Sidestep your recruitment issues

It seems that everyone is looking for experienced professional staff right now; quality seniors and managers who can help them to manage their firm better, deliver on client experience and provide the opportunity to delegate, freeing up their own time to grow the firm.   As a profession we’ve failed to develop and attract the necessary skills and personalities over the last decade to meet this demand and its leaving many partners with a headache: “How am I supposed to move my firm forwards if I don’t have the time and people to do it?”

In the medium term, I’m a big fan of recruiting people with the right personalities and characteristics, people who are a great fit for the firm’s culture, values and ethos, and then training them into the roles. However, that doesn’t solve the short term issue.

Whilst partners search for a ready-made solution, there can be a tendency to put the development and ambition of the firm on hold until they are found. In the current recruitment market place this can be many months, even years. Rather than put the firm on ice, or make the error of recruiting a ‘nearest fit’ because time is passing, my advice is to take a different look at what you are trying to achieve to see if what you already possess, or is more readily recruitable, can provide a different, more effective, solution.

Client management and process management, including the management of outsourced services, doesn’t necessarily require a technical person to fulfil the role since the key skill is the ability to manage. Partners and professional staff often spend a lot of time not managing quality but managing process. Whilst they may be trained in quality control, process management is an entirely different skill set and one which many non-accountants can do.

A non-technical manager, with people and organisational skills, armed with a checklist that meets the needs of professional quality control, can manage work flows, information flows and people often far more effectively than a good ‘accountant’ who can deliver expertise and quality but not necessarily efficiency.

The old model that has the accountant central to pretty much every production task doesn’t work if you can’t access the accountant or make them efficient enough within the process.

Team members with operational and people skills are just as valuable and can free up significant time by releasing technical professional staff from organisational tasks.

Just because your products and services are accounting related, not every internal task has to be accountant allocated. Use the best people with the best skills to deliver the best, and most profitable, outcomes.

Worth a rethink maybe?