WHY THE HIRES THAT MATTER MOST NEVER COME FROM AN ADVERT

WHY THE HIRES THAT MATTER MOST NEVER COME FROM AN ADVERT

Posted on 25 August 2026 by Lydia Sinclair FREC

On specialist audit, the RI shortage, and the tax technology roles nobody
was hiring for ten years ago.


Most hiring in practice starts the same way. A partner decides a role is
needed. Somebody writes a spec. The spec becomes an advert. The advert goes
out, and then everyone waits to see what comes back.

For a lot of roles that works perfectly well.

For the roles that genuinely change something about a practice, it usually
doesn't, and the reason has nothing to do with how the advert was written.


AN ADVERT IS A FILTER, NOT A SEARCH

An advert doesn't find anybody. It filters the people who were already
looking.

That's a useful thing to do when the skill you need is reasonably common,
because at any given time a decent number of people with that skill are
somewhere in the process of moving. You put the role in front of them and
some of them respond.

The moment the skill becomes scarce, the maths changes completely. You're
no longer filtering a large group. You're waiting for a very small group to
contain somebody who happens to be looking this month.

Most of the time it won't. And because the advert is quiet, the conclusion
the practice draws is "there's nobody out there", when the accurate
conclusion is "the two or three people who fit aren't currently looking".

Those are different problems with different answers.


THE ENVELOPE TEST

Here's an exercise worth doing before you place another specialist advert.

Take the role. Take the geography you'd realistically accept, allowing for
whatever hybrid arrangement you offer. Now count, honestly, the people at
that level in that area doing that specific work.

Then start removing.

Remove anyone at a practice you wouldn't approach, whether for client
conflict reasons or because you already work alongside them. Remove anyone
who moved in the last six to nine months, because they're not going
anywhere. Remove the ones who've gone into industry and show no sign of
coming back. Remove the ones visibly on a partner track they have no
reason to leave.

What's left usually fits on the back of an envelope.

That number is your actual market. Not the number of people with the job
title, which is the number most hiring plans are quietly built on.

Once you've seen it written down, several things become obvious at once.
Advertising won't reach them. Your timeline is longer than you assumed.
And you'll probably have to be flexible on something, because a list that
short rarely contains somebody who is perfect on every dimension.


THE RI PROBLEM IS A PLANNING PROBLEM

Audit RIs deserve their own paragraph because the shortage is structural
rather than cyclical.

You cannot hire one quickly. The right experience, the right sign-off and a
firm willing to take somebody through the process is a combination that
doesn't assemble itself in six weeks. Meanwhile the pipeline behind the
current generation is thin. A lot of capable auditors have been pulled
toward advisory work over the last decade, and plenty of practices quietly
stopped growing their own when the training economics got harder.

The result is predictable. The RIs who exist are looked after, and they
very rarely appear on a job board.

If your audit registration currently rests on one or two people, that isn't
a recruitment issue sitting in the future. It's a succession issue sitting
in the present, and it wants a two or three year plan rather than a search
starting the week somebody announces they're retiring.


THE DISCIPLINE THAT ARRIVED WHILE NOBODY WAS HIRING FOR IT

Tax technology is the clearest current example of all of this, and it's the
one I think is about to move fastest.

Ten years ago, tax technology in most practices meant a tax person who was
better than average with spreadsheets. It has become something else. The
people doing it now understand the compliance obligation, the shape of the
data sitting underneath it, and the software that joins the two. Just as
importantly, they can sit between a tax team and an IT function without
either side losing patience.

The pressure driving it comes from several directions at once. Making Tax
Digital. E-invoicing mandates rolling out across Europe. Pillar Two
reporting for practices with clients of that size. Every one of those takes
something that used to be a tax question and turns it into a data question.

Speaking to a specialist in Europe recently, what struck me most was the
gap in timing. Parts of Europe are meaningfully ahead, largely because
e-invoicing forced the issue earlier. Some UK practices are having the
conversation now that their European counterparts had three years ago.

The recruitment consequence follows directly from the history. Nobody was
hiring for this a decade ago, so nobody was training for it either. The
available pipeline only runs as deep as the handful of years of people who
taught themselves along the way. That is a very small group, and it is not
sitting on job boards.


YOU MAY ALREADY HAVE ONE

This is the part worth acting on this week, because it costs nothing.

Somewhere in most tax teams there is a person automating things nobody
asked them to automate. They've built something in Excel that half the
department now depends on. They're the one people go to when the software
does something strange. Nobody has ever given this a title, and it doesn't
appear anywhere in their appraisal.

That person is worth considerably more to the practice than another pair of
compliance hands, and at the moment they may not know it.

Two things follow. First, say so, out loud, before somebody outside the
practice says it first. Second, give the work a shape. A title, a portion
of chargeable time protected for it, a route that leads somewhere. People
rarely leave because of money alone. They leave because the thing they're
good at has no future where they are.


WHAT TO DO INSTEAD OF ADVERTISING

None of this means adverts don't work. It means they're the wrong tool for
a particular category of hire, and it's worth knowing which category you're
in before you commit three months to the wrong approach.

For the scarce roles, the sequence that works is roughly this.

Map before you need to hire. Find out who exists, where they sit, what
they're likely earning, who is genuinely approachable and who isn't. Doing
that in September changes what you're able to do in January.

Decide in advance what you'd flex. If the specialism is non-negotiable,
accept you may be hiring the sector knowledge and training the rest. If
the level is non-negotiable, accept the specialism may need building. Very
few practices get both without waiting a long time.

Then approach people properly, one at a time, on the basis that they aren't
looking and have no particular reason to talk to you. That conversation is
a different one from an application, and it takes longer.


A NOTE ON WORLD ENTREPRENEURS' DAY

It fell on 21 August this year, and it's worth a moment in a piece about
practice careers.

A fair number of the people placed as seniors fifteen years ago now have
their own practices, and a fair number of the ones qualifying today are
quietly working out whether they could. It's a bigger undercurrent in this
profession than the job titles on LinkedIn suggest.


FINAL THOUGHT

Think about the last hire that genuinely changed something in your
practice. Not the one that filled a gap. The one that made the next two
years different.

In our experience, those people almost never arrive through an advert.
Somebody went and found them, usually before there was a vacancy to
put them in.

The practices that will hire well over the next couple of years are the
ones treating that as a planning exercise rather than a reactive one.


If you'd like to know what your actual market looks like before you need
it, that's what our Market Intelligence service does. No names, no personal
data, just a clear picture of your market so you can plan against something
real.

protalent.eu/market-intelligence/

Lydia Sinclair FREC, Founder, ProTalent Limited
lydia@protalent.co · 01273 491 852