Now that I have a new goal in mind for what kind of company to work for, I need to get back into the world of recruiting for accounting so I can find the right company!

Since I wasn’t in university during the spring, I missed some important recruiting opportunities there. Once the recruiting starts in the fall, interviews will come up very quickly, and I might not have a chance to go to enough events before then.

If you haven’t gotten involved yet, accounting recruiting is an interesting process. Accounting companies come to my university, and invite groups of students out to dinner, to “get to know them.” They get the names of these students from the membership list of clubs like Beta Alpha Psi (the accounting honor society), professors, and other connections.

If you connect to enough people at dinners, then you get a chance to have an on-campus interview early on in the fall semester, in September or October.

If that goes well, you might get invited to an office visit later on, and then you might get the job/internship offer you were looking for.

Last year I didn’t have too many on-campus interviews because I felt pretty secure about getting an internship offer from the company I went with. This year, I’m going to take the time to go to some mock interviews at my university’s career center to get back in practice.

It should be interesting to see how recruiting has changed since I went through it last year, with the recession and all. Not only do firms not need to expand the number of employees that they have right now, but many people expect the (currently very low) retention rates at accounting firms to go up. Now that there are fewer jobs out there, those younger employees are expected to stop switching jobs as much as they did before.

So I had a long chat with one of my favorite professors today about what kind of firm I should be looking for. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t get an offer from my internship, but I told her that I felt like I didn’t fit in at my internship and I was considering looking at smaller, regional accounting firms.

Her opinion was that if one Big 4 wasn’t the right fit for me, there was still a good chance that I would like one of the others. I had been thinking that they might have some differences in culture, but would otherwise be about the same to work for. What I got from our conversation is that there are differences, and that there are also differences within any one of the big firms depending on which part of the country they’re located in.

The main selling point of Big 4 seems to be the “opportunities” you get from them. I think that people are referring to opportunities to move to a good job when they say “opportunity,” and are not necessarily referring to opportunities within the firm.

Then again, Big 4 does offer opportunities to re-locate while still working for the same company. That can make life easier if your spouse has to move for work, as you can hope for a transfer, rather than having to quit and find a new job entirely. Also, you can move to a different job within the firm, such as from audit to tax or forensics if you aren’t happy with your job. I don’t think a smaller firm could be so flexible.

Another good point that my professor made was that since there are fewer people at a small firm, then it could be even harder to fit in because there would be less diversity.

I’m not sure what to conclude here. I think a smaller firm could be nicer, but you would need to be pretty clear on what you want. For example, I know there is at least one regional firm that does a lot of forensic accounting, so if you knew that’s what you wanted to focus on, you could go for a job there.

I think I have to really define what I’m looking for before I fling myself into the job search again, so that I can explain to a potential employer exactly why it is I would love to work for their firm.