Month: April 2012

Not since 2007 have companies been willing to hire workers at the rate just observed by a CareerBuilder survey on first quarter hiring trends.

The study, released April 5, finds that about one-third of businesses hired full-time employees in the first quarter of this year, with their decisions to do so likely motivated by sales increases noted by 41 percent of companies. These numbers are reinforced by improving unemployment statistics, which many analysts have predicted will show growth when March figures are released later this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As companies supplement their workforces, competition for workers has also spiked. According to the survey, job candidates are increasingly turning down offers – 56 percent of companies reported this as occurring last quarter.

Earlier this week, this blog reported on the problems that could be experienced by organizations that are not prepared to engage with competitors in the highly frenetic war for talent. The best workers need to be fought for or they could escape to competitors.

“There is a growing gap between high-skill job openings and available talent that has a larger impact on overall employment,” CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson said in press release. “Fifteen percent of employers reported that, because they can’t fill high-skill positions within their organizations, they’re not able to create lower-skilled positions that are tied to these roles.”

The implications of this skills gap could prove extremely detrimental to organizations that are still in the early stages of developing their financial staffs. By working with headhunting firms with established records of success completing financial professional search processes, a business can stay ahead of competitors hiring for those same positions. Once these senior financial executives are in place, recruiting accountants and other financial professionals then becomes an easier task.

High-level business decision makers rely on rigorous financial reporting to make decisions about future spending practices. Timely and accurate financial reports enable companies to track their profits and expenses, which should allow companies the ability to project down the road.

When organizations are still in their formative stages, many accounting and financial roles  – from accounting to strategic planning – are performed in a piecemeal fashion. It works as long as the company remains small and a few key individuals are able to grasp in one view all of the vital information necessary to maintain accurate financial records.

But, when organizations expand they need to find a better way to process financial information. While some financial professionals think that automated systems expedite the process and ensure more accuracy, others are reluctant to further erode the role of human judgement in accounting .

“Financial reporting will never be fully automated,” CPA firm founder Gabe Zubizarreta told CFO.com earlier this week. “Say you tell a salesman he’s going to get a quarterly bonus if he sells X units. By the second month, he’s halfway there. Should you record that bonus for the quarter? There’s no right accounting answer. Maybe recording that puts you a little below your profit estimate so you don’t record it. Maybe you do. It takes human judgment. You can’t automate that.”

Ultimately, a company’s decision to rely on automated accounting practices depends on the size of the company and the specific practices it engages in. More complicated business transactions could require automated processes, regardless of how hesitant decision makers may be to implement such practices.

A business intelligence analyst can  help CFOs and other C-level decision makers identify and retrieve critical financial information. To find the right business intelligence analysts many  CFOs and accounting professionals turn to executive recruiters to access their networks and to assess candidates for key roles.