The Student CPA

I have some friends who, right out of college, happily accepted jobs offers from some of the top accounting firms. However less than a year in their jobs, my friends are already venting to me how frustrated and disappointed they are with their work lives.  Very often, we accept a job offer only to find out a few months down the road that the job's requirements and/or firm's culture were not a good fit for us. When we are just out of college and we receive a job offer from an accounting firm, we often naively say yes to the offer without conducting due diligence. Even the summer internship at that CPA firm might not give you enough inputs to assess whether you are a good fit for the job's requirements and/or the firm's culture. This is because you are in most instances so focused on selling your skills to the prospective employer that you omit to objectively study the prospective employer's work environment. It should not be a surprise then that you feel frustrated with your job within a few months or couple of years of being hired. Most employees who find themselves in such a situation  -The Lord knows there are thousands of them out there!- will blame it all on their employer. Let's be realistic here, the source of your frustration stems from a concept called the expectation gap. In other words, the reason junior level public accounting professionals get disappointed with their work life is because there is a sizable gap between their pre-employment expectations and the realities of their job. The best way to shield yourself from post-hiring disillusions is to do as much homework as possible on the prospective employer before you accept a job offer.  By now, you must be wondering how you should best go about screening out prospective/potential employers. It's all comes down to harnessing the power of the worldwide web.

• Glassdoor.com: In case you don't know, glassdoor.com provides salary surveys, employee reviews, and interview tips on over 78,000 companies. You will find quite an amount of information about most national and regional accounting firms when you visit glassdoor.com. All the reports you find on glassdoor.com are graciously provided by actual current and former employees. Now this is no some hear said type of reviews. You are getting all the information right from the people in the trenches. There is a little twist however, you have to be a registered member of glassdoor.com in order to be granted full access to the website database. For your information, glassdoor.com is a free service that requires free membership just as  twitter.com, facebook.com, and linked.com do. Because all reviews are anonymous, it is very unlikely that you will find some politically correct reviews. Sometimes, you will come across reviews by angry current or former employees, it is therefore very important that you use good judgment as you browsed the wealth of information available at glassdoor.com. All in all, glassdoor.com is a very powerful tool for screening out potential accounting firms and I would recommend every existing and aspiring accounting professional to add it to his/her job search tool box.
• JobVent.com: This website is somewhat similar to Glassdoor.com in that current and former employees submit reviews on their overall experiences with the companies they worked or are working at. No membership nor registration is needed to dig deep into the data available at JobVent.com.
• Facebook.com: The way I have used Facebook in the past is to conduct a search using a specific accounting firm name. For instance, I would search for let's say Firm XYZ then I would narrow my search down to people. The final results will give you a list of Facebook members that are or were affiliated with Firm XYZ. Once you have that list, all you need to do now is send out private messages to several of those people to ask them why would somebody want to  work for Firm XYZ. It's very important  that you contact people living in different geographical locations or else you will sound suspicious. You won't get a reply from everybody or if you do get a reply it would likely be one that is politically correct, however all you really need is 5 to 10 balanced responses and you will be on your way to building a realistic profile of the accounting firms you are looking at joining.

Although deep in your heart you believe you are the perfect fit for a job opening, the company offering the position might not be enough of a good fit for you. If you don't want to fall victim to what I earlier referred to as the expectation gap, I encourage you do as much research as you can to find out what current as well as former employees think of the company you are considering joining. The three websites I just shared with you will certainly get you started toward that end.

The following is a list of sources where you can find potential CPA firms that you can target in your job search.

1) Accounting Today Top 100 Firms(2010) (Comprehensive and interactive rankings of US accounting firms on a national basis, regional basis, by services, etc…you are going to love these rankings)

2) Top 100 Accounting Firms (This is an "unofficial" list maintained by James Cave, CPA. Although the list is unofficial, most of the CPA firms featured in it are indeed among the largest in the country)

3) Practical Accountant Magazine's 16th Annual Survey of Regional Firms (This list is somewhat similar to the previous one. You get a regional breakdown of the public accounting industry)

4) Accounting Today 2008 Best Accounting Firms to Work for (The list is not very exhaustive but it can be beneficial for those of you who want to work for an accounting firm that promotes work/life balance)

5) INSIDE Public Accounting 2010 Top 100 Accounting Firms (This might be one of the most authoritative sources you will find on public accounting firms rankings. INSIDE Public Accounting  is "the only publication to report and analyze the news, strategies, trends and politics that affect the accountant, his firm and the profession") I hope these resources help you locate your next employer. As you pursue your search for an employment within public accounting, always keep in mind that you only can affect the level of success you can achieve.