In a typical year, senior-level professionals at MarksNelson wouldn’t be able to take a half-day away from busy season work to sit at a job fair booth on campus and chat with students about career opportunities at the Kansas City-based firm. But since the pandemic, these firm leaders are logging onto virtual recruiting events to answer prospects’ myriad questions, in one of several ways the firm has capitalized on the challenges COVID-19 has thrust upon its traditional recruitment efforts.
The shift to remote work has widened the scope of MarksNelson’s hiring efforts at all levels, including the kind of experienced talent the firm has been seeking to support its growth in recent years.
“We feel the need for more experienced-hire recruiting, to be more diverse,” explained human resources director Laura McIntosh. “We took a long, hard look — what works for the traditional intern or new graduate won’t work for an experienced hire. The culture at MarksNelson is to grow and develop new talent and future leaders — to promote from within and hope to have lower turnover than is standard in our industry. As we’ve grown in recent years, and branched into new niche service markets, and new services to clients, we find we can’t grow from within quickly enough and have been forced to reach out to those with specialized experience in certain markets and services.”
While the pandemic has hindered traditional recruitment activities, McIntosh reports that overall the “new normal” gives MarksNelson an advantage in the notoriously competitive market for experienced CPA talent.
“It opened our eyes to casting a broader net,” McIntosh shared. “We are considering talent we had not before, because they couldn’t relocate to our corporate offices, or couldn’t commute.”
MarksNelson had already begun dissolving some of those barriers when it transitioned one of its partners to be fully remote before the pandemic began.
“Our first partner to work 100 percent remotely was a big hurdle that a lot of our competition hasn’t gotten to,” McIntosh explained. “They say they are open to remote workers, but at the partnership level, there’s uneasiness there. We are committed to being flexible and making it work. And it’s astonishing how successful it’s been.”
Leveling the field
While MarksNelson has ramped up its efforts to find and attract more senior talent, McIntosh stressed that the firm continues to pursue new hires at every level.
Both the firm’s college recruitment efforts and summer leadership internship program moved online in 2020, giving MarksNelson some unforeseen advantages over the usual job fairs and office visits.
“The summer leadership program went virtual, and [the goal] was to not make it as valuable, but more valuable,” said McIntosh. “In some ways, not being able to physically go to a recruitment fair introduced students to more senior staff. During busy season, they interacted with students we would not have been able to get in front of them before. We would not be able to send a partner to a job fair during busy season.”
Now, McIntosh continued, more of MarksNelson’s senior-level professionals were available to answer students’ questions over video. And what the firm might sacrifice in terms of the quantity of potential future employees passing through an on-campus booth, they made up for in quality of prospects.
“With the virtual recruiting events, there are not a mass number of students,” McIntosh shared. “There’s not a big hall on campus with hundreds of students, in traffic, stopping for the freebies given out … . The volume goes down, which we’ve seen with competitors as well, and the quality of interactions has gone up. They interact with firms, are more prepared, and are interested in your firm specifically, bringing questions.”
MarksNelson currently has 22 interns, with the majority of them joining the roughly quarter of MarksNelson’s employees who now register to come into the firm’s physical offices and follow social-distancing guidelines.
“The interns with us are working in the office primarily, with some remote,” McIntosh explained. “Where we could, we have in-person training, which is more important at the internship level. For experienced hires, [training] is more remote — we adjusted to training remotely on the fly. We have the same steps, the same information, but we share screens now instead of standing at a desk. There’s something lost in not having that nonverbal interaction. People tend to not ask the same number of questions, so we pull questions and assure them we are available to them, and they are not interrupted.”
Post-pandemic
MarksNelson is eager to return to those in-person interactions between staff, though McIntosh acknowledged that other pandemic-era practices will likely remain on the other side of the crisis. “What will have a lasting effect, from a college recruiting perspective, is a lot of colleges will host virtual recruiting events into the future — if not solely virtual, then a virtual option,” she predicted. “We are finding students do a lot more interviewing with a lot more employers virtually.”
Additionally, McIntosh reports that more employers are hosting their own recruiting activities outside school-sponsored events, which MarksNelson plans to do this year with the hopes of reaching more regional colleges that they have not hired from in the past.
The firm also plans to continue seeking talent outside the Kansas City area. In addition to the firm’s remote partner in Minnesota, MarksNelson also has fully remote staff members in Texas and Florida, with the anticipation of continuing the trend for roles where distanced work makes functional sense. Because, as McIntosh explained, what’s necessary during the pandemic may not be compatible with future needs. “People are going to be cautious as they expand the net for recruiting,” she said. “Just because we are working remotely now, it’s not that anywhere in the world is fine. Our consultants are licensed in different states, there are barriers to operating in different states, or we want them to do business development in a state, or just work remotely in that state.”
MarksNelson’s recruitment approach is thus guided by “intent and thought,” according to McIntosh. “We cast a wider net, regionally, in the Midwest. We have a cautious approach. If it works, where the comfort zone is, how far afield [will we go] — these are questions, conversations we were not having at all two years ago.”
