The accounting profession is facing a significant talent crunch, a reality echoed by recent reports by Forbes, indicating that a staggering 83% of financial leaders experienced a talent shortage in 2024. This isn’t just a fleeting trend; many accountants and auditors have exited the profession in the last three years, far outstripping the number of new graduates entering the field. For businesses relying on robust financial management, this scarcity translates into a complex and often frustrating hiring landscape. But understanding the challenges is the first step towards overcoming them.
Here are the top 5 hurdles in recruiting accounting professionals and actionable strategies to clear them:
- To hire finance and accounting professionals offshore, you need to set up an entity, which incurs substantial costs, time, and resources. Preparing necessary documentation, scheduling meetings with the relevant authorities to seek approvals, and hiring a recruitment and operations team typically takes days to weeks, and sometimes, months. By the time your entity is established, top talent may already have been hired by someone else, or your recruitment budget may have decreased considerably, leaving you with no option other than to hire mediocre professionals.
- Every country has its labor laws. While some laws may overlap, others will be unique. When hiring accountants overseas, you must have a sound understanding of the labor laws to ensure your company stays compliant and stays away from the consequences of non-compliance, such as hefty penalties, legal suits, and more. This applies regardless of the country from which you are hiring talent, and the type of talent, whether a full-time worker or a contractor.
- Many companies struggle to attract and hire top finance and accounting talent with the desired skills and qualifications. It could be due to weak job descriptions, a slow or disorganized hiring process, or simply because the offered pay is too low to carry out the roles and responsibilities.
- If you wish to choose traditional staffing agencies to hire talent, they will charge huge markups, which are often 30-50% of the talent’s monthly pay, along with other hidden fees. Now, this approach has many downsides. Firstly, your overall recruitment budget will get impacted due to the inflated fee charged by them. Secondly, you will not be able to offer industry-standard pay to your talent, as most of your hiring budget will be consumed by the agency fee.
- When you hire bookkeepers from India as contractors, you may not get the guarantee that they will work 100% on your projects. Most of these contractors, hired by staffing agencies, often work for multiple clients simultaneously. You may have hired them for a certain amount, but their exclusivity to your company remains uncertain. For instance, you may have hired them to work 8 hours a day, but they might only be working half of that time and spending the other half on another client’s project. The ROI you are receiving is just 50% of what you are paying for the resource.
One way to overcome the above accounting talent hiring challenges is to leverage Employer of Record or Agent of Record (EOR/AOR). This is a specialized entity that hires and manages top talent for companies based on their resource requirements. EORs also assume the employer’s obligations, ensuring zero risk to the company and 100% compliance with the country’s labor laws. Here’s how they can help you overcome the above challenges:
- With EORs, there’s no need to establish a physical entity in any country where you are hiring, as they already have their entities in most countries. Their teams of experienced recruiters have been working in the staffing industry for many years and have served a broad range of companies across various industries. Based on your talent requirements, they will source the most qualified and ideal candidates, facilitate interviews, and manage the entire onboarding and payroll process, ensuring zero employer liability to your company.
- An Employer of Record (EOR) serves as the legal employer for your international workforce, shouldering the responsibility for understanding and adhering to all local labor laws in each country. They manage compliant employment contracts, handle accurate payroll and tax withholdings, administer statutory and locally competitive benefits, and ensure all necessary filings with local authorities are completed. This comprehensive legal and administrative coverage significantly reduces your company’s exposure to fines and legal challenges, allowing you to confidently hire global talent without needing to establish your own entities in each new market.
- While primarily managing legal employment, an EOR contributes to talent attraction by enabling you to offer locally competitive and compliant benefits packages, even without a local entity. Their streamlined onboarding process enhances your employer brand, and by freeing your internal teams from administrative burdens, they can focus on crafting compelling job descriptions and engaging more deeply with candidates. Most importantly, an EOR allows you to expand your talent search globally, accessing a wider pool of accounting professionals with specialized skills that might be scarce in your home market.
- An EOR offers a more transparent and cost-effective alternative to traditional staffing agencies for long-term engagements. They typically operate on a transparent fee structure, which is generally more predictable than high markups. This allows you to allocate more of your hiring budget directly to the accounting professional’s salary and benefits, enabling you to offer truly industry-standard pay and attract top-tier talent.
- The EOR ensures a formal employment relationship, with clear employment contracts outlining dedicated working hours and performance expectations, ensuring their commitment solely to your projects during work hours. They can formalize contractor engagements with detailed contracts defining the scope of work and deliverables, protecting your intellectual property. EORs minimize complexities that may arise in achieving full exclusivity for true independent contractors and ensure your company gets full control over project management and performance oversight, maximizing your return on investment.
In essence, an EOR acts as a strategic partner, removing the complexities and risks associated with international hiring. By leveraging their expertise in global labor laws, payroll, and HR administration, businesses can confidently expand their talent search for accounting professionals, secure top talent with competitive offerings, optimize their hiring budget, and ensure a dedicated, compliant, and productive global workforce.
