Two years ago, we were contacted by a company who wanted to hire 3000 tax professionals on a seasonal basis. The company was challenged to find tax talent and so they came to us. What is important to understand is that they needed to find a better way to hire a remote online tax workforce, so they came to us for one. There are a lot of changes occurring in the tax marketplace right now. How do you get noticed by companies who are searching for your tax expertise? How do you access the growing trend in the virtual or remote tax workforce? It is all about positioning yourself in a way that makes it easy to find you and your tax expertise online. Even if you are not searching for a tax job you need to work smart and position your tax expertise online today.

Most tax professionals are hidden behind pay walls or multiple click barriers and are not easily found. How do I know these barriers exist? As a highly trained tax executive search expert, I know the obstacles and challenges more intimately than most anyone out there since I live and breathe tax professional search. What I see now are payment barriers set up all over the internet that prevent others from ever connecting with you in the first place. You are blocked by barriers and most of you are simply unaware of these obstacles to your success. Your name and reputation may be at the back pages of search engines (never to be discovered) or the front pages of sites who now request a payment upgrade before anyone can connect with you. These barriers are costing you dearly many tax opportunities and clients.

There is an unstoppable trend of tax professionals who want to work remotely. Every day I hear from tax professionals who want to work from home or virtually. We have one member who is setting themselves up to work from a condo on a cruise ship and is moving his entire tax practice to a virtual enterprise. We have other members who will be retiring and want to stay in tax and work from time to time; we have others who are parents who want to work part-time from home.

What is interesting is how this all started years ago with the Big Four firms who sent their tax professionals out to locations to work onsite. Remember when hoteling came along to save money on rent space? In my opinion, it was the start of a virtual tax workforce  now in full bloom where many accounting firm employees are now working at the client locations. I have had conversations with tax professionals who privately shared the welcome wore off after awhile and the clients did not want them working at their offices anymore. In fact, they were placing these tax professionals in uncomfortable office spaces (i.e. cold offices or no air conditioning) to encourage them to find another place to work. Now many of these tax consultants simply work from home. Now we have a tax workforce who has been trained and conditioned to work virtually from any location. Technology and work force trends are changing the very way we work everyday.

You will start seeing many more people indicate in their professional summary “Virtual Work Welcome”. It is an arrangement many tax professionals now request and we welcome tax professionals who want to position themselves as virtual workers to make themselves available through TaxConnections Worldwide Directory of Tax Professionals membership.