By now we are well-aware of the growing dissatisfaction among client-facing grunts at public accounting firms, many of whom are doing the jobs of two or more people this busy season as already understaffed teams become more depleted by the day due to people leaving their firms for greener pastures.
But we haven’t heard much at all about dissatisfaction among the smiling-faced campus recruiters whose job it is to convince bright-eyed accounting students to come work at their dumpster fire of a firm fun, energetic, culture-first, competitive-paying firm that offers unlimited career growth potential. Until now.
We got this tip on Monday evening:
There’s a mass exodus of campus recruiters happening at BKD, 5 have left in the last week. Poor management of the talent acquisition team combined with extremely low pay for recruiters has everyone jumping ship to competing firms.
Of those five, the tipster let us know that one is leaving for a top 10 firm whose name rhymes with “bro,” one is leaving public accounting altogether, and the others are going to smaller accounting firms.
We don’t know how accurate this is currently, but a quick check on Glassdoor shows the typical BKD campus recruiter salary is $71,365; however, campus recruiter salaries at BKD can range from $58,801 to $79,858. On Indeed, though, the average annual salary for a BKD campus recruiter is $49,524, with a range of $44,938 to $54,578.
When asked if the job of recruiting potential new BKDers has become more difficult in the past year or so during the Great Resignation, our source said:
I wouldn’t say it’s gotten too bad for campus recruiting right now, up until just recently there was a lot of seniority on the team and everyone had their shit together but there has been a lot of turnover in some practice units which has put a lot of stress on campus recruiters. They recently promoted a few CRs to senior CR which came with no pay increase and more work on top of doing everything on their own in each practice unit. It’s not sustainable unless they just expect this position to turn over every 2-3 years.
The structure of the team is 2 managers (of 18 recruiters) and 1 director and despite having done the role themselves they don’t care about the environment we’re in. They just demand more projects and more process improvements weekly. Extremely secretive environment and higher level projects are kept secret until they get approved without considering the impacts on the team (they do this because they don’t want anyone to have an opinion on the way projects are being guided). IT’S WILD.
I hope BKD sees this and makes some changes for the sake of the entirely new group of recruiters they bring in.
Anyone else aware of an exodus of campus recruiters at your firm? Let us know by using the contact information below. All tipsters will be kept anonymous.
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