CCH and H&R Block signed an agreement that gives Block tax preparers and franchisees access to tax-training courses from the online CCH Learning Center.

Workstream introduced an on-demand compensation-planning system, Workstream Compensation Professional, aimed at midsized companies.

Attracting fresh talent isn’t an impossible dream, but get them while they’re young and still in school. Establishing relationships with universities and individual college professors helps Grant Thornton attract the best students. But even small firms without big budgets can focus on recruiting at the local level, especially if they start the process when the students are still impressionable sophomores. By the time they have their diplomas in hand, most grads already have made up their minds as to where they want to work, according to Ed Nusbaum, Grant Thornton’s CEO and executive partner. Investing in them for a summer internship—even when the workload is light—could pay off when they become seniors, he says. The good news is that many of those young prospects are making conscious decisions to start their careers on a smaller scale. “When I pursued accounting, everyone looked at the Big 8, and Grant Thornton was No. 9. Nobody went anywhere else,” says Nusbaum, an Ohio State University alumnus who began working for Grant Thornton nearly three decades ago. “Today, the top six to seven firms attract the majority, but people go straight into industry or with local firms. Back then, if you did that, professors would say you’re crazy—and they have a lot of influence.” The American Institute of CPAs is targeting an even younger audience, high schoolers. Start Here, Go Places, is the AICPA’s student recruitment campaign, aimed at “building awareness” and “changing perceptions” about the profession. It connects students to a Web site that speaks their language, using words like “awesome,” providing ways for them to “get a leg up” on other college applicants by taking business courses in high school and offering quick facts, such as the inventor of bubble gum was an accountant. There are even video clips with real-life CPAs who drive—get ready for this—Corvettes (That means they’re cool.) This content is relevant to its readers and feels more like something they’d find in Seventeen magazine than, well, an accounting publication. No one knows how many kids say “I want to be an accountant when I grow up.” But at least they are learning that the profession exists and that jobs are available. Enron might have made those jobs more difficult, but it also drove awareness and made the thought of becoming an auditor “more enticing,” Nusbaum says. But work-life balance is also important, as much of a cliché as that may be. There’s no denying the fact that most teens don’t envision themselves working around the clock. Thirty years ago, when Nusbaum began his accounting career, he worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day, from January to March. On Sundays, he left at 5 p.m. “That was the easy day,” he says. Today, people put in a lot less time in the office. Kids don’t say they want “work-life balance.” They say they “want to have a life.” And the perception today is that accountants do have lives because people like Nusbaum are helping to influence their views and shape the next generation of CPAs.

Three academics from the U.K. who have written a book about auditing, and a Virginia professor who has developed a taxation education curriculum, will receive awards from Deloitte & Touche’s not-for-profit Deloitte Foundation.

Accounting and finance workers are slightly more optimistic about their jobs and the overall economy, according to a quarterly survey commissioned by recruitment company Spherion and conducted by Harris Interactive.

Carol Stacey, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporate Finance, has become vice president of The SEC Institute, an organization that holds conferences and workshops around the country to explain SEC and PCAOB rules and regulations.

KPMG, through its private foundation, has awarded 10 more $10,000 minority doctoral scholarships for accounting students, on top of the 35 it has already handed out in the 2007-2008 academic year.

Put a dozen managers and executives from financial planning firms in the same room, and before too long the conversation is likely to turn to the business issue that concerns them all: profitability. Whether they represent a one-person shop or are part of a large corporate structure, planners are almost universally challenged to serve the needs of their clients at a profit.To achieve that profitability, you must first address two other challenges - those presented by staffing and compensation. Getting the right people in place, giving them the tools to excel, and rewarding them for performance are all critical steps in achieving profitable growth.

RSM McGladrey has introduced Firm Foundation, an association and program for small CPA firms that gives them tools and training in areas such as practice management and marketing.Firms with approximately 10 to 30 full-time employees can join the association. Members get access to technical tools for tax and auditing, as well as assistance in succession planning, recruiting, people management, profitability, growth, human resources and technology.

A tax manager who left her firm in Hawaii and moved to South Carolina was the subject of a very interesting article in the July 2007 Boomer Bulletin from Boomer Consulting Inc. What was so interesting was that not much changed for the Hawaiian firm, as she continues to work for it remotely from South Carolina.

Sage Software has hired a new head of human resources functions in North America, appointing Lisa Codispoti as chief people officer.The company, a subsidiary of the U.K.-based Sage Group, employs more than 5,000 people.

Chief financial officers are split on the importance of an accounting graduate’s university when evaluating a candidate for an entry-level job, says a new survey.Forty-nine percent of the 1,400 U.S. CFOs polled by the staffing service Accountemps said the prestige of the candidate’s university was not important at all.

The National Association of Black Accountants said at its 36th annual convention that it is distributing $201,000 in scholarships to 60 college students nationwide, a threefold increase in fundraising compared to a year ago.The group also said Ernst & Young would donate $200,000 in scholarship money over the next four years to support students interested in pursuing careers in professional services.

Smart firms realize it’s better to hire a good guy and teach him the right skills than to hire a skilled psycho. Resumes tell employers something about skill sets, but little about candidates’ personalities. It takes the right interviewing techniques to figure out which people will be the best fit for your firm and to avoid hiring nightmares. Linda Bryan, owner of Dallas-based Tamlin Software Developers, was the poster woman for how not to select staff. “I was a disaster,” she confesses. “I hired some real goofballs, really weird people that didn’t work out.” These poor decisions resulted in a high turnaround, which can financially burden any company, as well as some embarrassing situations. One day a Fortune 100 drug company client came to the computer consulting company’s offices to discuss a large project and was waiting for one of Bryan’s new hires—someone who seemed “very business like and sharp”—for nearly two hours. She never would have expected the excuse he provided when he made his grand entrance. “He was supposed to show up at 9 and at 11:30, here he comes barreling through the conference room door and his hair is all disheveled and his suit is actually torn on the sleeve and we all just look at him and he says, ‘I’m sorry I’m late. There was this exotic bird and I’m an exotic bird lover and I jumped through a wired fence [chasing it] and it ripped my coat.’ He just went off,” Bryan recalls. “I just thought ‘You’re so fired.’ That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I thought I have got to get better at this.” She started asking advice and others told her she needed to hire on attitude, not aptitude. When she thought about it, she realized that she had hired people who had the right skills on paper but not the right personality. She found a book called “The Smart Interviewer,” which taught her how to ask questions that would allow her to get to know candidates to better determine whether they would fit into Tamlin’s culture. Only if they pass that part of the interview do they get tested on their technical know-how. “I started using that interview process and we started calling it the Good Guy Test. The first thing is do you have the right attitude/the right personality to fit in here. Then the second thing is do you have the right skills. It’s the reverse of what I used to do,” Bryan says. “Since then we’ve had some good longevity and some really good people.” It is not uncommon these days to have prospects meet their future colleagues to see how well they jibe. Some companies invite candidates to lunch. Others have subordinates interview their potential bosses. Just because a candidate doesn’t connect with the rest of your staff doesn’t mean he or she is not a talented individual. Every firm has different policies and ways of doing business. It just means that this particular individual is a bad fit for your particular firm’s needs. It behooves both the employer and employee to figure this out before signing on the dotted line and risk having to “mutually agree to part ways” soon thereafter.

The number of finance and accounting workers who expected their companies to increase headcount in the upcoming months fell 8 points to 30 percent in the latest Hudson Employment Index. Following a substantial rise in May, overall worker confidence plunged 9.8 points, to 106.3. The responses came from roughly 9,000 workers across all sectors. In addition, 19 percent of those polled anticipated layoffs, versus 15 percent who projected layoffs in May. The number of workers who felt their finances were getting worse rose three points in June to 38 percent.Those who said their finances were improving dropped three points to 44 percent.

The Hong Kong member firm for Grant Thornton International said that six partners and 80 employees from CPA firm Moores Rowland Mazars have joined the firm. The partners include Mark Fong, the current president of the Hong Kong Institute of CPAs. As a result, Grant Thornton will now have 21 partners and 480 employees in Hong Kong. The addition comes as a result of the restructuring at MRM, which will split into two firms -- Mazars and Moores Rowland. Grant Thornton currently has offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has reappointed Daniel Goelzer to a second five-year term at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Prior to joining the PCAOB in 2002, Goelzer spent seven years as general counsel at the SEC. He is also a CPA and was an auditor at Touche Ross, the predecessor firm to Deloitte & Touche. SEC chairman Christopher Cox said that Goelzer "brings broad perspective to the board through his substantial experience as a regulator and practitioner. We are fortunate that he is willing to serve the nation, investors, and our markets in this capacity."

I have always found regional accounting firms fascinating. Just take three recent developments regarding the regional firm of Virchow, Krause & Company. One was that Wells Fargo Insurance Services of Minnesota, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo & Company, acquired Virchow, Krause & Company's Twin Cities employee benefits operations, including the head of the employee benefits practice in Minneapolis and his team. It is a good example of how regional firms view these very specialized practice areas. The acquire them and spin them off reminding me of many businesses that view the acquisition and the selling of a portion of their business as a regular means for increasing profitability.

When Scott Cook presented his keynote speech at the end of the final day of Intuit’s QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions conference in San Diego last week, he asked the audience how many among them had ever had a boss. Of course, everyone raised their hands. But then he inquired how many of them who had ever thought their boss wasn’t doing a good job in certain areas actually sat down with those bosses to suggest ways to improve? Only a select brave few. “If you’re the boss, you’re getting a rose-colored view and not feedback on things you need to fix,” Cook says. “I’m the only person in the company who doesn’t get a formal personnel review.” Once someone establishes a position of power within his or her company, it’s that individual’s responsibility to ask for feedback in order to constantly improve, because most employees aren’t going to give that criticism unsolicited. It’s a phenomenon Cook refers to as “revolutionizing the way leaders lead,” and he’s fighting on the front lines of that internal battle. Cook participates in 360 reviews in which an independent outside party comes to Intuit and interviews employees at various levels about certain leadership qualities. Agreeing to this kind of research is one thing. Listening to the observations is quite another. “Every instinct I had was to disagree, or agree but not understand,” Cook admits of his reaction when he learned what employees felt he wasn’t doing well (He didn’t admit the specifics to the San Diego crowd, however.) In order to break old habits, Cook had to “design interventions,” posting sticky notes next to his desk and forcing himself to read those reminders prior to conducting meetings. Just like in other recovery programs, acknowledging the errors of your ways is the first step toward recovery. “I told the people who work around me what my problems are and how I’m going to change,” Cook says. “I told them ‘I need your help.’” It became clear through this honest discourse that the company he founded 24 years ago continues to enjoy success not solely because of his team’s ability to drive sales, but because of a constant drive for self-improvement, which trickles down from the top. Effective leaders shape great companies. Cook chose to check his ego at the door and give his subordinates permission to critique him in order for him to improve himself and his company. In doing so, he set an atmosphere for his entire staff to continuously strive for self-improvement, thereby always raising the bar as to what truly defines greatness.

Although Capitol Hill insiders such as Karl Rove, Paul Begala, Terry McAuliffe and George Will garnered marquee billing at the American Institute of CPAs Spring Meeting of Council, profession-centric issues, such as staff recruitment and the alternative minimum tax, reverberated the most with attendees at the three-day confab here.