Nearly one in three accounting firms experienced professional staff turnover above 20% in 2022, with some reporting rates that exceeded 30%, according to research compiled by Franklin Alliance. Those numbers have not improved materially since. The firms still treating CPA firm hiring as a reactive function, posting a job when someone leaves and hoping the right resume comes in, are the ones feeling the most pain.
The CPA shortage created the conditions. The pipeline of new graduates has been contracting for a decade. But the managing partners who are staffing their firms more successfully than their peers are not waiting for the pipeline to recover. They have changed how they approach hiring and, more importantly, how they approach retention.
This article covers what that looks like in practice: the compensation benchmarks that matter right now, the non–comp factors that are actually driving retention decisions, what a structured hiring process looks like for a regional firm, and when it makes sense to bring in a CPA recruiting firm rather than running the search yourself.
Why CPA Firm Hiring Has to Start With the Compensation Conversation
Most managing partners know their firm pays below market. Fewer know by exactly how much, and fewer still have updated their comp structure recently enough to reflect where the market actually is right now.
Robert Half’s 2026 Salary Guide, cited in a November 2025 CPA Practice Advisor analysis, found that starting salaries for tax, audit, and assurance roles rose 3.7% year–over–year. That is well above the 2.1% average increase across all finance and accounting positions. The profession’s most in–demand roles are pulling away from the average at a time when candidate supply is already constrained.
The same research found that 87% of finance leaders pay premiums for candidates with specific technical skills: financial reporting, data analytics, financial modeling, and ERP system experience. For a regional CPA firm, that last point is particularly relevant. A tax manager or senior who has worked inside modern accounting software environments and can operate efficiently in a tech–forward firm is worth more than the generic job description reflects.
The compensation conversation also has to happen before the search starts, not after a finalist is identified. A firm that builds its offer around an internal pay band that has not been benchmarked in two years is going to lose candidates at the offer stage. That costs another six to eight weeks of search time and the goodwill of a candidate who spent time in your process.
Benchmark compensation before you post the role. Use Robert Half, Stanton House, or regional salary data from a source published within the last twelve months. If your range is below market, decide before the search whether you are going to adjust it or whether you need to build a different value proposition around the non–comp elements of the opportunity. You cannot do both poorly and expect to close searches in a reasonable timeframe.
Permanent hiring in finance and accounting takes seven weeks on average, per Robert Half’s research. At a regional CPA firm in a competitive market, that timeline can easily stretch to ten or twelve weeks when the role requires a licensed CPA and the comp offer is not sharp. Every extra week a key position sits open increases the workload on your existing staff and accelerates the burnout cycle that drives more turnover.
The CPA Firm Hiring Problem Is Also a Retention Problem
Managing partners who focus exclusively on recruiting new staff without addressing why existing staff leave will keep running the same search repeatedly. The two problems are connected, and the data makes clear that compensation alone does not solve the retention side.
Robert Half’s research found that for the 73% of workers who planned to remain in their current roles through the end of 2025, work flexibility was the primary reason for staying, followed by company culture, manager relationships, professional fulfillment, and compensation. Compensation ranked fifth. That does not mean comp does not matter. It means that once a firm is paying at or near market, the other factors become the decision criteria.
For a regional accounting firm, this is actually good news. Competing with a Big Four firm on compensation alone is not realistic. Competing on culture, career trajectory, client exposure, and work environment is absolutely winnable.
Eric Abati, CEO of regional firm ATKG Advisors, put it well in an Accounting Today interview: firms that win the talent competition do so by building cultures that offer meaningful career opportunities, team cohesion, and personal and professional fulfillment. The firms that lose are the ones treating culture as a tagline rather than something with operational teeth.
What does that mean in practice? It means two–year career maps that show staff exactly what the path to manager or senior looks like, including licensure milestones, client exposure, and compensation checkpoints. It means flexibility structures that are clearly defined rather than case–by–case. It means managers who give honest feedback and protect their teams during busy season rather than simply adding hours.
The accounting firm retention problem is also where the CPA shortage compounds itself. Every person who leaves a regional firm to take a corporate controller role takes institutional client knowledge, training investment, and capacity with them. The cost of that departure is rarely calculated honestly. Recruiting and onboarding a replacement takes weeks of management time and months before the new person is operating at full capacity. Firms that take retention seriously as a financial metric, not just an HR concern, make different decisions about where to invest.
How to Hire Tax Staff for a CPA Firm in a Tight Market
Tax is the hardest part of the CPA firm staffing model to keep filled. Research published in the CPA Journal found that the accounting shortage falls disproportionately on tax practices rather than audit. The supply of audit professionals has held relatively steady. Tax managers, tax seniors, and tax associates are significantly harder to find and significantly harder to retain.
The reasons are structural. Tax professionals have more exit options than their audit counterparts. A tax manager with five years of regional firm experience can move into a Director of Tax role at a mid–market company, often at a higher base salary with more predictable hours. The competition for that profile is not just other CPA firms. It is every CFO and VP Finance in the corporate sector who needs someone to own the tax function internally.
Knowing how to hire tax staff for a CPA firm in this environment requires adjusting the search approach on two fronts. First, the passive candidate outreach has to be more deliberate. A tax manager who is content in their current role but would consider the right opportunity is not browsing job boards. They need to hear about the role through a direct conversation with someone who knows the market and can speak credibly to why the opportunity is worth considering.
Second, the credential filter has to be applied carefully. Requiring an active CPA license for every tax role immediately narrows the candidate pool and extends the search timeline. For many tax senior and tax associate roles, a CPA–eligible candidate who is actively working toward licensure is a workable hire. Supporting them through the exam process, with paid study time and exam fee coverage, improves both the quality of the hire and the retention outcome. People who complete their CPA at your firm with your support are less likely to leave immediately after.
The firms that are managing tax hiring better than their peers are also thinking about the university pipeline more deliberately. Internship conversion rates tell you a great deal about your firm’s attractiveness as a place to work. Leading firms consistently convert over 90% of their interns to full–time offers, according to research from Franklin Alliance. If your conversion rate is materially below that, it is worth understanding why before launching another lateral search.
What a CPA Firm Growth Hiring Strategy Actually Looks Like
A CPA firm growth hiring strategy is different from a replacement hiring strategy. Replacement hiring is reactive: someone leaves, you post a job, you fill the seat. Growth hiring is proactive: you understand where your firm needs capacity twelve months from now and you start building toward it before the gap is acute.
Most regional firms operate in replacement mode. The pipeline shortage makes that increasingly expensive. When a firm is in replacement mode, it is competing for candidates at the exact same time every other firm that just lost someone is competing for the same pool. Search timelines are longer, offers get more competitive, and the urgency of the open seat leads to shortcuts in the evaluation process.
Firms operating with a growth hiring approach build a continuous pipeline of potential hires before they need them. That means maintaining relationships with strong former interns who did not accept offers the first time around, staying connected with candidates who were finalists for previous roles, and working with a CPA firm recruiter who already carries relationships in the passive candidate pool rather than starting a search from scratch every time a seat opens.
It also means thinking about firm structure differently. The AICPA’s Registered Apprenticeship Programs, launched in September 2024, showed 93% of apprentices remaining employed one year after completion, per Franklin Alliance’s research. Programs like that represent a pipeline investment rather than a spot hire. They take longer to produce a fully productive staff member but generate significantly better retention outcomes than lateral hires in a competitive market.
The CPA firm staffing model that survives the current shortage environment is one that draws from multiple talent sources simultaneously: university recruiting, lateral hiring, apprenticeship and internship pipelines, and occasionally a specialized search firm for senior roles that require the passive candidate approach. Relying on any single channel produces inconsistent results.
I put together a detailed breakdown of how to build a hiring process that works across all of these channels in the CPA Firm Talent Playbook, available for download at insidefinancesearch.com/cpa. It covers the specific stages of a regional firm search from role scoping through offer, including how to structure compensation packages that close candidates without blowing your budget.
When to Use a CPA Recruiting Firm
Not every open role at a regional CPA firm requires a recruiting firm. Staff–level and entry–level positions can often be filled through your university pipeline, job boards, and referrals without paying a search fee. The economics of a recruiting engagement make more sense as the seniority and criticality of the role increases.
The roles where a CPA recruiting firm consistently adds value are manager and senior manager placements where the candidate pool is primarily passive, practice leader and specialty hires where the technical requirements are narrow, and situations where a previous internal search attempt has already failed.
A failed internal search is more common than most managing partners want to admit. A firm posts a manager role, waits six weeks, gets thin candidate flow, makes an offer on an underwhelming finalist, and either gets declined or makes a hire that does not work out. Twelve months after the original opening they are starting again, often with a more urgent timeline and a narrower budget because the seat has been open so long.
The right CPA firm recruiter for a regional accounting firm search is not a generalist staffing agency. It is a firm that places exclusively or primarily in public accounting and understands the difference between a tax–focused practice and an advisory–focused one, between a firm that is growing through mergers and one that is building organically. Those distinctions matter in how the opportunity is presented to a passive candidate and whether the hire ultimately stays.
When evaluating a recruiting firm for this type of search, ask specifically about their experience placing at the manager level and above in regional public accounting practices. Ask how they access passive candidates, not just active ones. Ask whether they work on direct hire only or also place contractors. The answers will tell you quickly whether they understand the search you need them to run.
The broader context on what makes a search firm the right fit for senior finance placements is covered in the article on what PE sponsors should know before hiring a private equity executive search firm, which walks through the decision framework from the buyer’s side of the relationship.
The CPA Firm Staffing Model That Survives Busy Season
Busy season is where CPA firm staffing problems become most visible. A team that is adequately staffed in October can be critically understaffed by March if two or three people have given notice in the months before. And the timing of those departures is not random. People who are considering leaving tend to make their decision in the fall, after they have processed their review and comp adjustment, and before they are locked into another season.
Building a CPA firm staffing model that holds through busy season requires attention to two things that most firms underinvest in: headcount buffer and early warning systems.
Headcount buffer means hiring slightly ahead of capacity rather than exactly at capacity. A firm that is fully staffed at 100% utilization has no margin for a departure, an unexpected leave, or a client engagement that runs longer than projected. The firms that handle busy season best carry a small margin of capacity above their minimum requirement. That margin is not wasted in slow periods. It is what allows them to take on additional work and protect their existing staff from the burnout cycle.
Early warning systems mean paying attention to the signals that precede a departure: disengagement in team meetings, declining quality of work, changes in communication patterns, increased questions about benefits and time–off policies. None of these are definitive indicators, but a manager who is paying attention can have a retention conversation before someone has already made the decision to leave rather than after they walk in with a resignation letter.
The structural backdrop to all of this is the CPA pipeline problem that has been building for years. Understanding that context in detail is worth doing before you design your firm’s hiring strategy for the next twelve months. The article on the CPA shortage and what it means for your firm’s hiring covers the supply–side data in depth.
Conclusion
CPA firm hiring has not gotten easier in the past several years and the structural conditions that make it hard are not going to reverse quickly. The pipeline recovery that the AICPA’s enrollment data hints at will take five or more years to produce licensed practitioners in meaningful numbers.
What separates the regional firms managing this well from the ones struggling is not luck or location. It is deliberate hiring strategy, honest compensation benchmarking, and a genuine commitment to the retention side of the equation rather than just the recruiting side.
The firms that are winning on talent are the ones that treat hiring as a continuous activity, invest in culture and career development before they lose someone, and know when to run a search internally versus when to bring in a firm that already has the relationships they need.
If you are running a search at your firm right now or trying to build a hiring process that holds up through the next busy season, Royal Search Group works specifically with regional accounting firms on direct–hire placements at the manager level and above. Reach Michael Hill directly at michael@royalsearchgroup.com.