By Christian Doherty Employer newsletterHow to recruit based on potential26 Jul 2024 Without experience, it’s hard for early-career recruits to prove themselves. Here’s how to find, and close the deal on, high-quality employees.It’s never been easy finding, recruiting and retaining talented people in accountancy. But with the after-effects of a global pandemic, a cost of living crisis, rising university costs and a general atmosphere of volatility have challenged accounting practices like never before.And, unlike hiring senior accountants with full CVs, recruiting those in the early stages of their career requires a bespoke approach that focuses less on experience and more on potential.Amy Carter leads the recruitment team at Leeds-based practice Kirk Newsholme. She says without past experience to assess, recruitment in early careers becomes about making sure that candidates have a good fit for the firm. “I think that’s key.“Finding those candidates has led Kirk Newsholme to focus on connecting with local schools and colleges to open up the talent pipeline.“We tend to run an event every year which we call an insight evening. I know other firms do things like using a week of work experience to sort of identify good candidates. And we’re looking at doing a bit more of that ourselves.”Holistic approach to assessing candidatesCarter’s work reflects a growing acceptance among firms that successful recruitment requires more than just a job ad and a competitive salary. She has spearheaded the development of a long-term process that sees potential hires attend insight evenings, meet staff members, ask questions and get a sense of what a career in accountancy might involve.“We’ve built that up over a number of years now where we’re in quite a good position and we do get a really good number of applications coming through,” Carter says.Once potential hires have been identified, the focus then falls on the interview process and getting a good feel for that person. “And that starts with a good CV and a good application and making sure that we are selecting the best ones that come through because we do get an awful lot.”Jez Brooks’ role as Early Talent Manager at Moore Kingston Smith (MKS) involves managing the recruitment of AATs, ACAs – which are typically graduates – as well as a tax program. So they’re also recruiting for ATT, CTA, and also for ACACTA. “So the majority of it is graduate recruitment, but probably about 20% of our program is school leavers, level 4 AAT stuff.”While MKS still uses traditional interviews to assess candidates, Brooks says the process prioritises more than just basic technical skill.“It’s absolutely not about experience. Instead, it’s competency-based, it’s strengths-based, it’s about transferable skills. So we’re still looking for team building, relationship building, communication, willingness to learn. We also want drive and a passion for the subject, the company and the industry.“Using tech to streamline recruitment drivesIn common with a growing number of practices, Brooks reports that technology is a growing part of MKS recruitment process. “One of the lessons of COVID was that it showed us that we can move online,” he says. “The last intake, we had just over 140 hires, which works out at about 35 applications per hire. So that’s a lot of processing that requires a lot of whittling down through the stages to get there.“So tech is part of that, and we’re now starting to embrace technology in terms of our assessments and being able to process that many applications and make sure that we can get through it in a timely fashion. Everyone wants to get a response in a few hours even. So if you just leave it to human processing power, it takes longer.“So actually we do an awful lot more online and while I think it’s still important that you have a face-to-face meeting with people that you’re recruiting where you possibly can, all those initial stages, right the way through even to assessment, can be done remotely. I think the use of tech in that certainly helps.”Creating a career pathJack Armstrong, Client Director at Richardsons Chartered Accountants in Oxfordshire, agrees that embracing technology is vitally important, both for attracting talented candidates and managing the assessment process.But, he says, while salary and flexibility are valued by younger candidates, there’s no substitute for offering a compelling career path. “We put ourselves within London catchment in terms of salary, but we don’t necessarily pay London salary wages. But something that’s really, really great with a firm like ours is the training involved.“Armstrong explains that Richardsons have designed an intake system that prizes variety over specialism. “Our hires won’t just be working doing one specific area – accountancy or tax or audit; instead, they’ll be doing a little bit of everything.““That’s because we appreciate when a 16, 17, 18-year-old is just fresh out of school or college, the world is their oyster. They don’t really know what they want to do. And if they kind of think that they really want to be an accountant, then we need to show them there are so many different aspects of accountancy”.Getting the hire over the lineOf course, finding and attracting candidates is one thing, but actually getting the hire over the finish line can be a challenge.“I think we tend to see a lot of young people coming through now who possibly have a bit less loyalty once they’re committed to something,” explains Carter. She reports a definite trend of candidates accepting an offer only to change course at the last minute.“It doesn’t happen a lot, but we are noticing it does happen,” she says. “It can happen two to three months after somebody’s accepted an offer, when you’ve closed off your recruitment process. That can be a real headache because you still need someone for the role.“I know that other firms are seeing a lot of that as well. It’s really important to make sure that I’m in constant contact with them over the summer to make sure that they don’t slip away.”In response, Carter’s team has developed a process to ensure candidates stay attached to the firm between hire and start date.“We run meet-the-team days over the summer where we get them all in to meet each other and the team, just for half a day, maybe go out for a coffee. And then they know where they’re coming on day one, they’ve met some people there, and it all starts to feel a bit more familiar for them.”Ultimately, we want somebody who’s got a little bit more than just technical skill – we want a bit of personality as well. And I think that’s why it’s important to have met these people several times across the year.” Christian Doherty is a business journalist and freelance writer for AAT.