When the millennials first started entering the accounting profession at the very beginning of the century, hiring managers and firm partners were astonished to discover in salary negotiations and annual reviews that this new generation often brought up other priorities than pay.
"These millennials," they whispered to each other, with growing excitement, "they don't care about money!"
And for a year or two, that was considered the secret to managing millennials: They didn't care about money; instead, they cared about life experiences and work-life balance, and giving back to their communities, and making a difference, and they cared about having input in the way the firm was run; so as long as you gave them some of that, you didn't have to pay them particularly well.
This was, of course, pure wishful thinking.
Millennials need to eat, and they like to sleep indoors and to save for retirement just like everyone else, so money was just as important to them as it was to preceding generations. The difference was that they were also interested in all those other things — and they saw no reason not to ask for them. Where it would never have occurred to Gen Xers or boomers to ask for work-life balance, or "Dress for Your Day" policies, or for time off pursue some personal goal, millennials saw no reason not to, and because staffing shortages and succession issues gave them some leverage, firms had to start offering those kinds of perks (to the benefit of every generation, it should be noted).
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Hiring managers and partners learned fairly quickly that they weren't going to be able to pay lower salaries in return for all those new benefits — but they didn't learn the more important lesson that entry-level accounting salaries were, in fact, too low already. In fact, I'd suggest that, consciously or not, firms adopted the attitude that they didn't need to offer pay that was competitive with the tech or finance sectors precisely because they were rewarding staff in all those other ways.
It seemed for a while in this decade that the Great Resignation and the growing impact of the pipeline problem had alerted firms to the need for more competitive pay, and entry-level salaries have risen somewhat over the past couple of years, but I've begun to hear hints of a resurgence of older attitudes — in hopeful descriptions of Gens Alpha and Z as being more interested in, say, a sense of purpose in their work than in money, as well as gleeful references to the very slight increases in accounting program enrollments.
So, just to make this clear once and for all: No matter what other priorities members of a generation may have, no matter what benefits they may ask for, money matters to all of them. They would like to make more of it, and they will leave your firm (and maybe the profession) if they don't get it. The other stuff matters too — but the money has to be there from the start.
