If you’re an accounting executive, you’re probably often on the lookout for effective accounting talent retention strategies to lower attrition. Because keeping employees on staff is often a matter of keeping them happy. The truth is, losing an employee can be surprisingly expensive for any company – the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates it costs between $30,000 and $45,000 to recruit and train an employee on a $60,000 salary —a great reason to focus on retention.
Preventing your employees from leaving is even more essential today as the world faces a growing shortage of talent and the ones that do stay are asking for more than just the office perks of days past. According to recent studies, 69% of U.S. professionals have changed or were considering changing jobs over the past few years. Read on to find out which strategies of accounting talent retention you can implement now to help significantly reduce attrition rates in your team.
Key Takeaways
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Retaining employees is crucial, as the cost to recruit and train a new employee can be as high as $30,000 to $45,000 for a mid-level position.
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Effective retention begins with an optimized onboarding and training process, which can increase new hire retention by over 50%.
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Improve work conditions by offering flexibility and a better work-life balance, as these are top priorities for today's workforce.
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Create loyalty and attract new hires by investing in your team through clear career-growth opportunities and continuing education programs.
Talent Shortage Is an Industry-Wide Problem: How to Address It
If you hoped the economy would return to an employer-dominated market, you’re probably disappointed about now. Concerns over a lack of talent are currently top of mind for companies around the world. And according to SHRM, 75% of organizations struggled to find the right full-time talent between 2023 and 2024. But what is really causing today’s paramount talent scarcity?
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Older generations are leaving the workforce
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Younger generations aren’t prepared
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Changing needs and expectations
What Can Employers Do? Crafting Effective Accounting Talent Retention Strategies
Upskill current employees
The World Economic Forum estimates that it costs roughly $4,425 to hire a new full-time employee and the Association for Talent Development has found that upskilling an existing employee costs around $1,300. In essence, it’s much simpler and less expensive to provide your current employees with the resources they need to do their job better than it is to hire new talent to fill the gap.
Give your employees what they want
Employee needs and expectations of their employers have drastically changed over the past few years – flexibility, higher wages, etc. With 60% of employees ranking benefits as a very important contributor to job satisfaction, it's more crucial than ever to provide extra benefits to employees.
Rethink your recruiting tactics
What worked in the past will not benefit you well today. Lauren Smith, VP at Gartner, touches on this subject: “Hiring quality talent today requires recruiting leaders to shift their strategies from replacing the workforce to shaping the workforce by defining needs based on skills, sourcing talent more broadly and creating responsive employment value propositions.”
For a deeper dive into day-to-day engagement, explore our guide on how to keep your team happy with 5 actionable strategies.
4 Actionable Accounting Talent Retention Strategies
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Optimize the Onboarding and Training Process
Take a deep look at your onboarding process. How does it stack up? Consider research from Harvard that shows organizations with standardized onboarding processes had a 62% increase in new hire productivity and 50% greater new hire retention. Setting up an effective onboarding system is more than just signing the necessary paperwork, taking an office tour, and arranging your workstation. It’s an ongoing process that begins before the new team members start their first day and ends when they leave the company.
Next, re-evaluate your training procedures and ensure that all resources are relevant and up to date. Create an atmosphere of learning for all members of your team. Introduce new tools and technologies that can aid in not only professional growth but also help to keep the attrition rate low.
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Improve Work Conditions
You should view creating and fostering workplace culture as an investment that will keep on giving. This investment will ultimately help you meet your retention goals and impact your bottom line by providing long-term gain. As it turns out, most workers prefer flexibility in their workday, whether that’s working virtually or setting their own schedule. In fact, a recent Harvard study found that 40% of employees would take a pay cut to work remotely. Similarly, Gallup research found that 76% of hybrid workers ranked work-life balance as their top advantage.
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Recognition and Rewards: A Core Accounting Talent Retention Strategy
Recognizing and rewarding success is one of the simplest ways to retain employees. Wanting our hard work to be acknowledged is about as basic and universal as it gets when it comes to what we expect from our employers. This recognition can take the form of a formalized rewards system, like yearly, quarterly, or monthly awards for hitting certain production or performance benchmarks, but they should go beyond that as well.
Monetary bonuses aren’t the only way to recognize hard work, and smaller tokens of appreciation can be an excellent way to personalize the kudos that keep teams motivated. If you’ve spent the time to get to know and understand the people who work for you, then you already know which things will motivate the high achievers to keep striving and what will encourage the employees who have room to improve and grow.
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Provide Career-Growth Opportunities
Your employees need to know that they will have room for advancement at your organization. Providing opportunities for employees to better themselves, such as through tuition reimbursement programs, continuing education courses or personal networking events, show your workers they matter and that you value them. An article from the Association Talent Development said it best, “career development also can help with retention because employees can develop a sense of loyalty for employers who are willing to invest in them. Likewise, when it is time to hire new employees, career development programs can be attractive to job-seekers.”
To further explore the real effects of high attrition rates, learn more about how to combat turnover in your accounting team.
Build Out Your Team & Lower Attrition by Outsourcing
Hire the right people, and keep them. While this is essential to your company’s success, it is often one of the most challenging hurdles leaders face. Constructing a recruiting strategy is quintessential and is one of, if not the, number one area you want to get down pat. By spending more money finding and engaging the right candidates, you are saving yourself the headache that inevitably comes with cutting your losses.
One way many businesses have improved their success rate with new hires is by outsourcing their accounting and finance positions. Outsourcing solves many of the pain points that come along with hiring in-house or working with a staffing agency. And here at Personiv, we’ve been working with clients – small to large – reduce employee attrition and improve worker retention for over 35 years and we can help you too.
See how you can expand your accounting team by leveraging outsourcing to grow your roster.
Curious how to prevent your team members from leaving? Check out our latest playbook, Battling Burnout: Retaining Top Talent in the Accounting Department, to explore how to turn it around for your employees.
If the strategies in this guide resonate with your current talent challenges, it may be time to consider a new approach. Chat with one of our experts to discuss how a tailored talent solution can help you build a resilient, engaged, and long-lasting accounting team.
