Friday, July 06, 2007

Life is Good

We keep hearing about "the pipeline" and how groups like the AICPA are trying to fill it up with accounting-minded graduates. In the Washington Post's view, riding the trend is a gas.

"These firms are so crunched for workers that they've become really aggressive in their recruiting," said Lindsay Terry, who works in the office of career management at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. "Students are getting serious internships by the time they're sophomores. The top seniors have had jobs lined up for years -- and that's after deciding between 12 offers."

And there's this on tactics:

(F)irms have tried to figure out what today's college students, dubbed the millennial generation, are looking for in a career. The Big Four -- Ernst & Young, Deloitte & Touche, PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG -- have nearly tripled the size of their recruiting teams and budgets over the last three years, partly to finance youth-oriented seminars, campus leadership programs and edgy marketing campaigns. Some firms have posted jobs on Facebook, a social networking Internet site popular among college students.

Beers & Cutler hired a consultant to get inside students' heads. Last year the firm gave $250,000 to the University of Maryland and George Mason University to provide scholarships to accounting students. Partners at PWC now spend part of their week on college campuses to teach classes and chat up students. Argy, Wiltse & Robinson, with headquarters in McLean, promotes a generous reward system, including 20-percent bonuses and rapid promotions. Grant Thornton, a firm with a major office in Tysons Corner, offers sign-on bonuses to interns and sends welcome letters to their parents.

Graduating With a CP-Yay [Washington Post]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"An entry level salary typically is $58,000 to $70,000 a year; people with master's degrees generally start in the range of $63,000 to $80,000."

I really have no clue where they got this figure, but it strikes me as extremely high. There might be firms out there giving $58k for a candidate with a master's or CPA but around my area (Metro-Boston/RI) no entry level candidates are even TOUCHING $70k, bonus or not.