-The firm is strikingly behind its peers in terms of technology, operations and recruiting. They use a number of different tools in audit engagements meant to facilitate the work, but they are often decentralized and outdated. It can be extremely cumbersome to leverage the firms technological resources and many of them have not been organized and implemented in a user-friendly manner which in turn makes their primary benefits, efficiency and effectiveness , a challenge to achieve.
-Operationally, the firm is largely ineffective as it pertains to the audit practice. Training for new employees in the department was largely the same for staff through directors in my experience. This may be acceptable for broader firm audit approach issues, but training topics would often sway in relevancy between lower level and higher level employees. Frankly, the onboarding was bizarre for a lack of a better word and often made for a lot of extra work to onboard new employees on the back end. Many of the internal policies held by the firm were either outdated or arbitrary and desperately required additional consideration.
-Recruiting was a massive issue at the firm and they often failed to recruit what I personally would expect from a firm in the 15-20 largest firms range. To be honest, I’m not sure if the firm had a recruiting team, but they really need one. It lacks outreach and brand recognition and partners often scramble and plea for employees to help them find new people. This is definitely a widespread issue in the industry, but more poignant here. This issue may be in part by the fact that their salary is typically less competitive than it’s peers and the lack of a dedicated recruiting team.
-The last issue here is the culture. It was largely devoid of any distinct meaningful culture. Coworkers were simply coworkers and it never really seemed like anyone had any admiration or loyalty to the firm. The atmosphere and energy at the firm is fairly dull and flat. This by itself is manageable, but in combination with all the issues previously mentioned lends itself to a toxic work environment in my opinion. It’s a very difficult place to work in busy season. Everyone is stressed and relatively unfamiliar with each other. Having worked at several firms, i have almost always enjoyed working on teams that build each other up and collaborate, but here there was a pervasive issue I had never seen before where management would frequently condescend, belittle and dismiss staff. Meetings were often combative and very little room for collaboration and growth was given. Public accounting is a difficult industry and this is a recipe for disaster. There was a lot of animosity here which hindered teams from being effective.
