When it comes to hiring and retaining talent within the accounting industry, it's important to recognize that hiring and retention are two distinct issues. This article focuses on the hiring problem, with a possible future article addressing retention.
To solve the hiring problem, we should think like marketers:
Identify and Understand Your Target Audience (Using the Golden AGE method)
Assess How Well Your Organization Addresses Their Problems
Communicate Value Effectively to Your Desired Target Audience
Leverage Multiple Channels for Maximum Reach (Using the Golden AGE method)
1. Identify and Understand Your Target Audience
What Problem Are We Trying to Solve for Potential New Hires?
Many organizations struggle to understand the problem they solve for potential new hires because they focus mostly on the company’s needs. When the hiring process is solely about what the company needs, it often leads to staff dissatisfaction and high turnover. A more effective approach is to consider how this job is going to give the new hire what they need.
Understanding Potential New Hires' Needs and Preferences
To understand the problems potential new hires face, I recommend using the Golden AGE approach. This process helps identify a score that measures the quality, strength, and effectiveness of your company’s recruiting process.
Here’s a breakdown of what the acronym means for us:
Average: an approach that does the bare minimum level of effort
Good: an approach that identifies key valuable insights to help you become more effective
Excellent: an approach that creates value and shares that value with others
Here are some examples of how this scoring system can be applied to your company's efforts to understand the needs of your new hires.
Average approach: Your company gathers basic information on the motivations and preferences of potential new hires. Some ways that you might do this might be to 1) have conversations with your youngest staff members and ask for their opinions, and 2) ask recruiting agencies what they are seeing regarding new hires.
Good approach: Conduct in-depth research to identify trends and key motivators for potential new hires. Some of the ways that you approach this might be: 1) Research YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn content to see what are people saying about a career in accounting, 2) look for people who are making “New Career” announcements and try to see if there is a trend or common themes related to the companies that they chose to work with.
Excellent approach: Create engaging and interactive content to directly gather insight and provide advice and tips to potential new hires. Some of the ways that you can use this approach might be 1) host a podcast where you interview potential new hires and ask them about their career preferences, 2) host a webinar with live Q&A on tips and best practices to have a successful accounting career.
Important NOTE: A marketing mindset tells us to never assume that you know what your audience wants unless you actually engage with them first. Also, as you put serious effort into understanding the needs of your potential new hires you will realize that “having a job and making money” may not be the most important need that your potential hires are trying to solve for.
2. Assessing How Well Your Organization Addresses Potential New Hires' Problems
Once you understand the problems that your new hires are trying to solve, you need to evaluate how well your organization addresses those problems. This will help you identify which potential hires are a good fit and which are not. For example, a potential new hire who wants to have an in-office work experience is not a good fit for our firm. Our firm, the TL Turner Group, is fully remote with staff in 4 different countries, so we know that the in-office experience is not something we can or desire to offer at the moment.
3. Communicate Value Effectively
Once you understand how well your organization addresses potential new hire problems, you want to develop messaging that tells others what problems you are good at solving and who you solve them for. Think about it this way, you could be the best company that can provide your ideal potential new hires with what they want but if no one ever hears about it your ideal new hires will go elsewhere. Consider adding blogs, photos or videos to your website, or creating a social media page about your company and the staff experience.
4. Leverage Multiple Channels for Maximum Reach
To enhance your ability to spread the word about your solution use a multi outlet approach to reach your audience. Here’s another area where The Golden AGE Method comes into play:
Average approach: Update your website with an “About Us” page that includes photos.
Good approach: Actively post on social media, attend recruiting events, and host webinars that talk about the work experience for your staff.
Excellent approach: Capture and create footage (video, audio or photos) of existing and potential staff engaging in the benefits of what your company has to offer while offering advice that can help staff further their careers
Note: The key to improving your approach is to focus less on just trying to get what you want, instead start proactively creating value for others first.
Conclusion
By taking a “marketers” approach to solving the new hire attraction problem and using the Golden AGE approach to score your efforts, you can create a more effective strategy to attract the right staff.
"This is a paid partnership with Intuit."
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