Big Four accounting firms on hiring spree as demand booms for professional services

INVESTMENT banks may be cutting jobs, but professional-services firms are only getting bigger.

EY is on track to hire around 220,000 people in the 12 months to July 2023, having achieved its highest growth in nearly two decades in the previous period – and this is before a potential break-up of its auditing and consulting divisions takes effect, which could further ramp up a recruitment drive that reached about 160,000 in the 2022 financial year.

As part of the push, the firm expects to sift through more than three million resumes this year, said Trent Henry, EY Global vice-chair for talent, in an interview. The company is using automation to help its recruitment professionals and match candidates to job postings, he said.

Its Big Four rivals, as the top accounting firms are known, are on hiring sprees of their own. PwC welcomed 148,000 new joiners in the 2022 financial year, and is on target to hire a net additional 100,000 professionals by 2026, the company said last month. Deloitte and KPMG are also adding to their workforce. Together, the four companies already boast more than a million employees.

The growth underlines the continuing boom in demand for professional services, even as job cuts hit other industries. Wall Street firms including Citigroup Inc and Barclays have been culling investment bankers. Tech companies chopped almost 10,000 jobs last month; Amazon.com Inc chief executive officer Andy Jassy said cuts will continue into next year. 

“While there is a cooling off in the job market overall, accountancy has stood up pretty well,” said Simon Wingate, managing director at job search website Reed UK. “If you look at traditional comparators like banking or legal, accountancy is by far and away the biggest in terms of job postings on our website.”

GET BT IN YOUR INBOX DAILY

Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign UpVIEW ALL

Accountancy job postings in the UK in October rose to around 21,000, according to data from Reed UK. Legal and banking each saw less than a third of that. The sector is on track to overhaul its tech to becoming the platform’s top employer. In the US, postings are still around their July peak, and are holding up better than other finance roles, separate research from Indeed found. 

Growth, diversification

Growth and diversification partly explain why the appetite for talent at accounting firms is resistant to market turmoil. Over the last decade, the Big Four have started adding new services as they broaden their offerings. Deloitte’s UK consulting arm recently announced that it would recruit 3,500 new people over the next five years, including app designers and machine-learning engineers. 

Another part of the answer is a post-Covid staff exodus. Even though the pandemic had a limited impact on the Big Four, the top accountancies freezed bonuses, promotions or pay rises at that time, said Chris Sale, managing director at Prism, a management consultancy recruiter. That left “an awful lot of very cheesed-off people in the Big Four”, many of whom became part of the wave of leavers between mid-2021 and 2022, he added.

‘Ludicrously large’

The recruitment numbers are “ludicrously large,” Sale said. “What they don’t tell you is the reason they’re hiring 200,000 people is because they’ve probably lost 50,000.”

The Big Four have also pushed up salaries and accelerated promotions to fight attrition, he said.

PwC increased most UK salaries by at least 7 per cent this summer, in response to the cost-of-living crisis and the fight for talent. Meanwhile, EY has already promoted 42,000 since July, said Henry, the firm’s global vice-chair for talent. That number could reach 60,000 by next summer, up from 56,000 in its 2022 financial year and 49,000 in 2021.

Partner vote

The hiring comes as some 13,000 partners at EY are set to begin voting on a possible break up. If the breakup goes ahead, the firm plans to accelerate recruitment as it will need more staff in areas such as technology, said Andy Baldwin, global managing partner for client service.

“A demerger creates jobs. It doesn’t reduce jobs,” he said. BLOOMBERG