The Modern CPA Success Show: Episode 142
Bringing in the right people can transform your CPA firm. Hiring is a strategic move that drives your growth. If you’re looking to make smarter hiring decisions, this episode is for you.
Will Spengler, founder of Frederick Fox, shares how his team finds strong controller and finance candidates in markets like Dallas, and what firms should do to stay competitive. You’ll get insights into how recruiting agencies work, what mistakes firms make when hiring, why public accounting backgrounds are still in high demand, and how remote work and compensation expectations are shifting the talent game.
Tom Wadelton: [00:00:02] All right, on this episode of the Modern CPA Success Show, we have a little bit of a different topic for you today, and I hope that people are excited. Like usual, I am here with my co-host, Adam Hale. Adam, welcome. [00:00:12][9.4]
Adam Hale: [00:00:13] Thanks, Tommy. Thank you. I was just going to throw you off. Sorry. [00:00:17][3.7]
Tom Wadelton: [00:00:17] Sorry. There you go. I’m Tom Wadleton. As well as Adam, both of us work with Anders. I do the virtual CFO role and Adam really runs our division around CFO. So we are excited today with Will, Will Spangler, and he is the founder of Frederick Fox, a recruiting agency. And Will, by better introduction, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe career journey that got you to what you’re doing today. [00:00:38][21.2]
Will Spengler: [00:00:39] Yeah, sure. So, Will Spangler, I started Frederick Fox about six years ago. We’re a small, it’s all relative, but about a 10 to 12 million dollar annual revenue business that focuses predominantly on accounting and finance and technology staffing. And we really built a lot in sales and operations. As far as my career, so I went to school for accounting in finance, I was actually a cost accountant. And back in 2012, a recruiter recruited me and they said, they were recruiting me for a cost accounting job. They said, hey, you would be a good recruiter. I thought it was a scam. I didn’t know recruiting was a real profession. And I got into recruiting in 2012. I got out of accounting, cost accounting mainly, and I’ve been in agency recruiting 14, 15, what is it? 13, 14. I think I’m in my 14th year. He’s not good at math. That’s the reason we never talk. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. 14, yeah. Somewhere in there at all agency recruiting, um, worked for a big shop for six years, then became a partner in like a hundred million dollar staffing business called Tima for three years. And then I started this business about six years ago and [00:01:59][79.9]
Speaker 4: [00:02:01] I love what I do. Why did you decide to start your own, why did you decided to branch out? I think I was just young enough and just. [00:02:09][8.7]
Will Spengler: [00:02:09] Enough to to do it in the sense that I was young enough to have the energy and dumb enough to not know what I was getting into. And so I would never do it again, I’ll tell you that, just because I have three kids and it put a strain on the marriage, but… Now it’s turning a point where I’m very happy with it, but I think I just always had an entrepreneurial itch that needed to be scratched. I think underestimated how challenging it is to build infrastructure, build accounting, build finance, build marketing. The recruiters are very much sales heavy individuals and you know, I think at first I had an ego about starting my own firm and now it’s it’s gone from needing to check the box to how do I uncheck this box and that’s kind of where I’m at. [00:03:03][54.0]
Adam Hale: [00:03:05] That’s an interesting I mean a lot of our listeners are practitioners and you know either considering starting their own or they are on their own our partner so I think I think that will resonate well with every [00:03:17][12.6]
Tom Wadelton: [00:03:20] Well, one thing you said about, I thought this was great. I thought it was a scam when you said that. I’m curious, because my guess is if our listeners, if they were to say, well, I can describe exactly what a recruiting firm does, and maybe there’s some myths. Maybe not. So I’m just curious if you think of some of the myths, but then also just describe a little bit more about like who it is that you’re serving and how someone comes to you and just help people understand if they don’t really understand what a Recruiting Agency does. [00:03:41][21.7]
Speaker 5: [00:03:44] I always tell people I [00:03:45][1.1]
Will Spengler: [00:03:47] People try to avoid recruiters by all costs. We’re like attorneys, right? Nobody wants to pay a recruiting firm fees for finding people, and I don’t blame them. There are certain times, usually it’s more within mid-sized companies that have a budget and there’s key strategic roles that need to be filled with extremely quality of hire or a speed to hire the position. It does exist in a lot of major companies that have a line item for staffing services. And I think companies view this as we just absolutely have to have this talent and they’re willing to pay. A fee for finding the right people with the right skill sets. So, you know, maybe a startup CPA firm that our fee seems really hefty to them because they’re not turning a lot of NOI. But I think let’s say you’re a $50 million company and you just absolutely have to have a controller that’s closing the books and doing payroll and people like that that have need in a pinch, they want the best person. I understand no one ever wants to pay a recruiting fee, but I think there’s a certain point in time where people view it as we just absolutely have to get the best talent possible and if we have to use a recruiter, they’re willing to do it. [00:05:10][83.5]
Tom Wadelton: [00:05:13] And since you mentioned no one wants to hear from the recruiters, it’s probably been made worse in the last couple of years with the number of like, I probably get at least once a week a text from someone saying, hey, you can make, I’ve seen your resume, you can make $3,000 a week doing this and it just looks like a scam. And unfortunately, my guess is when a recruiter calls, you’re like, not sure if this is like a real professional recruiter or is this really someone just trying to drum up some kind of business of it’s a bit of a scam? Would you think that’s true? Is it worse in the past couple of years? [00:05:41][28.3]
Will Spengler: [00:05:43] I just think with COVID and 21 and 22, the market was just so hot for staffing services that. It’s so many people jumped into the field. It got oversaturated and it’s kind of like the real estate industry There’s a when the hot markets hot all of a sudden everybody’s a part-time realtor And I think the recruiting industry went through that and over the last two years There it it’s kinda it’s starting to whittle down because the markets getting more challenging. So You know, the last two years have been challenging for recruiters and I think only the the lions are going to be left on the Serengeti at this point. I don’t think that the service is a scam. I think I obviously I don’t t do it for a living and run a business. I think people underestimate how much work recruiting actually is. And it’s sourcing, it’s research, it is calling. It’s prepping candidates, it’s debriefing candidates, it’s making sure they show up on the first day, following up for 90 days. I think everybody wants the AI button where it’s fully automated and you don’t ever have to have an internal recruiter or any agency recruiters. But as a person that’s been in the profession for a while, Thank you. I vastly underestimated just how much can go wrong in such an important career and hiring decision. So I think we serve as vehicles to de-risk that process and to, you know, increase quality and speed to hire, essentially. [00:07:22][98.7]
Tom Wadelton: [00:07:24] Well, I’d love to start there then. So since you mentioned what could go wrong, if we’re thinking of people listening now saying, well, there may be some roles that I’m trying to hire for. Can you give us some guidance for a hiring firm? What have you seen as the best thing that you’re seeing people come to you like, okay, these guys have really got it going and then what are some things that you see that you like this is a really bad way even though maybe with good intentions from the hiring side? [00:07:47][23.2]
Will Spengler: [00:07:49] Are you talking as, would this be like a public accounting firm that was interested? [00:07:54][4.7]
Tom Wadelton: [00:07:55] CPAs are listening and firms are like, I’ve got these three open roles. What guidance would you give people? Like here’s when you’re doing it right to be hiring if you’re trying to hire these kinds of roles. [00:08:03][8.0]
Will Spengler: [00:08:07] I think that just being in line with your market compensation is important. I think sometimes smaller CPA firms will sell the track to partners faster and then there’s maybe percentage on NOI or equity. But I think there’s just so much competition for CPA firms that if the dollars aren’t in line market, it’s just competitive. Like, if you have a tax manager, public accountant… And they’re willing to stay in public accounting, odds are they’re going to get five to six offers in their market and they are going to pick. The other thing I would add to that is I always recommend companies have a clear understanding of your employer value proposition, right? Like… I always say that the small company can’t outsell BDO or EY or PwC, but what you can do well as a company is just say, here’s where I’m at. Here’s where we plan to go. Here’s the benefits of working with us. Here’s a plan to get there. And even if you’re weaker than, let’s say, Pwc, it’s the vision, the confidence you have and the direction that you can sell. And I think that that actually will win. You as a as a underdog versus some of the bigger companies, right? [00:09:35][87.8]
Tom Wadelton: [00:09:37] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned compensation. So what would you suggest either some ideas what people should be thinking or maybe places to benchmark so that people know if I’m going out for that you mentioned tax manager, that I think I can afford x and how do I know if that’s like way below what the market what I should be offering for that kind of thing. [00:09:57][19.9]
Will Spengler: [00:09:58] Well, there’s a lot of like free online salary guides. There’s Glassdoor. Glassdoor has one. Salary.com. I think you could even use chat GPT to say, you know, GPT is amazing these days, but you can say, you know tax manager at a regional firm in Atlanta, Georgia. What’s the average salary? I bet you it would spit out something within a pretty good standard deviation. [00:10:23][24.6]
Adam Hale: [00:10:24] Or so you are seeing those be similar? Cause I know like, um, some of that stuff’s like promotional, you know, material and stuff like that. So, and a lot of it’s self-reported. So some of it it’s kind of unreliable. So I didn’t know if it was one of those things where kind of you’re talking about the realtor example. Hey, I heard I can get a million dollars from my house. And then the real or shows up and it’s like, well, maybe not a million. You can maybe get 800 K, you know, that kind of thing. Like, so I wonder is, do you run into that or are people coming to you? You know, especially, I mean, my kind of, I think one of my biggest reservations always with recruiting or the biggest fear was that the person isn’t really coming to me, I’m going to them. So immediately I’m on maybe a little bit more defense, you know because I’m, I’m out hunting for that person. So they’re immediately going to say, cool, in order to move me, you know I’m always at top dollar, right? Like that’s one concern. And then the other concern is, it’s like, Are they going to be willing to jump for the next offer, you know, that’s a little bit higher if somebody comes knocking again kind of a thing. So in that instance, like, how do you address those kind of things? [00:11:32][67.5]
Will Spengler: [00:11:35] Yeah, I hear this all the time. One of the things I typically do with customers is I’ll lock my feed percentage on the range that the client was initially trying to hire at. And then if I have a candidate that’s trying to scratch up 20 grand, I’ll keep my fee locked on the initial range so that the customer doesn’t think that I’m trying to pump this up because I’m trying to make more money on my percentage. Right. I think there’s a stigma that recruiters, they’re just cranking it up to make more money on the recruiting side. And I’m sure there’s recruiters that do do that. But that’s not my style. And nor are firms. You know, any one deal isn’t going to make or break us, right? I think what we’re trying to do is negotiate a fair compensation for both sides. And oftentimes, I’ll just remove any personal gain I would get because the customer had to pay more than they wanted to. Like, I want to take that off the table. I know everyone thinks that recruiters are just these scumbag used car salesmen. I wouldn’t go that far, but yeah, but there are actually a lot of really hard-working recruiters out there that are very ethical. It’s unfortunate that maybe a select few people have kind of tarnished the well at times. As far as the salary, it’s tricky because in certain states you don’t have to legally disclose like California and New York. Canada doesn’t have to disclose what they’re currently at and so That makes the negotiation very tricky because you can’t legally ask what you’re at and everybody always wants to know Well, what are you at and once you once you move for 10% more and they’ll Or they’ll do 10 to 15 percent is usually a good premium to move to entice somebody but Unfortunately, like if you go back to eek basic economics, it’s like it’s supply and demand of labor, right? It dictates the wage and if there is a shortage of public-to-public CPAs if you don’t want to pay for it, then you may be stuck without a hire. And I hate to say that to companies, but sort of the reality like the market dictates salary based off supply and demand, not what we want to pay or think we should pay, if that makes sense. [00:14:13][157.9]
Adam Hale: [00:14:14] Curious to follow up on the supply and demand thing. Actually, I’ve been going through econ with my daughter. So supply and the demand charts are all in my head right now. So, but it seems like to me, I would say, I mean, it’s interesting. You mentioned like a couple of years ago, it was a different market. I felt like a few years ago we were paying. You know, everybody was really upselling themselves and it felt like we were paying a huge premium to get any human to come board, you know, with any amount of experience. And then I would say over the last year or so, and whenever we would cast the net out and we’d say, Hey, like we’re hiring, it was really, you know, you’d get a few, few bites. Now, it’s pretty overwhelming the other direction where there’s a lot of people, you know, looking for jobs and doing those kinds of things. And we’ve seen some big movement in the larger firms, you know, specifically in like the consulting area. So I didn’t know if you’re experiencing that trend where you’re starting to see a lot more supply and then how’s that affecting the demand side? Are you still seeing heavy demand and a better supply or what does that look like? [00:15:22][68.0]
Will Spengler: [00:15:23] Yeah, I agree with you. The last, I would say year and a half, 24 and into 25, there’s a lot more supply of talent. I don’t know if you guys offer remote work, but if you are remote-friendly, you’re gonna have a leg up over being fully in office. So we work with public accounting firms that are remote friendly. They typically, the remote- friendly ones have their. A lot of options. Whereas the fully in office is more challenging. So yes, I would say I would say it’s relative. If you look at technology, there are so many software engineers. Companies don’t even have to use recruiting firms for software engineers or product managers because the talent is unbelievable. There are so many technology people out of work. But I would say accounting and finance is still a challenge for people. I don’t know your particular market or how you guys hire, if it’s remote or not. That might be part of why you’re seeing more candidate pool. [00:16:35][72.0]
Adam Hale: [00:16:36] Yeah, we are. We’re completely remote. So we have a large portion of our firm is located in St. Louis. So a lot of people come there, but specifically in our division, we’re 100% remote. We used to get. A ton of applications and then all of a sudden it dried up for a couple of years, you know, and then we were like, whoa, what’s going on? But there were a lot of firms that were offering remote and now what we’re starting to see is a lot firms are pulling back on their remote policies. And so I think that’s also opened up the, you know, the opportunities for us as well because so many firms are pulling back on that. Have you seen that trend as well or firms kind of pulling back on their willingness to allow remote. [00:17:17][41.1]
Will Spengler: [00:17:19] Absolutely. Even with our public accounting clientele, I would say about 25% of them are open to fully remote. So the majority want back in the office. And I would see across accounting and finance, even in industry, especially manufacturing. Manufacturing is almost four or five days a week, fully back on site. And I would say… 75% of our customer base, we have about 900 clients, is I would say 75% is fully back in office at this point, or some form of four day a week hybrid. It used to be three and two, but everyone’s now, like the employers have more leverage and they’re starting to get four and one. So you guys being open to remote, I always tell people you can get better talent when you are remote-friendly, because now you just opened up public-to-public people in any major market. And look, we’re a remote- friendly firm, and I think that works in our benefit. We’re able to attract some of the best recruiters from top agencies because a lot of our competition is going back in office. [00:18:32][72.2]
Adam Hale: [00:18:34] Okay, now I’m going to make you pick somebody. Who is your favorite role to source, you know, in terms of like in the finance space? And then where’s your favorite place to get them? So meaning like, people always ask us like we do virtual CFO services. So we’re not quite full fledged, full CFOs. We’re not controllers. We kind of in that layer in between. We are of like strategic FP&A players. And so people are always like, do they come from public? Do they come to private? Do they comes from, you know, we get for whatever reason, like folks that teach, you now, professors, and then we also get government. You know, so they’re like, where’s the best place to get them? You know that kind of a thing. So anyway, back at you. Like what’s the, what’s probably your favorite role to source? And then I would say like, what the, you know, do you have a preference on where you, where you get them from? You know, in terms of industry versus public versus that kind of thing. [00:19:35][61.3]
Will Spengler: [00:19:37] Yeah, sure. And that’s, it’s a broad question, but my favorite role to source. I always love the controller search. And it’s, I think, a really, there’s a lot of great markets. But we do a lot in Dallas, Texas, as far as, and as far is industry, our top industries right now are instruction. Manufacturing and SaaS. But if you ask me like my favorite, I love controller VP of finance roles in SaaS or manufacturing. I typically enjoy personally like multi entity businesses with some complication because I like, maybe it’s my accounting nerd coming out, but I like to kind dig into that with the customers and make sure I’m making good matches. I don’t know if that answers your question. No, it does. [00:20:37][60.2]
Adam Hale: [00:20:36] No it does on the front end and then on the back end I guess like in terms of whatever you’re finding or sourcing those people, are you generally going out and looking for somebody that already has that same exact job experience or do you find like hey grabbing somebody with audit experience versus tax experience versus whatever or are you looking to really of a line relative to that relevant experience. [00:21:01][24.5]
Will Spengler: [00:21:02] So I think in your role, you’re advising in a consultative role. Now, we consultatively sell to the customer, but we’re more of a professional service where we’re trying to understand what our customer’s trying to accomplish. We have to sort of walk on eggshells at times. We can recommend because. But we have to be careful saying, no, you don’t want somebody with that background. You really want this. So there’s always this like fine line of… Whereas, I don’t know your practice that well, whereas you guys maybe are coming in as it is a truly like top down consultative approach. So oftentimes we like to listen to the customer’s idea of what they want to hire. You’ll always hear, hey, we want public accounting foundation, two to three years in audit. Then they move into industry at this type of industry. For a progressive experience at a $50 million business with X amount of entities. And so each search is its own unique project. And I know I’m blurting out a lot, but one of the things I say to the customers is, look, I’ve ran these searches before. Here’s what you might run into what you may wanna consider. And I recommend this based off of your current state. But I would never tell the customer, no, you actually need this. That’s not my style. I try to listen and serve and recommend because. [00:22:36][93.8]
Adam Hale: [00:22:38] Oh, yeah, no. But I mean, what was interesting, what I heard you say was like, what you constantly hear is prefer somebody with a public background in audit, and then they moved on. You know what I mean? Like, so it still sounds like, at least on the surface, you know, whenever people are thinking about our profession, they’re thinking about, I want somebody that’s maybe been in the public accounting realm, and i’m looking for somebody that has that audit experience cuz you’re generally gonna be sourcing internal jobs that’s why you know as opposed to like public the public you would just be going to find somebody from tax to tax but whenever you find people in industry they have kind of an affinity for the audit folks it sounds like [00:23:20][42.6]
Will Spengler: [00:23:22] Yeah, I think for a few reasons because they’ve seen so many different industries and different business scenarios and different ways to apply the accounting rules. And so I think the customer feels like, if you get somebody with three to five years in public accounting, they’ve gone across a diversity of industries and different unique scenarios where they’ve had to critically think how to recognize accounting given this context. And I think they like that because there’s there’s I don’t know the right word for it, but there’s just broader exposure to the accounting rules across different scenarios. And they feel like when they come into their company, they’ll have that breadth of experience versus they’ve always been transactional in one lane, always did it this way, whereas I think that public accounting gives that diversity and that technical accounting research that has to be done when you’re in those roles. [00:24:21][59.5]
Tom Wadelton: [00:24:24] You know, it’s funny you mentioned Dallas, Texas, because Adam did in our most recent CFO. Our recent hire, I think, came from Dallas, Texas. We have found some really good talent in Dallas, as well. Since you mentioned auditing people going, is it pretty common that you find certain roles that people are saying, I’m in this role now, but I really want to get away from that, and they’re using a recruiter to help them jump from? Public to industry, audit to non-audit, out of tax, is there a certain, what are people running from that you’re seeing when you’re looking at the candidates and where they’re trying to go? [00:24:55][31.4]
Will Spengler: [00:24:57] It’s interesting. I talk to a lot of people in public accounting and they’re, let’s say they’re an audit or assurance manager and they are at a big four shop. A lot of the opportunities that they want, that the market wants for them is SEC reporting and publicly traded, you know, accounting. And a lot of those people don’t want they don’t want to do corporate accounting and SEC reporting. So it’s interesting because most of their experience in public lended towards that path, but they don’t have an interest in it. So I do talk to a lot of people that want to get out of publicly traded 10Qs, 10Ks, don’t really want to be technical accounting in industry. They really want go mid-size company. They want to into FP&A and analytics. I can’t tell how many auditors I talk to that just want, they want to get into FP&A and out of core accounting, but the problem is a lot of companies don’t want to hire them because they don’t really have those skills. A lot of company would say, hey, I’d rather just hire someone with a bachelor’s degree in finance and one to three years of analyst experience in industry than hire the three or four-year public accountant that wants to get in to FP&I. So interesting. [00:26:19][81.9]
Tom Wadelton: [00:26:20] I think I’d make the counter argument if, well, and I think of sort of our firm, if you’re trying to get into FP&A from like a CFO, virtual CFO kind of role, that background of really being strong in the accounting and the controller ship, but your focus once been forecasting can be fantastic because we don’t really want someone who likes to build models and stuff, but then the books are falling apart behind the scenes and they’re catching that stuff. To have that. So it would be a certain roles, but I could definitely see where that background is really good. You might take a chance on teaching them the FP&A part. [00:26:51][30.7]
Speaker 5: [00:26:53] I do, too. You have to have good accounting to do good analytics, right? So, you know. [00:27:01][7.8]
Adam Hale: [00:27:03] Oh, no, I was just going to ask. I mean, one of the things are is like it used to be like in public accounting in kind of that same thing, thinking about the technology side, it used to be, I remember whenever I got my CPA exam, the big thing was like accountants are dorks and they can’t talk. And so everybody wanted us to get like communications, right? So the whole CPA exam came around like, how do you communicate to people? How can you talk to them? And everybody was like, you got to get a communications minor. You know what I mean? Communication, communication. Now it seems like everybody’s like, no, you need to have a coding technology, a little bit of a mix of a background. Now we’ll see. That might change because AI can make coding completely relative pretty soon. But for the most part, are you seeing? Um the you know the highest dollar value people the most marketable people are they coming with some kind of um a little bit of a technical background whether it’s education or certifications or some things like that paired with their CPA. [00:28:06][62.6]
Will Spengler: [00:28:08] Yeah, I think the thing that I keep hearing from customers that use us is that they want somebody that can communicate the data so that a business unit leader can take action on that. And that’s like the thing that keeps coming up is the soft skills of communication. There are a lot of people that are really good in like Power BI or Tableau or SQL, and they’re very technical, And they’ll hand this like really fancy report with all these analytical insights. But if you think about the business unit leader in a company, they maybe came up the sales route or the operations route and they’re looking at this report like, okay, so what do I do with this, right? And that’s what we’re, we hear so many customers at like the director of finance, finance manager, FP&A, it’s like, we need people that can. Understand, like interview our business units, understand our business model and be able to give reports that these people can then take action on. And I call it like communicate the FP&A like your audience is a third grader. I think people are too technical at times and then sales and operational people don’t know what to do with that, right? So we do see that all the time. I do think that as far as what’s getting the premium dollar, I think it’s the CPA is still the gold standard is what we’re seeing. We don’t see customers asking for CMAs. We don’t t the CFA not so important. I think because you get into that valuing stocks, bonds, options. But I play mainly in the corporate finance route. So there’s probably financial services businesses that like CFA’s, but we don’t really see much of a premium on CMA or CFA for certifications. I do think there’s when you’re certified in like Power BI, Tableau, SQL, I think that can get you a premium in the market. That’s what I was kind of thinking. [00:30:20][131.6]
Adam Hale: [00:30:23] What about you mentioned like the soft skills, I’m curious, like, do you do anything or do you prescribe to anything to like kind of, because it’s kind of like multitasking, right? Like, every time we tell people we’re like, hey, in public accounting, you got to deal with 15 different clients, you gotta multitask. I’ve never met a human being once that I talked to that didn’t say they were good at multitasking. You know what I mean? But it’s like, you know, there’s degrees of that. And so Um, I was curious from your, from your perspective, I kind of nerd out on a lot of assessments. Um, do you do any kind of assessments to determine, um, for instance, like the one that I’m really hyped on now is the culture index. It’s kind of, it’s predictive index, but it’s like, got a little bit of a twist to it, but basically tells you if somebody’s more like defense or offense, right? And if you know what the role is, if it’s a controller role, you know, you probably need somebody that’s good at defense, right, like, cool, I’m glad you got a sequel background, and I’m going to be can nerd out on the numbers, be high and tight on that. Good job. But whenever I go to move to like, you know a CFO role, I need somebody that plays offense, like naturally, you Know what I mean? So I think that culture index, what I’ve seen of it so far, it really like gives us the ability to see defense versus offense, and then it can kind of tell if somebody’s strategic or not. Do you do any of that kind of? Testing or assessment on any of your candidates and kind of try to filter through that. [00:31:54][91.2]
Will Spengler: [00:31:56] So, I have a business partner in Dallas named Rob Thomas, and he is very into these assessments and he’s a big fan of one called the BG5, which I’ve grown appreciation for over the years. I would I would say the BG5 is like Meier-Briggs meets astrology, so it could be a little too out in the astrology category, but I have taken, you know, the Enneagram is another one that we looked at. We do have our clients will have the PI and then the CI, you said it’s the CI we’ve seen be important. As far as do we do it, it’s upon a client request. And we have that BG5 that we use as a firm. It can be frustrating for recruiters, these personality tests, because you have someone really good and then a customer, everybody loves them, but then they say, we’re not going to hire them because of their personality tests. It’s like, well, they just went through eight rounds of interviews. So for us recruiters. They could be frustrating. But I will say I have a customer they’re called nerdio. They’re a tech unicorn. They use one called the wonder lick. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the wonder link. The CHRO, he fully believes in the Wonder Lick, and me as a recruiter, and if he’s listening, I’m sorry, I have a good relationship with it, but it sort of drives me crazy, because only 20% of people pass this Wonder Lik, and so many good candidates just get knocked out right in the beginning because of this Wonder Lake, but then they are a tech unicorn that’s grown exponentially, and It’s unbelievable. They just got 500 million in funding and they’re up there with Other major tech unicorns and a lot of it’s done through hiring and I said to him the other day I said look I’ve given you a lot pushback on the Wonder Lake But it’s clear that it works and it’s leading to aligned results and getting the right people. So I think the best way, and I always advise customers, is don’t skip the references. I think it’s just make sure you get three professional references. They take a lot of sweat equity and elbow grease, but I think that the best to understand what you’re going to get is to really take the time to do the references, because people interview well, they speak well. But usually their past track record is typically 95% of the time, that’s what you’re going to end up with. Not that Tigers can’t change stripes, but I do think professional references are under-utilized because people get lazy not doing them. [00:35:03][187.1]
Tom Wadelton: [00:35:04] Well, I’m curious, if you’ve got someone listening who said, I’ve never used a recruiter, and maybe I’m a small firm, which is a lot of our listeners, and the expense and just don’t have that experience doing it, what would your proposal be to say you could change their minds? I’m hearing a lot things like checking references and doing the advertising and things that may be different than what people are doing today where potentially the cost is not as much as what they think it is. So how would you say, here’s why you should be thinking of using you? [00:35:32][27.7]
Will Spengler: [00:35:35] I think you have to think about, you know, if you’re a small CPA firm, you’d have to quantify if I made this hire, how much more free time would I have? What is the opportunity cost of my time? You know, it depends on the hire, but they oftentimes can bring a book of business if they’re a tax director or… And so I think I understand nobody wants to pay a recruiting fee. But you have to think about the opportunity, cost of your time, the potential growth in your book of business. And then you have think about improving the operations of your company and efficiency of your company and if you’re not filling those jobs for three, four, five, six months, you’re not growing, you are not efficient and you’re spending too much time. Why not give a recruiter a swing and if we’re a contingency-based service, there’s obviously retained firms, but you only pay us if you actually hire somebody. So I think I have a lot of customers that have been coming back to me for years. There’s a reason people use us. There’s reason we exist and can feed our families. And I think it’s because we We help build companies and we make good hires. I understand no one wants to pay the fee, but we are a professional service that exists for a reason. [00:37:03][88.6]
Tom Wadelton: [00:37:05] Two things that really stuck out for me that you talked about, maybe the biggest was the time to hire. If you could speed that up by say two, three, four months, you could pretty well quantify what the value of that could be and then the time of the person doing it. Who may have said, I’ve wanted to put this roll out for bid or put it out on the whatever for this long and I just haven’t done it because I’m procrastinating a job description. I don’t know where to post all that stuff and so that all takes time where you could just pay someone to have but done professionally for you. [00:37:34][28.7]
Will Spengler: [00:37:35] Yeah, I mean, there are certain roles we fill that are like mission critical, right? If you’re not making payroll or you’re not paying your vendors, like there are certain roles that it’s speed. We absolutely need somebody to do this, otherwise our business could shut down, right. So there are like speed hiring systems where companies are like, look, we just lost our payroll person. We have payroll next week, like we need somebody now. Not, you know, we can’t do eight rounds of reviews. If you’re a small CPA firm advisory practice, it’s just on how fast you want to grow, right? How what is the bottleneck of your time? Is it a good use of your times to interview people? It you know, it depends it just depends on the situation. So [00:38:22][47.8]
Tom Wadelton: [00:38:25] Let me get to a final question. I’m going to go a bit of a different direction, but have some fun. I’d be curious in hearing kind of a recruiting fail story that you have. And I don’t mind starting by being curious, Adam, you also, as we think of, as we have tried to recruit people. So I’ll tell you mine, but I’ll give you guys a chance to think about yours for a second. There was a time when we don’t do it anymore where because we’re a remote firm and we’re camera on firm, we would ask you before we do the interview, give us like a one or two minute, just a quick video clip. That would let us get a chance to see if everything was working well but didn’t just see how they are on camera and there were some that I remember one in particular where the camera was barely on their face maybe like on a fourth of their face and it was this complete monotone I would like to work for your for this and that and you just stop you’re like and you’ve looked at that and then decide to send that like yep that’s going to get me the job kind of thing most of them were really good but there were Some that were were pretty rough in that kind of Recruiting fail story that you think of [00:39:25][59.8]
Adam Hale: [00:39:26] Oh, we’ve got a lot of recruiting fails for sure. I’m trying to think through like the interviewing. I just remember like getting the bad resumes where I want to, you know, they were applying to be, I don’t know what there is something in accounting and their aspiration was to be a football couch, you know, instead of, you know, that one still sticks out in my head. Why would you like call out that you want to be something totally different, like a football coach? And then you spell it out. Uh, you’re not going to make it, but, um, but yeah, there’s a lot of those, but yeah, I do remember one of the interviews to, um where somebody wasn’t even on camera, they were like, they’re pointing it into the ground the whole time. What? So anyway, yeah, there’s, there was lots of those. [00:40:12][45.9]
Tom Wadelton: [00:40:12] Yeah, well, how about you? You’ve only done thousands of these interviews. [00:40:15][2.7]
Will Spengler: [00:40:16] Yeah, I’ve seen so many, and I don’t want to get too cryptic, but we’ve had temporary employees that are on our payroll out at our customers that have actually passed away at The Cube. And so, I have seen a lot of fails where people have a fake social security card, and I do not want to talk about all those negative things, but one that always sticks out to me in my career, this was about 10 years ago. Uh, we had a tax, uh, senior director going for like a fifth final round interview at a CPA firm and they brought it, they had all the partners come in to meet him and he was in the hallway waiting to interview. And I remember me and this guy, Howard, we were like, okay, we’re going to finally close this deal today is just meet the partners. This is like the fifth, sixth round of interviews. The gentleman proceeded to he had to use the restroom and he ended up walking into the maintenance in the maintenance room where like the toilet the trees are and he According to the receptionist, he opened the door, looked around, realized it was a maintenance room, proceeded to shut the door because he thought he was in the bathroom, and he actually got locked in the maintenance closet. And the actual maintenance person was not there that day at the office. So the candidate final round interview, all the partners that they’re flown in, A couple of them flew in. The guy was in the maintenance closet for, I think, three hours, and they finally had to call the maintenance guy to come out, get him out of the closet. The customer said to us, we like him, he’s a great candidate, but we just can’t see past how he could open the maintenance closet door. Didn’t he realize it was in a bathroom, and shut the door? And I remember at the time I kept saying, I was like, well, it’s been so hard to find the CPA, it’s senior tax director of this. They just couldn’t see past it. [00:42:28][131.8]
Speaker 4: [00:42:29] And I, you know, so it’s, I don’t know, that one always sticks out to me. That’s funny. [00:42:34][5.4]
Adam Hale: [00:42:36] Look at you. That’s a good one. Awful. Go to the fifth or sixth round and then lock yourself in. No kidding. [00:42:41][5.8]
Tom Wadelton: [00:42:45] To realize where he was for three hours, the poor guy. That is great. Well, I did, and this was actually a friend of mine who said, so he getting out of college, really awkward, just sort of, I was just on this day where I just, everything was awkward. Anyway, the client was, or the prospect was taking him out to lunch during the interview and they came up to a revolving door and he said, is the door when the guy stepped in, so like Adam steps in in front of me and he went ahead and stepped into like the same space. And when the guy noticed and sort of turned around he stopped and so then this guy hits his head on the door now they’re both in that same little thing kind of shuffling their feet to get out of the door and he was just like there was this one second like why did I follow him when you kind of wait for the next opening to come through but it was just such a funny awkward Like, what are you doing? That’s fair. Well, anyone’s recruiting story hopefully is better than the ones that we gave for this. But well, this has been really interesting. It’s been interesting to hear what you’re seeing in the market, what people are looking for, and anyone who has not used a recruiter, either find a job or to go look. I’m hoping that they’ll give this a shot after listening to you and what the professional approach that you want to do. Yeah. [00:43:55][70.9]
Speaker 5: [00:43:57] Thanks for having me on your show, hopefully there’s some value. [00:44:01][3.7]
Tom Wadelton: [00:44:02] Yeah, if people want to learn more you want to tell where people can find you? [00:44:05][3.1]
Will Spengler: [00:44:06] I watch my LinkedIn like a hawk, Will Spangler. You message me at 11 o’clock at night, my wife will be upset, but I will respond. You can also go to www.FrederickFox.com and take a look at our website, our team. We have a lot of great former CFOs. We have former partner of PWC that’s on our team, so it’s a really good group of people and I can’t speak. Enough about how great their work is. So whether you work with me or someone else in the firm, we’d be happy to help you if you see the value in our service. That sounds fantastic. [00:44:43][37.1]
Tom Wadelton: [00:44:44] Well, great, thank you for spending some time with today and this was really valuable. Yep, thanks Will. [00:44:49][4.9]
Speaker 4: [00:44:50] Thanks, Seth.