In this article, we examine approaches towards attracting a strong employee pool to your practice through a robust digital marketing strategy. The article also puts forward ideas pertaining to social media for attracting employees, virtual hiring procedures and employee engagement and experience.
Optimizing Social Media Profiles
Accounting firms and professionals rely heavily on LinkedIn and Twitter as their primary social media channels. One of the key aspects of a strong digital marketing strategy is having a captivating social media presence.
As an accounting services practitioner, it is essential that you have a functional LinkedIn profile. However, just having a profile is never enough. There is a lot that goes into a well-rounded LinkedIn profile which will attract fresh talent.
The first step to an engaging LinkedIn profile is to make sure that it looks fresh. One should make sure that you have an up-to-date profile image as well as a banner. Additionally, make sure that you have a captivating business description. This could be 100-150 words about the services you offer, your missions and visions or just a brief introduction to your firm and your USPs.
Doing so will have two-fold advantages:
- One- it will make your LinkedIn look polished and give it a sense of authenticity
- The content on your LinkedIn introduction is used by Google for its search engine results. Hence, it is important that the content be engaging and includes a few keywords around your core business for it to rank higher in search results.
Twitter was once known to be used for recreational purposes although, as social media marketing grew a lot of accounting practices have ventured towards creating a strong brand presence and messaging on Twitter. With respect to attracting top talent, Twitter will serve an entirely different purpose for your accounting firm.
It is important to note that social media marketing is quite diverse and what works on LinkedIn may not necessarily do so on Twitter. A few ideas that can be put forward using Twitter can be around sharing firm updates, employee testimonials etc.
What differentiates Twitter from LinkedIn is that the tone of communication on Twitter tends to be relatively casual as compared to LinkedIn. As an accounting professional on Twitter, you could share tweets relating to the firm’s culture or working environment, industry specific updates from the IRS, the AICPA, etc.
Virtual Hiring and COVID-19
Whilst the pandemic halted a majority of business activities, accounting professionals turned towards digitized solutions to keep practices operating as normal. This gave rise to the use of virtual hiring procedures in order to bring in fresh talent once the COVID-19 crisis was under control.
In a nutshell, virtual hiring refers to a process that is facilitated using Internet-backed solutions wherein a face-to-face interaction is not essential. All that is required is for you and your candidates to have a stable and secure Internet connection. Moving on, let’s delve deeper into the advantages of virtual hiring and how it is beneficial especially when firms are on the hunt for top talent to recover from a crisis.
First, with the help of virtual hiring strategies, accountants can continue to serve their staffing needs in uncertain times. This is especially important, referring to the ongoing situations and how accountants will need to fill a possible gap of employees post COVID-19.
Additionally, having a virtual hiring procedure will significantly reduce employment-related expenses. This will be quite beneficial as your practice recovers from the economic downturn.
Furthermore, a simplified, virtual hiring system will also assist in filtering talent and identifying the best of the lot tailored to the needs of your practice. This saves crucial hours and works in favor of building a strong workforce post COVID-19.
Onboarding Procedures, Employee Engagement
During the pandemic, a lot of the workforce was forced to work remotely. With this, a dialogue around employee engagement best practices was initiated. This put forward ideas around onboarding procedures and an enhanced overall employee experience.
It is safe to say that the onboarding process is the firm’s equivalent of a first interaction. The experience a new employee has will speak volumes for your practice as an employer. A great on-boarding experience will usually consist of a plan for the day depending on how you wish to conduct your on-boarding procedures.
A good practice is to have a steady and engaging training and induction plan. This will make all the difference in terms on employee engagement and overall experience as you take the first steps towards rebuilding your workforce post COVID-19.
Conclusion
These are some of the methods that could assist you towards attracting a flourishing workforce and propel your practice towards growth post COVID-19. However, there could be a thing or two that we may have missed. Hence, it would be interesting to learn what your thoughts are as an accounting professional. As yourself, is there anything that you would do differently?
Want more practical information on hiring and upskilling for your firm? Join our upcoming webinar Rebuild: Evaluating Skills and Staff Your Firm Will Need Post COVID-19, on Wed. July 29th, 2pm EDT as part of AccountingWEB’s Rebuild content effort and presented by Jennifer Wilson and Tamera Loerzel of ConvergenceCoaching LLC.