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Behind the Recruiting Curtain: A Deep Dive with John, Rachel and Marcus
Episode 65 of CPA Life is a particularly special episode—a re-broadcast of John Randolph’s appearance on Who’s Really The BOSS with Rachel and Marcus Dillon of Dillon Business Advisors! In this collaboration, John shares insights into the recruiting landscape in public accounting from his perspective as Principal at Benaiah Consulting, delving into what he sees as keys to healthy recruitment: work-life balance, a positive firm culture, flexible working arrangements, and decisive leaders, to name but a few. Rachel and Marcus recount their recent recruiting experience where they found going it on their own wasn’t working out, and they have been thrilled with their experience letting John and Benaiah handle things. John is full of practical advice on hiring practices, compensation ranges, and fostering lasting employee relationships—this is one episode you won’t want to miss.
Important Links:
About the Guests:
Marcus Dillon, CPA, is the President, Founder, and Client CFO of Dillon Business Advisors in Katy, Texas. Marcus founded DBA when he realized a significant opportunity to solve the problem of people sacrificing their passions and life priorities to keep up with running their businesses. With a team he calls family, Marcus hit the ground running to move away from the traditional framework of accounting and into an engaging, people-first approach to financial stability. He also co-hosts the Who’s Really the BOSS Podcast.
Rachel Dillon serves as Firm Administrator of DBA, where she focuses on helping prospective clients find the right accounting solutions for their small businesses and cultivating the team at DBA. Her focus in team building is on being a source of encouragement and an aid for team members to reach their full potential. In addition to Firm Administrator, She is also a co-host of Who’s Really the BOSS.
Transcript:
Thanks for tuning in to CPA Life’s special rebroadcast of John Randolph’s appearance on the Who’s Really the BOSS Podcast with Rachel and Marcus Dillon. They discuss their firm’s experience with Benaiah Consulting, and John shares his insider insights into the recruitment landscape in public accounting.
Welcome to Who’s Really the BOSS and CPA Life!
Welcome back to another episode of Who’s Really the BOSS Podcast.
Hey, thanks for having me back.
We are excited to have a guest with us—we have John Randolph. Welcome, John.
Hey, how are you guys doing? I’m excited to be here with you and talk to you a little bit about your business and our business and everything going on in the staffing world as it pertains to accounting.
Absolutely.
Thanks for being here, man.
So, John, give us a little self-intro, because we actually have come to know you a lot more really recently. So, give us a self-intro of who you are and you can share as much or as little as you’d like.
So that’s always kind of a loaded question. Husband, 28 years, dad of two girls that are amazing young women. My wife and I used to joke when our kids were little and say that, you know you’re doing a halfway decent job if other adults enjoy being around your kids. Now that our kids are grown, we get grief when we don’t invite them somewhere, so we’ve changed that saying and flipped it a little bit and say, you know you did half a decent job if your adult children enjoy being around you. So, we enjoy the fact that we get to be around our little girls. I say little girls, but they’re grown women now.
I’ve owned Benaiah Consulting Group as it sits as the business that it is today for eight years. We focus strictly on partnering with what I refer to as locally owned, small to mid-size CPA firms, advisory firms, and consulting firms. So, love the niche that we’re in, love the people that we deal with because just like you guys, you’re small business owners just like I am—I love the fact that we can provide the type of solutions we can provide to firms like yours and not worry about, hey, how’s this gonna fit into our business plan? What about the other big Fortune 500 clients or Big Four firms? We are narrowly focused on solving the problems of firms like yours.
Well, John, can I ask you one more question about the name of your business, about Benaiah Consulting Group? Can you tell me a little bit about where did the “Benaiah” come from?
Absolutely. So, the way that I tell the story is in the Old Testament, when you get into the Book of 2 Samuel, it starts talking about David’s mighty men. David, in effect, had what we would refer to today as his own secret service. So, David had his secret service detail. And the head of David’s secret service detail, if you will, was a guy by the name of Benaiah. It doesn’t list a lot in scripture about Benaiah, but there’s about four or five references to Benaiah. The first one is, one of the feats that he accomplished was he chased a lion into a pit on a snowy day and killed it with his bare hands. Through that process, I read a book called In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day. It is about chasing lions in your life, and instead of turning and running when things get tough, digging in, leaning into God, and figuring out a way to come up with a solution. So, that’s how the name of the firm came into play, through that book and that scripture.
Man, were you wrestling with some lions at that time?
You know, at that point in life, Marcus, I was wrestling with some serious lions. I think we all go through phases of life where we do that.
Yeah, that’s good stuff.
I think that’s going to be added to my bookshelf, in my coming up reads section.
That’s good!
Before we get started, we like to always ask our guests the best piece of advice they’ve ever been given. That way, if our conversation goes south or sideways, at least we’ve left the listeners with something good from this episode. So, best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
That’s a really hard question to answer. Thinking about, you know, we talked about beforehand, I’ve been very blessed. I grew up in a house where my parents were married 68 years and my dad was just a blue-collar, hands-dirty mechanic guy that owned his own business. Mom was a school teacher. So there was always banter in our house and wisdom being thrown around. My dad didn’t talk a lot, but when he did, it was usually pretty profound. Probably one of the biggest things that I took away from my life at home with my dad was no one is going to work harder for you to succeed than you’re willing to work yourself. And that was my dad’s nice way of always telling me, look, I’ll invest in you, I’ll help you succeed, I’ll do all the things that you want and need me to do as your dad and as a supporter, but I’m never going to work more at it than you are. So, I’ve always kept that in mind that people are only going to pour into me what I’m willing to pour into myself.
Yeah, that’s good. So, have you used that on your daughters?
Oh, that was used a whole lot, Marcus. There’s a lot of Lloyd-isms, as my daughters have come to call them, that they had thrown at them from me, from my dad.
That’s awesome. No, that’s good stuff, man. Appreciate you sharing that. It’s great, every time we ask that question, it’s like it’s from a previous generation, it’s usually something that’s handed down and continues to be handed down. So I’m sure 20 years from now, your grandkids or different generations will be saying, you know, this is what was taught to me. So, it’s cool.
Yeah. You gotta love that.
Yeah. Well, I appreciate you joining us here today. I’m going to give a little bit of background on how we’ve come to know you and then how we’ve specifically been working with you recently. So, John, you have a podcast, the CPA Life Podcast, and you asked me to be on that a while back, maybe one, two years ago. I was very fortunate to do that. I don’t know what you saw in me to come as a guest, but I was very honored to do that. You’ve had a lot better guests before and after me, so maybe just setting the bar really low for everybody else was what you did with me. But CPA Life, you can go check that out. We’ll link to it as well. A lot of great stuff there. I’ve had some friends that have been on it, and I listened to them and got to know them more too in that process. So, you’re great as an interview, kind of through the podcast and probably through your day job, what you do with recruits.
Thank you.
But here recently, obviously, we’ve been connected even after that, kinda reached out to you. We had a need for a team member, a client controller specifically, which has a similar background to a tax manager out there in the open market. Just like anybody that loves doing stuff ourselves, we took a stab at it to try to fill that position ourselves first. In that process, I was like, there’s probably somebody else we really trust and know that we’re connected to that can kind of help us with this process because of some frustrations that we were seeing in those initial resumes and responses we were getting. So, we reached out to you about that time. It was after a team member had left, so after November, kind of December timeframe, not the best time to hire somebody. People have already kind of found their next job prior to tax season. So I think that’s what led us to engage you, and then you were able to find us a great crop of resumes. One of those we interviewed, ultimately hired, and she starts next week. We’re excited for her journey with DBA. But that’s kind of how we’ve recently worked with John, just so everybody knows. Rachel, is there anything else to add to that?
No. But before, John, I ask you all the questions and the magic and the secret sauce of how you find great people, I just want to share that—Marcus, will you share what we did before we reached out to John with very little success?
Yeah! So we’ve come a long way even in this. We posted on LinkedIn, we boosted that post. I like the little “hiring” thing around your picture. Every time we do that, we seem to get a lot of additional followers for DBA. I think your posts get boosted as well because you’re an employer hiring, so that’s probably part of the LinkedIn algorithm,
They’re making money. So, they’re gonna boost that.
Yeah. We spent, I think over two to three weeks, maybe it went a month, we spent about five or six hundred bucks, just to boost that post, and we got resumes, man, did we get resumes. We got all kinds, all industries, all backgrounds, all nations pretty much. In that process, you can definitely find a diamond in the rough, so to speak, or even try to go after people—I’ve had some success with that in prior years where I would identify, hey, this person would be really great for DBA based on what they share, or who I know them to be through just additional connections. So we’ve had that luck before. But this time around, it just got our heads shaking, like, what is going on in the market today? The people that we have in our mind, do they even exist? So that’s what we did. We used LinkedIn, which has produced results in the past. Way back when, we’ve used Craigslist at one time for a job posting, and that was fun. So, we’ve used some different things. Indeed, Craigslist, but here recently, it was LinkedIn. So Rachel, if that was what you were hoping for that I said. I mean, we didn’t go door to door knocking for anybody yet, but we were pretty close.
Not yet. So, John, is that common of what you see when accounting firms come to you? Where are they looking or do they typically just, are they smarter than us and just come to you first?
No, I think that everybody, regardless of what it is that we’re trying to do, obviously, there are things that we look at as individuals, business owners, homeowners, whatever it is, there are things you look at and go, you know what, that’s outside of my scope and my bandwidth. If there’s something that goes wrong here at the house that has to do with electrical or plumbing, there’s a phone call that’s gonna get made. I’m not gonna touch it. Outside of that, I’ll try it. And if it doesn’t work, then I’m gonna call somebody.
I’ll give you a perfect example. We moved a year ago, downsized our house, downsized our land. I needed to dig a trench that was going to be about 250 yards, basically a ravine to steer some water away from the house where we built. I’m looking at it and I’m thinking, it’s dirt. It can’t be that hard. I mean, I drove a skid steer in college, I’m gonna run a track hoe, I’m gonna dig this, what’s the worst that can happen? It’s dirt. I spent $650, rented a track hoe. Dug about 60 feet of it in nine and a half hours. Got off that thing and called a dirt guy, got a bid, $6,000, and I told my wife, that’s gonna be the best $6,000 I’ve ever spent, ever. Had I not done that, I would’ve walked outside, seen that trench for the next, however long we live here, and thought to myself, I could have done that. I absolutely could have done that. Why did I spend that money?
So sometimes we have to do those things to learn, you know what, maybe that’s not in my wheelhouse. In answering your question, yeah, that’s a normal process and a normal step that I think everybody goes through to try to see, hey, can I get this done, whether it’s on my own, or I’ve had bad experiences, or man, I just don’t want to spend, or I don’t have the money to spend. It’s a multitude of things, but that’s typically what we’ll see is those are the resources that people are leaning on, and they’re great resources at times.
Now, let’s start with the big question. Are there qualified and quality accounting professionals available to work? I think we’re being told something different, that there are none. So if you just find like a living, breathing person, hire them. But are there qualified and quality accounting professionals available to work?
Easy answer: Yes, there are. They’re out there. It’s just a matter of putting in the time, energy, and effort to find those people, to engage with those people, to know where to go, what to say. Here’s the biggest challenge I think that most firms don’t understand, and maybe they do, and maybe most public accounting firm leaders don’t want to address it or deal with it, or they don’t think it really affects them, and that is, the industry as a whole, from an employment standpoint, doesn’t have the greatest reputation in that two to eight year, two to ten year employment model. They just don’t, because the preponderance of those people are spinning their wheels working 80 hours a week at a Big Four or top a hundred national firm, so that’s the news that’s getting out there on Reddit, on GoingConcern, on Glassdoor. That’s what people are seeing is this is a horrible work-life balance, I hate this place, get me outta here, kind of mindset. They’re out there, they just have to be dug into a little bit more than just the surface.
I’ll give you some numbers—I’m a huge stats person, so we track pretty much anything and everything we can track in our system. Played baseball all through high school, college. It allowed me to get a college degree, so I love numbers, love stats. We did a survey in 2019. We redid that survey last year. One simple question, we sent it to 600 people. The first year, we got, I think 550 responses, this time we got about 460 responses. The question was real simple: If you have made a job change, and this was only sent to people with a public accounting background. If you’ve made a job change in the last 18 to 24 months, or you’re contemplating making a job change in the next 18 to 24 months, did you or would you respond to a job posting from another CPA firm? In 2019, 83% of the people said they did not or would not. In 2024, 78% of the people said they did not, or they would not.
So we’re getting better, we’re getting better. But again, I like to take that and put it in real live numbers. If there’s ten people that are qualified for a job that someone posts, qualified—forget whether they’re interested, they’re just qualified—seven to eight of them are never even gonna send their resume in. That leaves two to three, that’s it. Two to three that are gonna raise their hand and say, hey, I’d like to know more.
Yeah. I like data, I love that. I’m gonna ask you about some other data that you shared here recently in a post. People do exist. They’re out there. Part of it, and you may speak to this, like what we see is, when we test our team and do some general testing, Enneagram or things like that to learn more about ourselves and each other and how we work better together, a lot of accountants are loyalists, right? And so a lot of accountants live through and you get calloused and you sometime in your career, you wore those hours or those nights as a badge of honor, but maybe not your whole career, right? So we see a lot of loyalists, and I know that whenever you and I were talking about like, hey, what would it look like to get some help on placing someone in this role, you went through how you identify people who could even be looking potentially for a change, or have recently had a change and maybe it wasn’t the change that they thought it was gonna be. Could you give a little bit of background about that process? What you and your team do to even go find or go touch those qualified people? Like you said, people with public accounting backgrounds that have actually worked in accounting.
So I think that one of the things that give us a little bit of an advantage in the space that we play in is this is all that we do. While that may not seem like it’s that big of a deal, it’s huge. I spent—Marcus, Rachel—I spent half my career with two large national recruiting firms that are known for their accounting finance practices. When you’ve got sitting on your desk, a job rec that is from a staff accountant at a manufacturing company to a financial analyst at a bank, to a senior auditor at a public accounting firm, and a CFO at a hundred-million-dollar manufacturing company, and that’s just four or five of the 30 that you have sitting on your desk—and when you multiply that to a team of five to eight to 10 people, now you’ve got 50 to a hundred job recs that you’re juggling as a team.
You are speaking to anybody and everybody that’s got a background in accounting. You are doing that from the process of, let’s face it, sales, so you’re going to shoot at the closest targets and the lowest hanging fruit. So if, again, a stat I’ll give you: 83% of the conversations we have with people, somewhere in the first 10 minutes, we are told, I hate what I do. Get me out of here. I don’t wanna be in public accounting. If I’m sitting at another recruiting firm and I’ve got 30, 40, 50, 60 open recs sitting on my desk, plus what’s on my teammate’s desk, and somebody says in the first 10 minutes, I hate public accounting, get me outta here. The response is, hey, not a problem, ’cause I’ve got 50 to 70 other jobs that have nothing to do with public accounting. Let’s talk about those.
In our business, all we do is public accounting. That’s it. So I don’t have controller CFO jobs to talk to people about, I don’t have a senior accountant at a bank to talk to somebody about. I’ve got a tax manager job, I’ve got a client controller job, I’ve got a CAS senior accountant. I’ve got a tax senior manager. That’s what I’ve got on my desk, that’s it. So we are spending all day long reaching out and engaging with people in that space.
We are sending emails, we are sending in-mails on LinkedIn. We are farming our database. We’ve got anywhere from somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 to 300 messages going out on a daily basis to people just touching base. And with AI today and with technology today, we can personalize that to a pretty nth degree. It’s not like it was even a year ago. There is stuff that we can do that creates a lot of personalization through the conversations that we’re having, documenting, and information that we’re pulling offline on people. We just want to engage. We just want to get a response. If I can get people to start talking, then I can start pulling on that thread just a little bit. It may not bear fruit for us today, it may not bear fruit for six months to a year, it may not bear fruit for four years, but we’re going to continue to pull on that thread, we’re going to continue to engage with that person, we’re going to continue to talk to that person, because there are going to be opportunities that may check the right boxes that we’ve been able to learn about what’s important to them. A lot of times we’ll have people say to us that we reach out to, “Hey, now’s not a good time. That sounds like a great opportunity, but I’m happy where I’m at.” We are going to do everything that we can to continue to stay in front of those people on a consistent basis.
Yeah. One quick question, because we talked about loyalists and you just mentioned people that say, “I’m not in a position to change.” How silent does it go from January through April?
Yeah, it’s pretty silent from a proactive perspective. It’s funny, the way that we design our outbound engagement is it’s pretty high—throughout the year it ebbs and flows—but it’s pretty high in November, it gets higher in December, gets a little higher in January, and then we start tapering off, and we are virtually non-existent in someone’s emails, text messages, anywhere we don’t have a relationship already, we are silent because I know that I am the last person, whether it’s someone that’s hiring or somebody that’s looking to make a job change, I’m the last person they have mental bandwidth for. We try to be respectful of that. But even when we’re reaching out to people with the stuff that we’re doing, our response rate from people coming back, even if that response rate is, “Hey, thanks, I’m busy,” is less than about 2.5% from about mid-March until around the week before the 15th. The week before the 15th, we start to see a little bit more engagement pick up.
Yeah. They’re just watching stuff, making sure nothing blows up from a filing standpoint, and they’re like, “Yeah, that was brutal.”
Yeah, or they’re running like crazy in that last week and at 2 o’clock in the morning when they’re shutting down their computer, they’re thinking, “Let me just see what might be out there because I’m dying right now.”
A glimmer of hope to get through the week, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, I think that’s a prime opportunity when people are at that breaking point of “I’m never doing this again.” The pain of staying the same gets greater than the pain of even entertaining a different solution or a different opportunity.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, definitely there’s a little window in there right at the end, before the deadline, and then a few days after, something happens and they start to forget day by day how brutal it actually was during those first couple of months. And ask us how we know. We played that game for a few years in a row ourselves with what we were willing to sacrifice and take on and say yes to, because it was “just for a few weeks” and then it’ll get better. Thankfully, we no longer operate that way.
So tell me, John. You mentioned that the candidates that you’re talking to, or prospective candidates that you’re talking to, will latch onto something. What are some of those things that candidates latch onto that get them excited enough to continue exploring an opportunity?
Rachel, It’s really not rocket science. When we talk to candidates, and we hear that “get me outta here, don’t want to do this.” What we’ll typically ask at that point, you know, we don’t tell them, hey, sorry, all we do is public accounting, so we have nothing to talk to you about. What we do is we’ll dig into why: “What is it about what you’re doing that is just so horrific? What’s got you to this point?” We hear the exact same answers, for the most part, just said differently. A lot the same ways, but we hear the same answers, four, five answers. Number one is work-life balance: “I don’t have a life. My hours are ridiculous. I’m micromanaged. Billable hours, utilization, realization issues. I hate filling out timesheets. I hate that it’s never enough. I’m just a cog in the machine.” We hear a lot of the same things.
Then we’ll talk to them about, “What do you like about what you do? You’ve been there two years, five years, eight years, ten years. You’ve been in the industry that long, whatever it may be. You obviously don’t hate everything about it. Tell me what it is that gets you going in the morning.” “I love the variety. I love to make a difference in the clients that I work with. I love the fact that the clients that I work with are small to midsize businesses and if I make a difference in their organization, it’s not just their organization, it’s probably their lives as well.” Or if they’re working at a big firm, “I love the complexity of the work that I do.” We hear a lot of those things.
So when we talk to candidates and speak to them about things that are going to check the right boxes, we focus on the things that we hear that excite them, and the things that drive them crazy, what’s the exact opposite of that? They get jazzed about work-life balance. “You mean I can work for a firm that I’m not going to be told in January that I gotta have 60 to 65 billable hours already?” Or, “I’m going to work for a firm that maybe they track hours, but it’s strictly to understand scope of work, it’s not for billing? I’m not going to get beat up every Friday because I didn’t work enough hours?” Those are huge. The ability for people to have the flexibility to have a life from 8 to 5, work for a firm that understands that, “Hey, I got two kids that are under the age of 12 years old and sometimes curveballs fly at me that I just don’t see coming, and I need somebody that understands that.” And somebody that understands that, while it may seem like a natural outflow for you guys or a lot of the other clients we work with, you’d be surprised still to this day, how many people just don’t get it. They don’t get it.
Those are things that when we talk to people, their eyes light up, they get a smile on their face, they’re excited about what we’re talking about. Compensation obviously plays into that. I think that we’re at a point in the world today in accounting where there’s not a huge disparity in compensation between firms. There’s some—there’s definitely some—but the thing that I talk to candidates about constantly whenever we start talking about compensation, especially if there’s other comp on the table from other opportunities they’re looking at, is you’re gonna earn every dime of that compensation. They’re going to get their value out of you at that comp for what they’re paying you.
We’ve got a candidate that just took an offer for another firm versus an offer that we had on the table that was an eight-year tax manager CPA at $175,000. It’s a mid-sized firm. It’s not a large national firm, it’s a mid-sized firm. But $175,000 plus a $10,000 sign-on. I’m very well aware of who the firm is. I know how they treat their people, and I let the person know, “Look, you’re going to earn every dime at $170,000, $175,000. You’re going to earn every dime at $170, $175. You are—you’re going to work for the money you’re getting. If you’re okay with that, God bless you. Go knock the cover off the ball.”
Yeah, I think that’s really helpful. So obviously a lot of accountants listen to us ramble on and talk about our mistakes—they probably all just backed up and highlighted what you shared as far as compensation. So can you share, you know, because going into even posting a job, maybe you don’t know what the compensation should be. And I know there are a variety of factors—you could probably speak to that as well, what drives the range of compensation—but what are some acceptable ranges for really looking at three different roles? Like an entry level, maybe bookkeeping, accounting, and then, like you said, that tax manager—I think that’s a really important role—and then the other one is everybody is looking for, you know, hopefully that director level, that advisor, that leader that can kind of get plugged into the firm. So could you share some ranges of what you see and even what impacts those ranges on those three different roles?
Absolutely. On that first tier that we’re talking about, that staff accountant, bookkeeper, accounting specialist kind of person, I think a lot of the things that drive compensation there are: do we need a degree? Do we not need a degree? If we need a degree, does it have to be an accounting degree or would you look at somebody with just, you know, any kind of a bachelor’s degree? So trying to understand what some of the requirements are there, but stereotypically what we’ll see as a comp for that type of position is anywhere from about $45 to $75k is kind of what we see. There’s obviously some that we’ve seen that are a little higher. There’s some that—well, we really haven’t seen any that are lower. Typically if we see something that’s lower, we’ll try to advise people, “Hey, you’re probably not gonna have a lot of success,” or they haven’t had success, and now they’re talking to us and we’ll let them know that’s why they haven’t had success. But stereotypically, that’s kind of a range that we see at that level. And it’s a workable range, again, depending on the skill set they’re looking for, someone’s looking for a degree with two to four years experience, they’re obviously gonna be at the higher end of that range. If they’re looking for somebody that is non-degreed with two or three years experience, there’s a wide range there they can look at.
At that manager level, there’s a pretty big window there. A lot’s gonna be driven by firm size. A lot’s gonna be driven—and when I say firm size, again, as I said a minute ago, there’s not a drastic difference from what we’ve seen over the last two to three years. There’s not a drastic difference in compensation once you start getting at a manager level and above. Now you start getting at partner level, principal level, yeah, there gets to be some differences there because maybe there’s a few more dollars to work with that are incentive-based. But at that tax manager level, we are seeing anywhere from—here’s the best way to answer that question. If I talked to a client and they said they’re looking for a tax manager, and the compensation was under $90,000, we’d be really hard-pressed to find somebody, even if we were looking for somebody that wasn’t certified yet. So at least $90,000 is kind of where we are advising clients that they need to be from a manager’s perspective, and that comp range could go all the way up to $150, $160k. Again, depending on the size of the firm, the complexity of the work, different variables are gonna come into play there. But that’s kind of what we’re seeing that’s a workable comp range that we feel like we can bring value to the table for a client.
At that advisor level, that senior manager, director level of a person, again, depending on the size of the firm, we’re gonna be looking for a client that’s compensating anywhere from about $130, $140k and north of that is where we would need to see compensation to be competitive. Again, a lot of it just depends on the size of the firm. Some of it becomes in that level, some of it does become geography. We’ve got a client that’s in Buffalo, New York that just hired a senior manager over their trust and estate group through us. The comp range we were at was a little bit north of $200k. We were looking at people with comparable experience in New York City and those guys were making $350 to $400,000. My advice to those guys was, “Hey, stay working in New York City because you’re not gonna make that outside of New York City unless you work for a firm based in probably San Francisco or LA or maybe Seattle.”
Yeah. You’re gonna give a lot of that back in taxes to the variety of different taxing authorities there. But no, that’s really helpful, those ranges.
There was a lady that I spoke with, ironically, for y’all’s role, that had the background that we were looking for, had all of the things that check the right boxes. She’s in LA. I mean, she was not gonna budge off $170, $175k base. I told her, “Look, I’m gonna be honest with you, in the market you’re in, you’re worth every dime you are asking for. I can’t sit here and tell you that you’re not gonna get it. You’re probably gonna get it from somebody. I just don’t have that on the roles that I’m working on right now,” based on the level of experience she had, what she brought to the table. But in the marketplace, she was in LA. If she looked at San Diego or San Francisco, she’d probably get what she was looking for.
So tell me a little bit about, or tell all of us a little bit about, are people still looking for completely in-office, local positions? Do you see mostly hybrid to remote? What is the makeup of the businesses and candidates you’re working with as far as, what do they request for location?
Here’s the best way I can answer that question: Time to fill. If we’re working a job that is 100% completely remote, I don’t care what the job is—it could be a staff accountant, it could be a senior manager, director, principal, partner. Obviously, you get a little higher, there’s some more nuances, but let’s just say staff accountant up to a manager. Our time to fill on a role like that is between 30 and 45 days. Hybrid role, in-office, two to three days a week, and when I say hybrid, I’m not talking about, “Hey, we’re flexible. They can be in the office whenever they want.” I’m talking there’s a schedule: “We need people in the office Monday, Tuesday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Monday, Friday,” whatever it may be. Time to fill on a role like that is between 45 days and three months. 100% in-office, our time to fill on a role like that is about seven and a half to eight months.
We’ve got a client in the DC area, they’re pretty much in office full-time. They’re off on Fridays, but they’re pretty much in office full-time. Through our Talent + Advisory model, we worked with them, took on all of their recruiting this past year—We were able to fill nine positions with them over the last year, staff level and up—but there was one senior manager, director-level job that we worked on, and we started working on that job in January of ’24. We had a candidate start in January of ’25. We got to the altar with a couple of people, but when it came down to really thinking about getting in my car four days a week and driving to the office, they pulled out.
Are there any other, I’ll call them red flags, but anything that gives candidates pause? So you’ve kind of presented this opportunity with a company, maybe they’ve had a discovery call with them—is there anything that they start to get cold feet or give pause and think, “I don’t know if I want to proceed with this company?”
I think probably the biggest thing that we see there is a slow process. People want to work for people that are decisive and know how to make decisions. We all sell candidates, everything you do in this process is a part of the interview process. Everything you do. Well, that sword has two sides to it. Everything that you do as a business owner and a business leader is a part of the interview process. If things get delayed, if there’s no communication, if things just drag on, that’s a red flag. We try to get clients to understand when you interview people, you need to approach the end of that interview with one of three very simple thoughts in mind: One, hire. Meaning if it’s up to me completely, we’re hiring this person. Now, there may be other steps in the process and we’re going to expedite those and move them along. Or, no, not hire, we’re passing. They don’t fit. My experience has been in three decades of doing this, whether I’m hiring people for me or interviewing people for my clients, when I hang the phone up, when I end a Zoom call, when I walk out of an interview, there’s a part of me that knows that—I know that I know this is a yes or this is a no.
Now, there is a small percentage that I’m not sure. And if that’s where we fall, then let’s figure out, what do we need so that we are sure? Do we need another interview? Do we need more data on the person? Do we need an assessment done? What has to happen to get us to either “hire” or “don’t hire?” If firms can move that process along or effectively communicate about what the delays are, what’s slowing things down—because those are things that people are going to take into account when they start looking at how you manage your people, how you run your firm, what am I going to encounter when I step into this organization.
So what you’re saying is don’t reach out to people at nine o’clock on a Saturday because they see that you’re working at nine o’clock on a Saturday, and they may see that as part of their future, so they may opt out of moving forward.
If people are going to do that, I would strongly advise, begin that message with, “Hey, I normally am not working on Saturday, but I’m catching up on some stuff.” This past Saturday, Cindy was gone, so I was working—or it was Sunday afternoon. I typically shut off Friday at five o’clock. Unplug, I’m out. But Sunday, I was working, and I was sending emails to people while I was bouncing back and forth between my office here and the game there, but I was sending every email and saying, “Hey, I’m normally not working on a Sunday, but here’s what I’m doing. My wife’s not here. I’m trying to catch up on some stuff. If you’re working or you’re available, great. If not, this can wait till Monday.” I think it’s important that you do that. That is a great observation, Marcus, because there are people that will do that.
I can tell you, speaking from experience, years ago, I was interviewing for a regional VP job with a firm out of Houston. The only communication, I wasn’t actively looking, a recruiter that reached out to me, and the only communication I would ever get from the president of the company was somewhere between 11 at night and 3 in the morning, every time. After about two weeks of that, I decided, you know what? I don’t think that’s the kind of life I wanna buy into.
Yeah, no that’s good.
I’ll share a little about our most recent hiring process, which follows how we typically do our hiring process. Typically when we have a candidate, I will have a discovery call with them. While it looks and sounds a whole lot like an interview, I don’t really ask any technical accounting questions at all during that call, I’m really looking for culture fit—are they going to fit with our team? Are they going to mesh well? How do they present, obviously, on camera—we hire remote people, so that’s kind of like, can they join the meeting with me? Does all of their technology work or do they know how to address it? If it doesn’t, I am literally analyzing every single thing during that call, even though not asking technical accounting questions. Then I save that for the people who would probably know the answers better than I do to those kinds of questions.
This last time, we had the discovery call with our candidate, and then we had already decided as a leadership team if we’re going to proceed, two dates and times, we had already set it, we had already put holds on our calendar just in case, so that way before Tiffany—who will be working with us—that way before Tiffany and I got off that call, we already went ahead and scheduled that. One was for a day later and one was for the Monday after the weekend that was coming up. They were very quick to come in, which I don’t typically like to move that fast. I like to take time in between to think about all of the things, to pray about it, to hear or see anything that comes up in between. But, that was really under Marcus’s suggestion of like, no, we need to move fast for this. This time, we need to go even faster than what we normally do. Then after that, when we got off the second call—our second, our actual interview is with our leadership team. That way everyone has had the opportunity to ask questions and we don’t have to go back to the candidate again. It’s either at that point, it’s a yes, we’re going to make an offer, or, thank you so much, we’re not going to proceed at this time. Thankfully, we were able to do all of that and move quickly.
John, I know you asked why are you having another interview already? Why is this not just an offer or a thank you for trying? I appreciate that, listening, time is of the essence.
I think that one of the things that we try to do is understand what does the process look like. That’s why I said if the answer is yes after that initial conversation and there are other calls that need to be had, other discussions that need to be had—like you guys did—let’s get those set up, let’s get this thing moving along. There’s a couple of mastermind groups and leadership groups in the staffing industry that I’m a part of, and we were talking about this the other day in one of our groups. I said, look, I don’t have a problem if the process is three steps long or 13 steps long. What I have a problem with is if the process is 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13 days long. That’s where it becomes a problem.
I think what we fail to understand when we’re hiring, and we try to convey it to the clients that we work with, is we may reach out to a candidate that maybe they’re not actively looking today, but if they sit down and put together a resume and send that resume to us, I don’t know statistically what that number is, but I gotta believe it’s north of 90% of those people sit down and think, “Well, you know what? If I put a resume together for John, and I’m going to look at this job, I might as well look and see what else is out there.” They’re gonna pop open Indeed, they’re gonna pop open LinkedIn. They’re gonna go to their LinkedIn messages and look at the 37 different messages they’ve got in the last three days from recruiters and see if anything looks interesting there, so this candidate that we talked to on Monday that wasn’t looking at all, somehow by Thursday, has five different opportunities they’re juggling.
Again, real life example: recruited a candidate last Friday for a client, presented to them on Monday, she got a resume to me on Sunday. She did a first interview on Tuesday with that client, she has a second interview, final interview tomorrow, but between Tuesday and today, she’s already got an offer on the table from another firm and has a final interview next Monday with another firm. It’s just that type of pace that’s gotta somehow figure out how to juggle getting comfortable with the situation but also addressing the needs of what’s happening in the marketplace right now.
Alright, I got two questions for you, man. I’m trying to leave listeners better off. As a firm owner, how do we protect our team from recruiters?
Oh, that is a great question, and it’s funny because I work with a content manager that we put together content for the next month, usually the last week of the month, and I was on that call before this one, and one of the things that we talked about was exactly that subject. I think probably one of the biggest things that firm owners can do to create an environment and a culture that they are putting up roadblocks from firms like ours is open, honest, candid communication. One of the things that people need to understand is that people don’t leave because of compensation, people don’t leave because something bad happened yesterday—they leave because there’s been a compiling of things that have brought them to this point.
Again, as an analogy, my wife and I do marriage mentoring and marriage coaching, and one of the things that we always talk to people about is ultimately, sometimes what causes a marriage to fall apart is not the salt in the green beans. And what I mean by that is, one of the biggest fights I ever saw my parents get into ever was over how much salt was in the green beans. Now what I didn’t know was there was a lot of stuff that was going on underneath at that time that ultimately caused my dad to blow up about how much salt was in the green beans. Obviously, they worked through it and spent the rest of their lives together, 68 years, but employment is the same way, Marcus. People don’t leave because of the salt in the green beans, because they didn’t get the raise they were wanting or because they didn’t get the promotion they were wanting. They leave because it’s just one of a stair-step or compiling of things that have been frustrating, and that’s driven by lack of communication, lack of transparency. Being open and honest with your people and letting them know, “Hey, what does your career look like here? What does the next step look like here? What have you got to do to get to the next level? What does a compensation increase look like? If you do X, Y, Z, what does that look like and what’s the timeframe that that looks like?” That is huge in the world we live in today.
The other thing is, we’ve got a group of people in the marketplace that want to be trusted, respected, they don’t feel micromanaged. Now obviously there are people maybe that aren’t delivering at a level they need to be delivering at, and there’s going to be a little bit of a tighter rein put on those people. But I think that so many times the lazy thing to do as a leader—and I’ve been there—is you manage to your lowest common denominator. And if this is the person that’s causing us to do all the things that we do that aren’t good, we just make everybody else live to that, and I think that is completely wrong in the world we live in today.
We’ve got a group of people in the marketplace today that want to be trusted, that want to be given latitude, that want to be given the opportunity to get the work done, sometimes not at the times that we want the work done, but it’s getting done. I think if people can do those things—and ironically, we keep a list of firms that we can’t recruit out of. And I don’t mean like they’re a client so we don’t recruit out of their firm. I’m talking about firms that it doesn’t matter what we say, what we dangle in front of them, what we offer them, statistically speaking, the response we always get is, “Thanks, but no thanks.” We keep the list of those firms and the reason why is those firms become the firms that we start doing business development with. Those are the firms that we want to work with.
That’s good. Yeah. Take care of your people, candid conversations, all the stuff that you know you should be doing. Because recruiters sometimes have a negative approach with recruiting: “You’re taking my people,” and then Intuit sends a postcard to the office asking for all this stuff. It’s like, your people are gonna throw those things away, or not respond, but it’s building and maybe one day they open that email on the wrong day.
Absolutely. You’re not gonna be able to win 100% of the time. But if you’re winning more times than you’re losing and holding onto your people, then that’s a win because, at the end of the day, you may not be the right place for somebody today, after they’ve been there 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years. Just like somebody in your firm that’s been there 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years may not be the right person for where you need to get to be tomorrow. It doesn’t make them a bad person; it doesn’t make you a bad place. It’s just not a good fit any longer. It may be five years from now, you come back together. But it’s all in how we handle those situations and if you create an environment that people want to be a part of, and you create that stickiness, that connective tissue that holds people on to the environment.
Yeah. Alright, so one of my last questions and then I’ll throw it back to Rachel. For people that are going to take a stab at trying to hire themselves, how long before that job posting goes stale and they really need to reach out to somebody like you who is qualified? And then, how do they know when they’re working with a good recruiter or not?
For the first part of your question, I think it really comes down to the individual and what they value their time at. If somebody has the bandwidth to spend hours looking at resumes of Firestone Tire changers—no disparaging remark to Firestone Tire changers that want to be accountants—and that’s not an exaggeration. We get at least one of those a month. If you want to spend your time digging through those resumes, then do it. Knock yourself out. But there’s a lot of time, energy, and effort that goes into that. I don’t know if there’s a magic answer for how long, it just really comes down to where do you place the value in your time in doing that. Do you have the bandwidth to do it? Do you have the energy and patience level to do it?
Because let’s face it, if you’re running a firm that is stereotypically what our client size is, which is about 10 to 12 employees up to 60 employees, that’s our target avatar. That’s the client we work with more times than not. More times than not, you are the person as the firm owner that’s doing that screening. Something tells me—you tell me if I’m wrong—something tells me you’re not doing that at two o’clock in the afternoon or ten o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday or Thursday. You’re doing that at eight o’clock at night while you’re trying to watch the latest episode of Friends. You’re doing that on Sunday afternoon at two in the afternoon while you’re trying to watch the AFC championship game. That’s when you’re doing it. And more firms than not don’t have a husband and wife duo like you guys. So a lot of times that firm owner, that firm leader is doing it while their spouse is in the back room or in the kitchen, deep breathing and sighing, shaking their head, wondering why, why are you doing this?
Oh, that still happens. It doesn’t matter that we work here.
Somebody has boundaries in our house, and someone, those boundaries are a little looser than the other.
So someone needs to understand where those boundaries lie? Yeah, that’s a whole other conversation we can have outside in our marriage coaching.
There you go.
I would say a lot of it just depends on the individual when it comes down to how do you know if you’re working with a good recruiter? To me, that’s an easy answer, and that is: are you working with somebody that understands your business? You guys get that. You are a fairly niche advisory, consulting, tax advisory, accounting firm. You know who your customers are. If customers come to you that are outside of your wheelhouse, you either dig in really deep to understand them, to determine whether or not you can work with them, and then if you work with them, you know there’s going to be more work to understand who they are, or you’re going to pass on them and say, “Hey, we’re probably not the best resource for you today.”
I think working with recruiters is the same way: Somebody that understands your business, somebody that understands the needs of a locally owned small to mid-size CPA firm is hyper-critical. We talked to a potential brand-new client that was referred to us out of Memphis the other day. You know, he’s worked with three or four other recruiters and he was talking about how, “I’m getting CFO resumes of people that used to be tax people or somebody that was the tax manager at company A, B, C, but they’ve been out of public accounting for 13 years and yeah, they’re doing taxes, but they’re working for a $2 billion organization. They don’t understand who our clients are.” So as a firm owner, digging into that recruiter, “Hey, how much of your business makeup is in public accounting? How much of your business makeup in public accounting is outside of the top 100 CPA firms out there? What percentage of your placements last year were with locally owned, small to mid-size public accounting firms? Oh, and by the way, if this doesn’t work out, what’s my recourse from a financial standpoint? Because I’m not a $100 million firm. I’m a $4 million firm, $5 million firm. So cutting you a check, let’s just say for $100,000, the average fee’s going to be $25,000 to $30,000. That’s a lot of money. So when I cut that check, what’s my recourse if this doesn’t work out?”
And if that’s Matt from Memphis, I owe him a text back because he was asking about it.We’re talking at four today, by the way.
Good!
John, I just want you to know that we often get asked by our accounting friends, so firm owners, and firm leaders in accounting firms, how do we hire? Have we ever used a recruiter? How much does it cost? Was it worth it? And even though our candidate hasn’t even had their first day when we’re recording this, I can say that it was 100% worth it.
I think it’s a testament to you, your character, and the integrity of wanting what’s best both for our firm and for the candidate, because it’s what’s best for both of those things.
Thank you.
Yes, there’s a little incentive because if it doesn’t work out, you have to start all over and look for a new candidate to fill that position. But I think honestly, even the coaching and encouragement that you provided during the process for both sides—for the candidate as well as for us, to make sure that we both got the best fit possible—was very much appreciated and very much worth it. It doesn’t even matter how it plays out after that first process. From the beginning, the whole process with you was top notch. Just for anybody who’s wondering, would we do it again? Yes, we would do it again. Just so painless and fruitful and encouraging of an experience that we would 100% do it again. John, we’ll make sure your information is there in case anyone else is in the same position of needing to hire candidates for their firm.
I appreciate it. That really means a lot, because when we started down this path in 2018, I made it very clear to my family as well as our staff and our team that we are going to work with people that are just like us—we’re going to work with people that are small business owners that every single time they write a check, there’s some weight to it. We are not going to work with firms where we’re just one of the masses. That means that we’re probably not going to have a ton of volume from clients. That’s okay. We want to make a difference one firm at a time, one person at a time, and we know that that’s going to continue to build upon itself if we do that right and we do it with everybody’s best interest in mind, and it’s worked.
Well, thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time, thank you for answering all of our questions and even providing more than we could have ever thought to ask. Thank you for being here and sharing what you do so well with everyone.
I appreciate the opportunity to be here, you guys. I love your podcast. I watch and listen to it quite often, so I love what you guys are doing. Love what you are doing in the industry, in the space itself. I’ve referred several people to your collective cohort because I think that what you guys are doing to help people run more effective and efficient firms is amazing. So you guys keep doing what you’re doing as well, and I’m excited to be just a little part of that.
Yeah. Well, thanks, man. I know that you’re just listening to that to get more content on what not to do for your marriage counseling. So appreciate you being here and we’ll make sure that people know how to find you. Thanks so much for your time today and we’ll see you soon.
Thanks a lot.
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