Accounting News Roundup: Quitting a New Job; Tim Ryan's Diversity Project

Quitting a new job

If you start a new job, there’s always a honeymoon period where everything is fresh and exciting. But how long does this last? Apparently, it’s a lot shorter than you might think:

Twenty-eight percent of workers said they would consider quitting within the first 90 days of starting a new job if they were unhappy at work, according to a national survey of more than 1,000 employees done by Robert Half, the global staffing and human resources company. More than half said they would quit within the first six months. Eighty percent of employees would consider telling their employers, “Take this job and shove it,” within a year of being hired.

“When people do leave in the first year, a surprisingly high percentage make up their mind on their first day,” says a guy. Yeesh, you are not running a good business if that’s the case. Unless there’s a large percentage of people who are accepting job offers they don’t want? No one says, “I’m not sold on you, but let’s see how the first day goes.”

Maybe employers are good at giving the impression that they have their act together. The article suggests that’s the case, that lots of employers do a poor job of on-boarding. But if that’s so, I can’t help but wonder what the interview process is like at those companies. What are they promising? Free beer and ice cream? It must really be a bait and switch if you’ve managed to convince someone to accept an offer to work for you but then more than half of them change their mind in the first six months.

Diversity

PwC Chairman Tim Ryan has helped build an initiative of 150+ CEOs “to foster more open discussion about race and gender in the workplace.” It’s pretty easy to be cynical about corporate efforts to “raise awareness” about anything, but Ryan has always struck me as more authentic. He freely admits how difficult and awkward it can be to talk about race, especially at work, but wants people to do it anyway because he thinks it’s important. Now he’s got a bunch of CEOs on board to at least pretend like they believe that as strongly as he does. Regardless if you think it’ll make a difference or not, Ryan is all in on this.

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The featured job of the week was a Senior Accountant with Ryan & Wetmore in Vienna, Va.

Previously, on Going Concern…

I blew out of town for a couple of days last week. Thanks for not burning the place down. Last Wednesday, Greg Kyte’s Exposure Drafts cartoon touched on receivables confirmation. And there’s a lot going on in Open Items: Private to Public after 13 years; New Jersey law and ethics; Is this a position for an accountant?