Recruitment, Internship and Mentoring—Crucial for All Size Firms

Source: Insight, The Magazine of the Illinois CPA Society

Recruiting at Colleges:

• It’s more than putting a booth at the student center. You need well-informed representatives with passion for your firm and the profession.
• Don’t spread yourself too thin. Identify just a few institutions with strong accounting departments.
• Find out where graduates tend to migrate. If they tend to go to cities other than yours, you might be wasting resources recruiting there.
• The school career center can:
  • Assist you in contacting student accounting organizations.
  • Introduce you to professors, who may invite you to talk to their students about the profession.
• Don’t delay in making offers. If students don’t have your offer when they’re ready to choose a firm, they won’t choose yours.

Interns:

• Give them challenging work. They want to find out what it’s like working in your firm and in the accounting profession.
• Observe their soft skills—ability to multi-task, handle pressure, and set priorities.
• Inundate them with information about your firm—benefits, work/life programs, professional development, firm goals, and their possible career tracks.
• Students also want to know about the firm’s culture, commitment to the community, etc.
• When interns have positive experiences, they communicate them to other students.

Mentoring:

• Assign mentors at the start of employment.
• Mentors help recruits feel part of the firm. They like to feel accepted and to have friends at the firm.
• Mentors can indoctrinate recruits into the firm’s culture, methods, values, and goals.
• Mentors must sincerely care about the future of the recruit. If the recruit senses otherwise, the relationship won’t work.

From Insight, The Magazine of the Illinois CPA Society, January/February 2007. For the complete article, click on the following link: www.insight-mag.com/insight/index.htm, select January/February 2007 issue, click on “Features,” and select the article: Professional Grooming.