Dream team: Finding talent where others aren’t looking

The accounting talent shortage is not coming; it’s already here. Between 2019 and 2024, the profession lost roughly 17% of its practitioners, accounting graduates are down 20%, and with approximately 75% of CPAs at or near retirement age, the pipeline isn’t going to refill itself anytime soon.

If you haven’t already felt the pressure of too many clients and not enough staff, you will. The firms that figure out how to grow their teams now will be the ones still standing and thriving in 5 years.

I’ve been building my firm, Liz is All Biz, for more than 15 years. We specialize in the arts with clients in music, film, styling, and writing, with about 30 staff nationwide and roughly 1,000 clients. Over that time, I’d estimate that more than 90% of my hires have been nontraditional. No accounting degree, no Big 4 pedigree, and in some cases, no accounting background at all.

Yet, those hires have produced some of the most loyal, talented, and capable team members I’ve ever worked with. Here’s what I’ve learned.

What to look for when the résumé doesn’t look familiar

When you step outside the traditional talent pool, you have to recalibrate what you’re screening for. Here are the qualities I look for most.

Transferable skills. My tax manager Justine came to me while she was working in a bank and studying to be a film editor. Film editing demands obsessive attention to detail and a deep need to make everything fit together. Those are accounting skills! She didn’t know it yet, but I did. Justine has been with me for 14 years. When you’re reviewing résumés, train yourself to ask what the person’s background tell you about how they think and work. Precision-driven fields, customer/client-facing roles, and project management experience can all translate powerfully into accounting work.

Client/customer service connections. This one is underrated in our profession. You can do technically flawless work for a client, but if you can’t explain it in plain language, they can’t understand the value or act on the information you’re providing. As AI and automation make our work more efficient, these tools also risk making it more impersonal. Hiring people who can genuinely connect and communicate with clients is a major differentiator. It also takes pressure off you as the principal.

Small business experience. Many of my clients are small business owners. When I hire someone who has run their own business, they bring a different kind of empathy and insight to those relationships. They understand cash flow stress and know what it’s like to be on the other side of the conversation. That perspective can be more valuable than a textbook credential.

Unexpected credentials. One of my best hires, Tenzin, had advanced accounting degrees from Nepal and India. When she came to me, she wasn’t working in accounting; her foreign credentials and a hearing difference made it hard for her to navigate the US job market. She’s now been with me for more than 8 years and is exceptional. The lesson here is not to let unfamiliar credentials stop you from having the conversation. The mindset that draws someone to accounting with detailed orientation, analytical thinking, and a need for things to balance is consistent across cultures and educational systems. Real-world experience gained outside a traditional degree path is equally worth your attention.

Where to find people others see as invisible

Once you’ve expanded what you’re looking for, you need to expand where you’re looking. Two groups have been particularly valuable for my firm:

1. Career changers. Ada, one of my onboarding specialists and a technical lead on our bookkeeping team, came to me after a career in the military. Ada was ready for something new and already had an instinct that accounting might be it. That eagerness to grow is something you can’t manufacture. Career changers who have deliberately chosen your field bring motivation that more passive candidates often don’t.
2. Parents returning to the workforce. This is my not-so-secret weapon. Accounting, especially with so many positions now remote, can be an ideal fit for parents re-entering professional life after a pause. In my experience, these are some of the hardest-working, most reliable employees I’ve had. They’re motivated, organized out of necessity, and genuinely appreciative of the opportunity. If you’re not actively recruiting this group, you’re missing out.

How to train without losing your mind

Hiring nontraditional talent only works if you have a system for developing it. At Liz is All Biz, our culture is built around what I call ABL: Always Be Learning. That applies to every person on the team, including me. Here’s how we make it work in practice.

Document everything. Every task, every client process, and every workflow gets written down. We use a CRM, Karbon. to manage all of it. The person documenting a process runs through it once themselves, then passes it to someone equally senior to look for assumed knowledge and gaps. Multiple sets of eyes make the documentation clearer and more complete. A diverse team is an asset here: People with different backgrounds catch different things.

Build a culture of flexibility. At my firm, there are no permanent work assignments. Everyone is expected to keep growing. Although this involves some transitions and a lot of different roles, from day one, I communicate clearly that we’re not looking for someone who wants to do the same thing forever. This expectation has to be set early and reinforced consistently.

Teach the teachers. Our firm’s training cycle works like this: a senior team member learns a task, masters it, then trains someone more junior. Once the junior team member has mastered it, they’re ready to train the next person, and move on to learning something new themselves. The test of true mastery is whether you can teach it clearly to someone else. I’ve seen team members think they’re ready to hand something off and discover mid-training that they have gaps. That’s not a failure; that’s valuable information.

Stretch your team, don’t break them. The only way to know which side of that line you’re on is communication. I talk to almost every team member once every 4-6 weeks, and weekly for team members I supervise directly. My managers do the same with their teams. I want to know if someone is genuinely struggling with an assignment or just needs a little more time. Some tasks take longer for some people. That’s fine, but what I’m not okay with is a team member falling behind and not telling me. At any given time, three or four other people can likely step in if I know there’s a problem.

Keeping it profitable

All of this only works if it doesn’t cost you more than it earns you. A few principles keep us on the right side of that equation.

Know your own bandwidth. Before you can train anyone, you have to be honest about what you can take on. Training takes real time, especially at the start. If you’re already overloaded, you’ll set everyone up to fail. Be rigorous and realistic.

Balance billable and training time. My goal for team members is to spend about 75% of their time on billable work. The remaining time is split roughly between teaching and being taught, about an hour each, although in practice this often comes in bigger chunks on certain days rather than precise daily allotments. I track this. If training crowds out billable work, it will cost you. Stay organized enough to see where things stand.

Organize, without fail. There are parts of my firm where we’re extremely flexible, but our internal documentation and workflows are non-negotiable. Everything is in Karbon. That level of organization is what allows us to be seamless when someone is out unexpectedly; another team member can step in without the client ever knowing.

Be realistic about timelines. Some people move faster than others. That’s not a judgment, it’s a reality. Build your projections around what people can actually do. And remember that all review and sign-off steps matter: Everyone’s work at my firm gets reviewed before it goes to a client, including mine.

Gain an advantage

The accounting talent shortage isn’t going away. If you want to grow your firm or simply maintain it, you’re going to have to look in different places and at different kinds of people. That requires changing how you read a résumé, asking different questions in interviews, and having a real system for developing talent once you bring it in.

For me, hiring nontraditionally has actually been an advantage. Because I work in specialized industries, even candidates with accounting backgrounds didn’t know how to do what I needed them to do. I was going to have to train them anyway. Having a system to do it well with documentation, clear quality controls, and a culture built around continuous learning meant I could bring in the right people and shape them into exactly what my firm needed.

The work is worth it. My team is largely made up of people who have been with me for years, and in some cases, more than 10 years. They are talented, committed, and genuinely invested in the firm. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you look for the right qualities, invest in developing people, and build an environment where everyone is always learning, including you.

Leave no stone unturned. Your dream team is out there. You just might not be looking in the right places … yet.

Editor’s note: Check out Liz Hanley’s profile for the Intuit® Tax Pro Center. She was also featured in a recent tech stack case study, and is a member of the Intuit Tax Council.