So it never makes sense to go and spend time on this more abstract thing where I don't quite know how that ROI calculation works. But if you do that and you just living in this sort of low leverage, trading time for money, not investing in the bigger things sort of framework, then you're not making connections and you're not leaning into opportunities that like you couldn't even imagine being possible. I mean, nothing about what my life is right now I could have even imagined five years ago I didn't sit down and say I'm gonna, I'm gonna make accounting videos for people. That still sounds as ridiculous to me today as it does to everybody else. And it wasn't until I started consistently posting online that I was, I was making friends. I, I was learning a whole bunch from what other people were sharing, making connections. And it just took me on a much more fun path. That is not something that I ever could have willed into existence myself. The people who are highly visible and everyone knows who they are and what they do, it's not hard for them to hire. Now we look at like the biggest examples of this that are, you know, kind of the accounting celebrities. And you're like, well, I'm never going to be that. There's a whole, I mean there's a million steps below that where the likelihood that someone finds you goes up the more that people know about you. So simply being visible and talking about what you're doing can only serve to help this problem as and is an investment in the future and your ability to continue finding people down the road. Because that person you're looking for today, man, that's probably not going to be the last person you have to find. There you go. Eight tips just dawning on me. I feel slimy making this plug. Jason DOT careers. We do have like a sort of quasi placement agency where applicants that consume my content, they share some information about them with us and we place them into firms that consume our content. The only place place to talk about it is in the content. We're not like going out and finding applicants or anything like that. It's. The problem is my content attracts a bunch of progressive firms. But 95% of the accountants that find my content, they're like, buddy, that ain't my reality. Like, I work for a legacy firm. So that platform is for matchmaking. Those two people got a bunch of people running through there like it is. It's the. The response has been amazing on that. The goal is I'm just trying to get groups together that have that day one alignment. They consume my content and they just have that kind of common thread of understanding of here's how I want to run my accounting firm. Anyways, domain for that is Jason Careers. That's the website. There you go. Eight tips. Anything I missed, anything you disagree with or would add, even like hacks or any ideas successful ways you've had of finding good hires. Drop that stuff down in the comments. Thanks for hanging today. I'll see you tomorrow.