Nobody Is Signing: Why Audit Firms Can't Fill The Layer Above Manager

Nobody Is Signing: Why Audit Firms Can't Fill The Layer Above Manager

Posted on 11 August 2026 by Lydia Sinclair FREC

If you run an audit team and you've been trying to recruit at the top of it, you've probably had a version of this year.

The advert goes out. It attracts semi-seniors and seniors, a couple of managers who aren't quite there, and nobody at all who could take on Responsible Individual status. You widen the salary. You widen the geography. Same result.

The instinct at that point is to blame the market, or the pipeline, or the fact that nobody wants to do audit any more. I don't think any of those is quite right.


It isn't a pipeline problem

The trainee shortage is real. Practices have been fighting over school leavers and graduates for several years now and the intake has never fully recovered from the period when audit stopped looking like the interesting option. But that isn't what's stopping firms hiring at the top today. The people who would be filling those roles in 2026 were recruited in 2016 or earlier. They exist. Most of them are still in practice.

They just aren't moving up.

The bottleneck is the step from strong audit manager to RI, and it is a decision being made by individuals, one at a time, in favour of staying exactly where they are. 


What people actually say when you ask them

I've started asking this directly rather than letting it pass. The answers are remarkably consistent.

The responsibility is personal in a way almost nothing else in practice is. Your name goes on the file. If a file is picked up and found wanting, the consequence attaches to you and follows you, not to a firm that can restructure and move on.

Regulatory scrutiny has gone one direction over the last decade. People in audit are acutely aware of that, and they can name the cases.

And the work itself changes. Being an RI isn't more of what a good audit manager already does. It's a different job, with more judgement calls made alone, more sign-off, more difficult conversations with clients about things they'd rather not hear.

Most people I talk to aren't frightened of the work. They're weighing it up. Which is a very different problem, and a more solvable one.


The reward hasn't moved with the risk

Here's the part firms find uncomfortable.

Ask someone what the financial difference is between where they are now and where they'd be as an RI, and in a lot of practices the honest answer is: not very much. A step on the salary band. Maybe a title. Sometimes a conversation about partnership that has been going on for three years without a date attached to it.

Compare that with the alternatives sitting in their inbox. Advisory work at a similar or better number with none of the personal exposure. An in-house financial reporting role where the hours are predictable and nobody is asking for a signature. A move to a larger firm where the RI step comes with a materially different package.

Set against those, staying as a very good, very well-regarded audit manager is not a failure of ambition. It's a rational calculation.

If you want people to make a different one, the calculation has to change.


Why an advert can't fix it

This is the bit I'd want any hiring partner to sit with.

The people you're looking for are almost never applying for anything. They're employed, they're valued, and the firms they're at would be dismayed to lose them. They are not scrolling job boards on a Sunday night.

So your advert reaches the people who are actively looking, which by definition is a smaller and different group. If you run that advert for four months and conclude the market is empty, what you've actually established is that the market isn't reading your advert.

Filling a role at this level means someone going and having a conversation with a person who wasn't planning to have one. That's a different exercise, it takes longer, and it doesn't work on a contingency basis, because nobody does four months of patient work on the chance of a fee at the end.


What the firms getting it right are doing

Across the practices I work with, the ones successfully moving people into RI positions have a few things in common.

They price the responsibility rather than the title. There's a visible, defensible difference between manager and RI, and everyone in the team knows roughly what it is. That does two things at once: it makes the step attractive and it tells your existing managers what they're working towards.

They put a date on progression. "In time" and "when the firm's ready" are the two phrases most likely to make a good manager start taking recruiter calls.

They make it clear nobody carries a file alone. Real review by a partner who reads it. A second opinion available without it feeling like an admission. Someone to ring when a client turns awkward in October.

They grow their own. The firms with a healthy manager layer now made deliberate decisions about study support, secondments and exposure five years ago, when there was no crisis and no obvious reason to.

And they're honest in the interview. Understating what the role involves gets people through the door and back out again within a year.


If you're the one weighing it up

Some of you reading this are the audit manager in question.

A few things worth thinking about, none of which are in my interest to say.

Ask what support genuinely exists, and ask someone who already has it rather than the person recruiting you. Ask how many files a year you'd be signing and what the partner review actually looks like in practice. Ask what the difference is financially, in numbers, and be unembarrassed about asking.

If the answer to all of that is vague, that tells you something useful, and it doesn't necessarily mean the answer is no. It might just mean it's no here.


National Allotments Week

It's National Allotments Week, 10 to 16 August.

You can't buy a mature allotment and you can't advertise for one. You get one by turning up for years and doing unglamorous things in bad weather. Practices are the same with their senior people. The firms with a strong manager layer today were feeding it quietly five years ago.


Final thought
 
Nobody takes a step this size because someone talked them into it. They take it because they can see who'll be standing next to them when it gets difficult, and because the numbers make sense when they say them out loud to a partner at home.

If you're a firm stuck at this layer, the honest starting point isn't a job advert. It's working out what your version of that answer is.

If you'd like to talk it through, I'm always happy to, whether or not it turns into a search: lydia@protalent.co or 01273 491 852.

More on how we run retained searches: protalent.eu/protalent-professional