[Reverie]

I’ve read a few topics/posts here and apparently many of you are having difficulty looking for work. What is the problem here? Are you guys just applying for the Big 4? What about other accounting firms? What about industry? What about government? Are those jobs not sought after? Or have u guys tried ’em as well and still no luck?

[letsrun4it]

It seems a fair number of people getting their CPA have been busy students and failed to get any work experience in college and then want to work at a big 4 accounting firm. Tough.

BEC: 85
REG: 74, 78
AUD: 86
FAR: October?

[Skynet]

My backup plan was to sleep with a a Managing Partner : p

[Missy]

In my opinion it's a combination of two factors, first that it's a competitive field and there's such a wide variety of education and experience in the labor pool. More importantly though particularly younger candidates seem to think putting credentials on a resume makes them supervisor candidates. I see all the time “I've passed three exams why aren't I getting offers?” without even considering “what are this employer's needs, and how do I convince them I'm the best person to fill those needs.” At the end of the day the interview isn't about the candidate it's about the hiring company and few people are mindful of that fact.

Licensed Massachusetts Non Reporting CPA since 2012
Finance/Admin/HR Manager

[Anonymous]

Let me try to give a bit of perspective from having sat in the hiring seat… (Addressed to job seekers, though it sounds like OP isn't in that boat.)

In most job markets, when you post a job, you get waaaaay more resumes than the number of interviews you're willing to conduct. So, let's say you post a job for an opening (in private – I've never hired in public), and get 12 resumes. Very low number, but I'm in an area with a lower population density, so 12 might be reasonable here. You've got 12 resumes, 12 cover letters, and have to figure out from that who might be good to hire. Stop and think about that for a minute…pull out the most recent resume and cover letter you sent out, and try to pretend you're the hiring manager, and have 11 other resumes and cover letters sitting in front of you. What does the one you sent have in it to make the hiring manager go “I'd like to call this guy/gal in for an interview”? Resumes are all pretty similar. It's hard, as hiring manager, to find things that make you get excited. For the jobs people on this board are applying to, I'm guessing all the applicants have a Bachelor's in Accounting or related. If it's a job in public, most are CPA-eligible if not sitting for CPA exams already; in private, CPA eligibility doesn't matter as much, so candidates may or may not have CPA eligibility. So, when you've got 12 people with a Bachelor's, what's going to make one stand out?

This is where customizing your cover letter to the specific job comes in to play. If I put in my job description that I need someone who is tech savvy, then probably that means that's a big deal to me, cause I need this person learning various programs quickly to succeed in their job. So, if 4 of the 12 saw that and listed “tech savvy” in their job description, that's going to bump them up in the pile.

Also prior experience counts for a LOT. I've got a dozen people that all have a Bachelor's, so your Bachelor's isn't special. And…it's a fairly entry-level job, so a Master's isn't going to really help you at this level. So, who's got experience? What experience? How does it fit to what I need? This is, again, where a customized resume is helpful; your job as Bank Teller might be different from the one I worked, so seeing that as Bank Teller you also processed loans would help if I'm hiring a position that has something to do with loans, whereas if you don't customize your resume to my needs, then I'll see “teller” and think “cashed checks and processed deposits”.

I guess what I'm getting at is when you have 12 people who are nearly the same on paper, it's the little things that matter. “Qualified candidates” are a dime a dozen, but good employees aren't. As hiring manager, you're faced with a pool of “qualified candidates” and have to try to figure out which ones might be good employees. Of course, for most hiring managers, that pool is way more than 12, but it's an example.

So, out of this pool of candidates, you bring in – let's say – 5 to interview. If you've got one position, that means that each one has a 20% chance of getting the job. Keep that in mind as job-seekers – every “I got a job!” success story left several others disappointed, replaying every minute of the interview to try to figure out what went wrong. But back to the interview. You bring in 5 people, chat with them, and try to figure out what sort of work they'll do. Believe it or not, that's hard to do. As interviewer, you're not looking for right answers; you're looking to get a good feel for this candidate, cause everyone's going to answer with the right things (“I'm hard-working, detail-oriented, great in a team OR solo, love everything about this job and company, blah blah blah”), but some are more convincing than others. You might have some little skills test to try to get some concrete evidence to work with, but heck, even that's hard to tell much from! If you could have the person come work for you for a week, you might be able to tell for sure, but 20 minutes of conversation? You're not learning much worthwhile.

Eventually you pick one cause you have to out of those 5. Bring them in for a 2nd interview, perhaps at this round they interview with your boss, too, to get formal approval. Maybe this time everything goes great, and you hire them; maybe this time something just doesn't seem right, and you go back to Square 1.

My point in all of this is that there's a lot of uncertainty and having to pick anything you can to try to make a decision. It is somewhat arbitrary, but it has to be. It's not fair for me to ask someone to drive 1 1/2 hours and get their hopes up to come interview with me just so that I can be sure I don't like them. So, you turn away candidates for things that seem petty, but you've only got about 1000 words to go off of, so you've gotta find petty things to whittle the pool down at all.

What's the point for job seekers? Make yourself stellar. “Good” isn't good enough. I've got 10 or 100 “good” candidates. I think a big problem for a lot of recent grads is that they have no transferable work experience. That's a hard one to fix at this point in the game, but try what you can to help it. A big problem for all levels is a resume and cover letter that isn't great. It MUST be free of grammar and spelling issues, and MUST also be informative. “Bank teller” isn't enough; useful descriptions of what you did and what you accomplished are necessary. Over-inflating things is bad, though; the hiring manager will have been around enough to know if you're making stuff up. You've got to make everything about your pre-employment time be so amazing that the hiring manager has no misgivings. If you can do that, you'll be an instant hire.

P. S. Don't forget to check your online image. Google your email address, your name, etc., and see what comes up. Be mindful of what you post on Facebook – hiring manager might be friend-of-a-friend and able to see your Facebook, or someone in the office might be your friend and able to show off your Facebook. Also consider everyone at or associated with the company to be part of the hiring decision. We don't have a switchboard operator at my company, so switchboard goes through various people, and I'm the last stopping point before they get sent back to the main menu. I've answered calls from job-seekers, and transferred them to HR, that have made me go check with HR to make sure it wasn't one of my candidates, cause they were rude and scatter-brained and acting like idiots. Even if I was just a switchboard operator, I could still be close buddies with the hiring manager. You never know, so keep your nose clean. 🙂

[ninjacpa_hck]

COMPETITION 🙂

[Pete]

I'll give you my insight on the problems, which I think make getting a solid position in this industry difficult.

For one thing and others I know agree on this, the field has become WAY over-saturated. They've done such a great job pushing the major so much, over the past decade or so, that now everyone and their brother's and sister's is going into the field. More people going into a field make that field much more competitive. In the past, a job would never have over 100 applicants (as others have stated); today, 200 plus applicants is the norm. Having different organizations push people to get into the field, while not the only problem, has certainly increased the competition a massive amount.

In addition, I think that accounting is an incredibly structured field. The standard candidate will get an internship while on campus, then get picked up from a firm, after said internship. If you miss that internship boat, you're already fighting a massive uphill battle. Typically, the larger firms will hire a vast majority of their candidate pool from internships (i've spoken to a few managers, who've actually basically told me i'm screwed for larger firms because i've graduated in 2010 without having an internship to get hired from). They do hire those outside internships, it's just the vast majority of hires are interns; you've already put that intern through a test run in which they've succeeded. The intern to hire concept makes sense, but it puts a burden on those, who didn't get one. Once you graduate, you aren't really considered for internships (in my experience).

By essentially eliminating your options of getting into a larger firm through missing internships, you're now confined to applying to smaller firms. Problem is, like the experienced hires at larger firms, smaller firms don't always hire. They're even less likely to hire someone without experience. The best case scenario is that you end up doing tax work at a tiny firm, but even this is difficult to do (even basic tax jobs want prior experience), which leads me to my next point.

Industry jobs also want, guess what? Public accounting experience, usually audit. I've had over 20 interviews in industry positions, over the year, which want 1-2 years experience. I've got 6 years book-keeping/accounting experience, but these industries are very nit-picky as to the experience they want. Despite absolutely crushing every single accounting test they give me (i've been told this during multiple interviews) and giving a ton of VERY SPECIFIC details (ie. I have 10-15 specific stories I tell at interviews, detailing a skill that I posses), I just can't seem to break into these companies.

I've spoken to a manager, who's basically told me the same thing; a lot of it is luck. He was able to get into a smaller firm by luck and then move to a larger one; however, without working at a small firm, the larger one would not hire him, due to how candidates are hired at lower levels (ie. internships). My friend also worked at a firm briefly, then took years to find another position at a different firm, while working at call centers in the interim.

It might be my specific area, but this has been my experience.

B=84 This exam was such a b**** that I thought I failed-don't know how these things work
A=76 Slacker I am, I'll happily take it
R=81 I LOVE taxes
F=80 I don't wanna get banned for an expletive I'm thinking with "yea" proceeding it

[Author]

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