CPA firm finds great value in TalenTrust Recruiting and Consultative Partnership
Details
Amy Langfelder is a Principal at Cray Kaiser LTD, a full-service accounting and business advisory service with offices in the Chicagoland area. With more than 45 years in public accounting, the CK team passionately serves clients across the Midwest and has special expertise in closely held and family-owned businesses. Here is what Amy and the Partners at Cray Kaiser have to say about working with TalenTrust.
The Problem
Cray Kaiser has been successfully able to recruit recent graduates and recently licensed CPA’s to their firm through strong relationships with universities and employee referrals. However, like many accounting firms, they have struggled to find Senior Associate level CPAs with 5 years or more experience. Having utilized many local recruiting firms, they continued to struggle to find a substantial volume of quality candidates for these roles, and when it came time to make the offer and on-board selected candidates, they were in heavy competition with other firms and ended up without the talent they needed to grow at this critical level.
“We have worked with many contingent recruiting firms and they lacked a true care for our business and a deep recruiting knowledge to deliver enough strong candidates. They were able to find resumes of candidates with the appropriate credentials, but they were never looking for candidates for us at Cray Kaiser specifically. It is different with TalenTrust – we only see the candidates that TalenTrust knows are the right fit for us and we get more choice of candidates overall.”
Success
We have interviewed some excellent candidates that TalenTrust has been able to find for us and have made some great hires. It has been surprising to us how well-equipped TalenTrust has made us for all of our interviews and for our hiring decisions. A candidate actually said that we have the best interviewing process they had experienced so far, and this was because of TalenTrust. The interview guides and predictive assessments that TalenTrust has provided to us have been very beneficial. Our interview process has been dramatically changed because of TalenTrust’s recommendations, expertise and consultation. We have realized that we were often ‘shooting from the hip’ even when we thought we had a plan and now we have a truly proactive process.
Results
Cray Kaiser invested in TalenTrust’s Full-Cycle Recruitment Solution which provides powerful national search capabilities. In the first 5 months of partnership, TalenTrust found over 830 candidates for Senior Accounting positions with the firm. Amy says, “We can see the pipelines growing and we know we will have access to quality talent for our future as well as for our current needs.”
The partnership with TalenTrust, however, has stretched beyond recruiting and delivery of candidates. We have a partner we can turn to for all things people related. In addition to giving us an excellent interview and selection process and helping all of our team feel well equipped, they have helped us to implement predictive assessments and use of benchmarks for our current team and some of our most critical positions. They have also introduced us to employee engagement and communication tools that help us retain our most valuable asset – our people. Our culture is so important to us – TalenTrust is helping us find new team members that fit our culture and helping us keep the ones we have. Their consultation through our partnership is a true value-add.