The People Who Count

Smaller firms are following suit. Newton, Massachusetts-based Braver Accountants & Advisors PC maintains alumni contact information on its company intranet and is considering inviting former employees to its summer outing this year. When Beers & Cutler PLLC, based in Vienna, Virginia, faced the prospect of losing a class of potential hires to Virginia's new "five-year" (academic) requirement for CPA certification, the firm offered to pay students' additional tuition if they agree to work part-time or commit to joining the firm after completing their schooling. "We couldn't wait another year for those people to be available," says the firm's managing partner, Ed Offterdinger.

Many accounting firms now emphasize an "employee first" approach, says Koltin, in contrast to the "client first" approach of previous eras. At Braver that translates into on-site yoga and massages, and the chance to watch March Madness basketball games on new large-screen TVs in order to ease the pain of working on Saturdays during busy season. "We're upping the ante on everything this year so people will be happy when they go out to clients," says Alison K. Simons, marketing manager for Braver, which has stopped publishing the names of new hires or managers on its Website for fear that recruiters will come calling. The larger aim of such perks is to create a sense of camaraderie at the firm so "people would feel like they'd be abandoning their friends if they left," Simons explains.

Regional firms are also adding a new tier of incentives known as "nonequity partnerships" to retain valued managers who may not want to become full partners. According to a recent survey by the trade journal Inside Public Accounting, nearly 20 percent of non-national firms now offer senior managers such carrots, up from 11 percent 4 years ago. The focus on retention "is beyond anything I've ever seen," says Koltin, who has worked as a CPA and a consultant to firms over the past 26 years.

To Market, to Market
Companies, it seems, have little choice but to follow suit. "You'd think you'd just have to raise salaries to get supply in line with demand, but that's not true," says Jon Zion, president of eastern U.S. operations for Robert Half International, which tracks CFOs' forecasted hiring. "Companies are getting very creative about accommodating the quality of life and professional issues that matter to people." They are also making the hiring a priority. "In the past, we'd find a few recruiters and let them go off and find candidates," says Stuart West, vice president of finance at TiVo Inc., "but now our entire team has a sense of urgency" about finance hiring. As one sign of the times, the company's search for a new head of internal audit spanned not just weeks or months but several quarters.

Not that compensation is unimportant. Fifty percent of CFOs surveyed say they do plan to loosen the purse strings not only to attract new hires but to retain current staff as well. "Very often," says Mobile Mini's Trachtenberg, "a finance person starts with a company, gets annual increases, and then suddenly looks up and realizes they're 20 to 30 percent under market," prompting the person to leave in order to get the market rate. To stem the outflow in his 12-person finance department, he has at times given staff members as much as a 30 percent salary increase to get them up to market. "It's a big dilemma — how do you justify giving someone a raise like that when they didn't really demand it, but on the other hand, you know it's just a matter of time [before they leave if you don't]?" he says.

Another response is to focus on job content — in particular, splitting up onerous jobs among several people or even outsourcing certain tasks to avoid burning out one person. That's what TiVo did last year when it finally filled that internal-audit position. While the previous person in that role had responsibility for internal controls and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, West says that the job has been reconfigured to include coordinating internal resources as well as outside service providers. "We felt that was an important way to make the position attractive," says West, "and it's better for controls to have more checks and balances." And, after job burnout compelled its previous controller to leave the profession, TiVo has also focused on lightening the load of current controller Anna Brunelle by boosting the skills of employees reporting to her.

In addition to recrafting jobs, CFOs also face the more daunting task of recrafting entire career paths. Creating "promotability" has become "the biggest challenge in keeping existing employees satisfied," says Lanny Baker, senior vice president and CFO at Monster Worldwide. Most of the 25 people who report to him at Monster's New York headquarters spent four to seven years at CPA firms and have been with Monster for about three years, making them ripe for a change. The dilemma is that new jobs would likely mean global relocation and travel — the other 100 finance positions are in units across the United States and Europe — and "it's hard to get people in corporate to feel like they're getting ahead by going out in the field," Baker says.

That's true even at the largest companies. "You have to show them they have a career path here or they might go somewhere else," says Dell CFO Jim Schneider. To keep his international finance team of 4,500 from "feeling like the only way they can get promoted is to wait for someone to move or retire," Schneider relies on formal job categories that make it easier for him to track available positions, and he holds quarterly discussions with other top managers regarding the career prospects for a group of 60 to 100 finance employees. "We don't want to have everyone 'stovepiped.' We're trying to look at people across the organization and provide rotational assignments," he explains. "It could be an international assignment or movement from one area of finance to another to enhance employee development and have people who understand all parts of our business." He has also tried to instill a sense of ownership into his team by having as many as 100 of his nearly 2,000 U.S. finance employees serve on committees associated with employee retention, training, and career development.

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