A common New Year best practice is identifying our top priorities and setting goals to focus and progress key initiatives. This should be no different for HR and Talent leaders, so recently my partner, Jennifer Wilson and I made a list of the top HR priorities for 2025 in our weekly livestream, HR Huddle (which you can catch every Monday at 4:15pm CT!). We think these topics should be on HR professionals’ and talent leaders’ radar this year:

  1. Talent Pipeline – employers and each of us individually are responsible for building a strong talent pipeline of young people who pick a career in accounting and then choose to stay in the profession after their first few years of work. HR professionals can drive initiatives to impact the accounting pipeline in your community and for your firm by downloading and reading the National Pipeline Advisory Group (NPAG)’s Executive Summary and the full Accounting Talent Strategy Report for strategies and solutions you can consider implementing in six different areas.
  1. Salaries (especially starting salaries) – One of the barriers that NPAG uncovered is that starting salaries for accounting do not stack up against other business degrees, such as Management Information Systems or Finance, and other bachelor’s degrees competing for the same talent pool, like engineering and computer information sciences. Firms need to compare salaries beyond other accounting firms, because your competitive landscape is much broader than that with other industries vying for college entrants and accounting graduates. And survey data of students who did not choose an accounting career back this up. In a Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs report The CPA Pipeline: Crisis and Opportunity, Evidence-backed Action the Profession Can Take Today starting salaries “are much lower compared to other careers” was a top reason students gave for not selecting accounting among other degree choices. HR professionals can analyze how to increase starting salaries without having to create major bumps at all levels and instead smooth out the large increases that happen at different levels, especially around manager and senior manager.
  1. DEI – Gen Z is the most diverse generation to date, with 48% being non-white, compared to 39% of Millennials in 2002 according to Pew Research. The accounting profession is not keeping pace or reflecting what the US population looks like, yet some short-sighted firms have back-burnered DEI initiatives, or are stopping them all together. Tapping into the under-represented minorities is critical to easing our staffing shortages and gaps, and maybe more importantly, creating firms that mirror and reflect the Next Gen of clients. Creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment where all feel they belong should be part of your HR and firm strategy with goals for how you’ll achieve this change.
  1. RTO – with all the buzz about companies mandating return to the office (RTO) and eliminating the flexible hybrid or remote options team members have come to enjoy (and expect) the last five years, we worry firms that do so will negatively impact staff retention and engagement. Instead of mandating return to the office, create specific in-person team collaboration, intentional opportunities to meet with clients face-to-face, and learning and team-building events. In-person interactions have a place but requiring people to commute into the office, often based on personal preference and not outcomes or deliverables of meeting in person, stymies your ability to expand your team outside local geographic boundaries and sends the wrong messages to your remote team members and their ability to build a career with your firm. HR professionals should update your firm’s remote, hybrid, and flex policies and ensure all leaders are consistent in their messaging and approach to leading their teams.
  1. AI – understanding how AI can simplify day-to-day tasks, conduct analysis, and research, and improve processes and workflow is critical to building a future-ready talent organization. HR professionals should be evaluating how your team can utilize AI and encourage each department and service line to do so, too. In addition, firm leaders don’t necessarily understand the policies and guidelines that should be in place for team members who are likely using AI technologies, like Chat GPT for writing, research, even technical answers, yet not considering the risk to client confidentiality, intellectual property or the larger language model your proprietary approaches when using these technologies. HR can work with IT to be enablers of these technologies, versus “no” people, and still develop safe guardrails for use and education to maximize the value and mitigate the risk to the firm and personally.
  1. Rebrand “busy” season – to attract and keep top talent in accounting, we must create a better work experience and tell a better story. At ConvergenceCoaching®, we are committed to stamp out the use of the phrase “busy season” (and to deploy strategies to reduce compression) as one place to start. The profession has long-told war stories and worn badges of honor for surviving the worst busy season in 34 years, and your young people look at your leaders and wonder why they would sign up for a career like that. So, let’s stop saying busy season and talk about peak periods and client commitments instead.
  1. Smooth Out Peak Periods – in addition to rebranding our peak periods, firms have to make the investments necessary to change the business model of public accounting and smooth out workloads. Truly embracing creative staffing solutions using non-CPAs, outsourcing and offshoring, client coordinators, and other new roles will help smooth out the work volume during these peak periods. Using AI as mentioned above can help create capacity, too. In addition, scheduling across service lines, empowering a scheduler to manage and make assignments instead of leaving it up to the preferences of partners and managers, which can create resource lulls from “hoarding” staff waiting for jobs to come in, or enable overuse of high performers and underuse (not developing) our poor performers. Other strategies for smoothing out peak periods include setting clients up for a natural, expected extension and working their projects in the traditionally slower periods. Helping service line leaders solve this issue is right up in the strengths box of HR professionals!
  1. Career Pathing – top talent wants to understand their career opportunity with your firm. At the lower levels, they often want to get as broad experience as possible, and if they don’t know they can get that from your firm, they’ll look elsewhere to build their resume. As high potentials progress in their career, they want a clear roadmap for what it takes to progress to manager, senior manager, and partner, and many firms still have a long way to go to mapping out the competencies, experience, and business expectations for progression and then creating one-size-fits-one plans for each individual team member to achieve their career goals. This is an area where HR professionals can help service line and industry group leaders build their team member career maps and help leaders provide feedback against them throughout the year.
  1. Change management with M&A and PE – with the continued volume of M&A activity and recent infusion of private equity funding, firms are often moving so fast towards growth they are not taking the time truly needed to integrate teams, which can leave an “us and them” divide. A merger or PE backing can create confusion and uncertainty for team members about what it means to them in their career, and it can create inconsistencies across teams related to culture, communication, processes, and general approaches for “how we work” if not defined and communicated clearly up front. M&A and PE backing are change initiatives that need to be managed over time with multiple communications that address questions like, “Why are we changing and what will be better when we do?”, “What’s not changing?”, “What’s the timeline for change and who owns it?” and “How does this change affect my career?” HR professionals can help with a change communications plan that other firm leaders often overlook or are too busy to define yet can be the critical lynchpin in M&A and PE success.
  1. Perception of employee control – finally, we are perplexed when we get the question from firm leaders, “When will we, as employers, regain control again from employees?” What? First, our relationship with our team members should not be based on control or who has the upper hand, so in our mind this is an invalid question. Second, HR professionals can help firm leaders understand the demographic trends and impacts to talent (the NPAG Executive Summary and Report are chalk full of them as a place to start) beginning with “the share of working-age people (ages 15-64) in the U.S. population has shrunk, down to 64.9% in 2021, from a peak of 67.3% in 2007,” and will continue to shrink according to Population Reference Bureau. The better question to ask is, “How can we create a great firm that attracts and engages top talent who thrive?” This is a great question to explore with your firm leaders and develop strategies to answer it, starting with many of the ideas outlined above.

We hope this list helps you define your priorities for 2025, and we’d love to know what they are if you’re willing to share them! And if there is something missing from this list that you’d add, let us know as we’re very interested.

Wishing you the best in 2025!

Tamera