iscoverOver 90 per cent of firms can’t fill key roles. That’s not just a recruitment issue – it’s a growth ceiling. The firms that break through won’t win on salary alone, but on the experience they offer their people, writes Clare Willenberg.
Beyond salaries: How small firms can win accounting’s talent war
17 September 2025
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10 minute read
The numbers don't lie. According to CA ANZ, over 90 per cent of accounting firms are struggling to fill roles with qualified talent. The result? Vacant positions, delayed reporting, and increased compliance risk that keep partners awake at night.
Many practices are scrambling for quick fixes – expensive outsourcing, rushed automation implementations, or throwing money at recruitment agencies during peak periods. But these are band-aid solutions to a structural problem.
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The firms that will thrive in the coming years aren't necessarily those with the biggest budgets or the flashiest offices. They're the ones that understand a fundamental truth: today's accounting professionals aren't just looking for a job – they're looking for an experience, a purpose, and a path forward.
This is where your employee value proposition (EVP) becomes your secret weapon.
The anatomy of a winning EVP
Your EVP isn’t HR jargon – it's the total of what someone gains from working at your firm beyond their salary. Think of it as your firm's promise to employees about what they'll experience, learn, and become during their time with you.
A strong EVP has five core components:
- Career development opportunities: not just annual reviews, but genuine skill-building, mentorship, and clear progression paths.
- Work environment and culture: the day-to-day experience of working at your firm, including flexibility, autonomy, and how people treat each other.
- Leadership and management quality: access to partners, quality of supervision, and clarity around how decisions are made and communicated.
- Purpose and impact: understanding how their work contributes to the overall success of their clients and the firm.
- Total rewards: yes, this includes salary, but also benefits, recognition, and non-monetary perks that matter to your specific workforce.
The expectation gap: what employees want vs. what leaders assume
Here's where most firms get it wrong. They assume they know what their team wants based on what motivated them 10-15 years ago when they were starting out.
The Hays 2025 Skills Report reveals some eye-opening insights about evolving candidate expectations. While competitive salaries remain important, today's accounting professionals are increasingly prioritising:
- Flexible work arrangements: and this goes well beyond working from home two days a week. The four-day work week is gaining serious traction, with some firms reporting improved productivity and staff retention.
- Meaningful career development: employees want to see a clear path from compliance work to advisory services, with the training and support to make that transition successfully.
- Technology fluency: rather than fearing automation, many accountants want to work for firms that are embracing technology to eliminate mundane tasks and create more interesting, strategic work.
- Work-life integration: not just balance, but genuine integration where personal and professional goals can coexist.
It’s important to stay up to date with the current expectations of job seekers, and equally important to ensure that you are meeting your employees’ needs, which naturally evolve throughout their different career and life stages.
Small firms' secret advantage
Here's the thing that should give every small firm owner confidence: you have natural advantages that Big Four and mid-tier firms simply cannot replicate, no matter how hard they try.
Direct client exposure from day one: your junior staff aren't filing away in some back office. They're meeting clients, seeing the real impact of their work, and building relationships that will serve them throughout their careers.
Personalised career development: in a 200-person firm, individual development can get lost in corporate programmes. In your 10-person practice, you can craft personalised development opportunities around each person's specific goals and interests.
Genuine work/life balance: while larger firms talk about flexible work arrangements in policy documents, you can actually implement them. You know when Sarah needs to leave early for her son's soccer game, and you can make it work.
Faster decision-making and change implementation: when you decide to adopt new technology or change a process, it can happen in days, not quarters.
Access to leadership: your team members don't need to book meetings through executive assistants to share ideas with decision-makers.
Practical steps to audit and enhance your EVP right now
You don’t need a 6-month HR project to overhaul your EVP. Here are five things you can do in the next 30 days.
Seek employee feedback – stop assuming and start asking. Schedule one-on-one conversations with each team member to understand what they value most about working at your firm and what they wish was different. Use specific questions like:
- "What part of your work gives you the most satisfaction?"
- "Where do you see yourself professionally in two years?"
- "What would make you more excited about coming to work each Monday?"
Identify your differentiators: list everything your firm offers that larger competitors cannot or will not match. This might include direct partner mentorship, diverse client exposure, or genuine input into firm strategy.
Test your messages: before you update the careers page of your website or recruitment materials, test your EVP messages with current employees. Do they ring true? Would they use similar language to describe working at your firm to a friend?
Align your practices with your promises: the fastest way to damage your employer brand is to promise things in recruitment that you don't deliver day-to-day. If you're promoting work-life balance, make sure your partners aren't sending emails at 10 PM expecting immediate responses.
Make it visible: your EVP isn't much use if only you know about it. Integrate it into your recruitment process, onboarding, performance reviews, and day-to-day management practices.
The bottom line
The war for talent isn't going anywhere. Technology will create new opportunities but also new skill requirements. Client expectations will continue to evolve. The firms that will thrive are those that recognise their people as their primary competitive advantage and invest accordingly.
Your size isn't your limitation, it's your opportunity. While your larger competitors are bogged down in corporate bureaucracy and treating employees as resources to be optimised, you can create genuine relationships, meaningful development opportunities, and the kind of workplace people actually want to be part of.
The question isn't whether you can afford to invest in your EVP. It's whether you can afford not to.
Clare Willenberg is the Founder of The Happy Hive Co.
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