Even the top companies on the Fortune 500 leaderboard are feeling the staffing squeeze for finance and accounting talent — a market that’s as tight as it’s ever been.
Is hiring even more difficult for companies that don’t have thousands of employees, or do small- and medium-sized businesses hold a few advantages over their behemoth counterparts?
To find out, we asked Aston Carter Account Manager Brian Burrell, whose years of experience placing finance and accounting talent in the sprawling Los Angeles market has exposed him to an incredibly broad range of hiring needs.
Smaller Firms Must Compete on Price
In a labor market where few candidates are available or actively looking, it’s hard to find finance and accounting talent with the right skills and interests to fulfill a broad range of duties within the niche submarkets often inhabited by small- and medium-sized businesses.
If the tight labor market wasn’t worrisome enough, the hiring process itself can put smaller firms at a disadvantage. For example, there’s the price point. Unfortunately for small- and medium-sized businesses, partnering with a staffing firm is another area in which they’re working against economies-of-scale offered by larger competitors.
Paying a little more than a giant company would to engage a trusted staffing partner is still a worthwhile investment. Especially when you consider the alternatives.
Resource allocation can easily turn into a huge issue if (and when) a candidate search stretches longer than a payroll cycle. And relative costs associated with turnover magnify the importance of culture and fit, not to mention speed — current employees will only be willing to do the work of two people for so long before they become motivated to test the waters themselves.>
A Beacon for Motivated Candidates
But there is good news. In a labor market that exacerbates many of the challenges of dealing with larger competitors, smaller firms do have one major advantage: they’re an attractive landing spot for growth-oriented finance and accounting talent.
“Small- to medium-sized businesses offer hybrid roles, where their finance and accounting employees touch different aspects of the balance sheet, and work on some of the budgeting while also doing accounting,” says Burrell. “That’s a big draw for certain candidates, and especially for the type of candidate that a smaller company would need.”
Due to a blend of resourcing necessity and a less rigorous regulatory framework, smaller businesses can enable employee growth faster and more flexibly than a massive publicly-traded firm.
Finance and accounting job hunters know the current market is in their favor — they get plenty of calls from recruiters, after all — and further know that building their skills profile is the key to unlocking better opportunities.
Smaller businesses looking for top flight finance and accounting talent should do all they can to emphasize opportunities for on-the-job learning represented by every available position.
Find the Right Partner for Your Ideal Skills Profile
For smaller firms, finding the right candidate starts with picking the recruiting partner most up to the task.
“As a recruiting firm, we always want to make sure that our clients, regardless of their size, have focused skill sets and candidate profiles that align with our core competencies,” says Burrell.
But that’s especially so when recruiters partner with smaller companies, where there’s no assurance of future placements. The current labor pool is candidate-driven and so tight, even seasoned recruiters have to be careful about how to invest their time.
Burrell says, “Without working to establish a whole new talent pipeline, as you’d do for a larger firm, we don’t have a choice but to limit the relationships we build to candidates we’ll also be able to place elsewhere.”
When considering recruiting partner options for finance and accounting staffing, small and medium businesses should ask about their most successful candidate skill sets and profiles.
Give Soft Skills a Hard Look
Employees in small and medium firms tend to work in closer proximity than they would in a gigantic corporation, and as a result, successful owners and managers have always taken great care to shape and protect their company’s culture. Add that to the red-alert employee retention concerns raised by the current labor market, and it’s clear that evaluating soft skills to determine fit couldn’t be a more important part of the hiring process.
Owners and managers of small businesses hardly need reminding that soft skills matter, but cost concerns associated with hiring in the current labor market can make it tempting to cut corners.
“Candidate fit usually comes down to soft skills, and that plays an even larger part with smaller companies,” says Burrell.
“But that’s the highest-touch, highest-effort part of candidate recruitment, and that’s why smaller clients definitely benefit from partnering with a recruiting firm that has the time, experience, and market knowledge to evaluate on that basis.”
If your business could benefit from a free conversation about matching your most sought-after candidate skillset to the finance and accounting labor market, contact Aston Carter now.
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