The Day After April 15th: How To Find A Tax Job When Your Firm Downsizes
With wars spreading throughout the world, tax and accounting professionals must build a backup business plan to protect their tax careers from unwanted interruptions. Unless you are not paying attention, (doubtful since tax professionals are highly educated), world events are quickly unfolding that will affect the tax and accounting profession, too. Previous wars are a good indicator of future actions, with generations having lived their lives through the Vietnam War(1969-1973); Persian Gulf War(1993); Afghanistan War( 2001-2014); Iraq War( 2003-2011, we know wars create a fast track to downsizing firms. While the government is funding wars in Ukraine, Russia, Israel with Iran; U.S. taxpayers are increasingly taxed to the max. We know from years of experience that large firms downsize to reduce overhead costs after April 15th . They now call downsizings, a rightsizing which is an oxymoron. A firm rightsizing is the process of restructuring an organization by cutting costs, reducing employees, or reforming upper management. For tax and accounting professionals caught in these rightsizings, it is devastating. However, this time it is different, as we built a safety net to protect tax professionals.
What action should you take now to support and protect your tax career?
A tax career is smart choice, if you manage it properly, and this means taking personal responsibility for marketing yourself. Every firm’s marketing budget focus is on the firms’ name and brand, not your name. What most tax staff do not realize is that the Tax Partners who are knocking it out of the ballpark for their firms are privately investing their own money in marketing themselves. You need not wait to make Tax Partner to realize what really happens. Years ago, a Tax Partner privately confided in me, they would rather get a root canal than go in and ask management at the firm for money to market themselves. They told me the answer would be a hard no! The firm’s marketing budget is spent on a firm’s name, not individual names. This makes good business sense since the turnover rate is 25%-30% in the Big Four. Most do not realize that the Tax Partners who are doing well in large firms invest in marketing themselves out of their own pocket. Once you learn this lesson, you learn to start early in taking personal responsibility to market your tax expertise.
There are two things that get a tax professional noticed online: writing blogs and answering tax questions. You also need an active distribution channel to distribute your ideas to an audience interested in tax content and information. We encounter good writers in tax who great articles sit on their sites but not positioned in front of an audience who loves to read tax content. TaxConnections has a proven and very loyal audience who loves to read tax content. See proof in our site metrics. The reason writing and posting blogs are so important is because people get to know you through written articles. Taxpayers learn more about you and your tax expertise; they get a sense of your personality through your writing. On the other hand, if you do not like to write. TaxConnections provides a powerful way to actively engage with taxpayers who need a tax advisor through our Ask Tax Questions/Answer Tax Questions feature. Many TaxConnections Members have shared with us that they have acquired several new clients using TaxConnections Q&A feature. Every time you answer a tax question, only TaxConnections Members can answer questions, your questions and answers appear on your Professional Profile page and are also displayed on TaxConnections Homepage. If another client asks you the same question, simply send them the link to your TaxConnections Professional Profile page. The best way to build trust with prospective new clients is for people to read articles you have written or questions you have answered. This is how they first start to learn about you through blog posts and answering tax questions. This all builds trust around your expertise.
TaxConnections Membership ensures that all your professional assets work in your favor by raising your visibility. In other words, your assets should work together to advance your tax career online. Your professional assets may include: Resume, Audios, Blogs, Videos, Tax Answers, Photo, Podcasts, etc.) What most tax professionals mistakenly do is disperse their assets around multiple sites; when they should also have all their assets in one primary location that they can redirect clients. Having all your assets in one place online is a smart and thoughtful way to organize your information for prospective clients to learn the most about you! A TaxConnections profile is highly effective in selling your tax services. TaxConnections brings all your professional assets to one online location in a way that elevates your professional visibility. You may have not previously considered organizing all your assets online and how it impacts your visibility. Do you currently have all your professional assets in one location so prospective clients can learn about you in one link? If not, you should start building one today with a TaxConnections Membership.
What causes the most disruption in a tax professional’s career is that they fail to have a backup business plan. Most tax professionals are unprepared for job changes that will inevitably occur during their career due to a firm downsizing (rightsizing), layoff, merger/acquisition, technology transformation, or a misfit cultural experience. This can happen to anyone with a tax career which can span three or four decades. Each year in April/May Big Firms are rightsizing their organizations.
Allow me to share a personal story with you. Over the past thirty years, I have had my heart strings tugged listening to private conversations with thousands of tax and accounting professionals caught in these rightsizings. Tax Partners to tax seniors are rightsized out of their roles and it is devastating for each tax professional involved. The stories I could share are stunning, especially at the Tax Partner level. This is another article altogether as no one is safe from downsizing.
My primary motivation in building the www.taxconnections.com site resulted from the thousands of private conversations I had with tax professionals who I could not help when losing a job. I wanted to create a solution for tax professionals who felt they had nowhere to go in their greatest time of need. The answer was building a backup business plan for tax professionals to be up and running within hours of the day they lost their source of income. Previously, as a tax recruiter I had to turn away ninety-nine out of one hundred tax professionals I spoke with who I could not help because retainer clients have very specific requirements. It was during these times I realized the importance of developing a solution to help tax professionals connect with those who need their tax expertise. I also knew that for a tax professional to have a safety net for source of income, each tax professional must take personal responsibility for their tax careers in good times and in bad. I advise all tax professionals to take action to protect themselves with a safety net by raising your visibility in front of millions of visitors searching for a wide range of tax expertise.
As a result of building the www.taxconnections.com platform, tax professionals can be up and running their own tax practice very quickly and/or market themselves to organizations needing their expertise. Whether you work for a big firm or are on your own, you need to be consistently visible to attract new business to your current firm or a future one. There is no better way to invest in yourself than to position yourself in front of a steady stream of potential clients who are searching for tax expertise on the tax centric site www.taxconnections.com
A TaxConnections Member gains a website built about them online in less than thirty minutes with active traffic coming to discover them. TaxConnections Members gain an immediate online business presence positioned in front of a steady stream of taxpayers searching for tax expertise; TaxConnections Members gain a way for previous colleagues and clients to find them online without being blocked by paywalls on alternate websites; TaxConnections Members also gain a global distribution network for their written blog content; they gain immediate access to prospective tax clients who are reaching out through TaxConnections Ask Tax Questions/Answer Tax Questions feature; TaxConnections Members also gain a Virtual Tax Office that organizes all their professional assets to one page (Audios, Resume, Blogs, Video, Tax Answers, Podcasts, etc.) that work all together to raise a professional’s visibility higher online.)
TaxConnections has had millions of visitors searching for tax expertise from and to locations all over the world. We have received numerous requests for referrals we have been unable to fill, so we need your professional profile and services on our site to feed taxpayer visitor demand. Believe me, taxpayers will not pay to go through a paywall to find you on LinkedIn; they will not go to FaceBook to find you due to it being a data collection trap, they will not look through multiple association or government sites to find you. They want an effortless way to find the tax expertise they need around the world. TaxConnections Visitors are growing due to the need from increased taxes in every direction.
All you need to do is show up as a TaxConnections Member and learn from the Tutorials we send you when you join our community. Many of our members come to find and refer other members on our site to outsource work to them under white label agreements! As a TaxConnections Member you can build a services firm simply by creating collaborative relationships with other trusted tax providers. Reach out to members who will do the tax work for you under your own label.
Through TaxConnections Membership, you have a way to be up and running quickly and earning income should your firm rightsize you out of their practice. Do not panic, move fast and take action, and get busy with a great helping hand from TaxConnections.
What do most tax professionals not know about searching for a new tax job?
Your firm cannot save you; a recruiter cannot save you; you need to be prepared to know how to save yourself. Most tax professionals are clueless that the organization they work for can buy their engagement activity online. Are you searching for a new tax job on LinkedIn? If so, LinkedIn is providing a service called Glint Services (Read 7.0-7.5) to your employers, since LinkedIn tracks and sells the activity you are engaged in online. Prior to company layoffs, your company can purchase your activity(engagement) on LinkedIn when making downsizing decisions. This should be a wakeup call for anyone looking for a tax job on LI. On the other hand, TaxConnections never has, nor will sell your activity on our site to anyone, ever! We may send you a message from one of our advertisers, but we never sell your private search activity. We respect and protect your privacy! We reach out to the tax professionals in our community about our private retained searches.
About ten years ago, we started seeing an interesting trend. I do not know if it was going on before this time but it shook many Tax Partners who shared their stories with me to the core. I will not mention the firm name but will tell you what happened. I saw one firm downsizing that cut out dozens of high performing Tax Partners making 800K – 1M and promoted all the less experienced Tax Partners making 300K into senior roles of authorities at the firm. The senior Partners were treated badly and put aside. The Senior Partners got mad and 90% left the firm within the year, and all the Junior Tax Partners simply picked up the clients from the Tax Partners who left. The Managing Partner of the firm no doubt improved the balance sheet quickly. This kind of treatment actually happens to Partners who have devoted their professional lives to grew these firms. It was hard to put my head around at the time, but it is “just business” with many of these firms. Moral of this story is have a backup plan in place by building and investing in a visible brand identity of your own.
7.0 Glint Services https://www.linkedin.com/legal/l/service-terms
Another thing tax professionals need to know about finding a tax job is why they do not hear back from tax recruiters on all tax jobs. The answer is recruiters are either working on a contingency basis or a retained basis with clients. If a recruiter is working on a contingency basis this means they are competing with multiple recruiters inside and outside the organization and never guaranteed to get you in front of the client, nor do they have a guarantee to get paid for all the work they do for the client. HR folks may state they already have the tax professionals name in their resume database, even though the recruiter was the first one to bring the candidate to the clients’ attention. It does not matter that your resume was already in their resume system, yet they did not put it together. Hardworking recruiters get burned all the time by internal recruiters who find the resume in their LinkedIn database only after a recruiter notifies the HR person the resume in in their databank. Internal HR folks have dashed many hard-working tax recruiter careers due to unfair practices. I sent out a letter a week ago to communicate with forty tax recruiters and fifteen have already left the tax recruiting profession or have gone in-house to make a living. On the other hand, retained tax recruiters(how we work) are paid a partial fee upfront to conduct a thorough search of the market for clients who demand specific requirements. Recruiters time belongs to the clients who pay(retain) them for their time to search the tax marketplace for qualified tax executives. An expert tax recruiter is a valuable resource. We do not even post our tax jobs anymore, we simply seek out professionals on tax executive searches. It is wise to know us and support us since you will be the first to know about these roles.
When you do not hear back from a tax recruiter it is primarily because you do not have the qualifications their clients want. There is a service where you can retain an expert tax recruiter coach to walk you through the process so you get in front of the clients who do not pay recruiter fees; many recruiters may not tell you that is happening but we always tell you at TaxConnections because we want to help you succeed. If we have a member who needs help contacting clients directly, we hold their hands through the entire search process if they are a TaxConnections Member. They can book private coaching time with us to navigate the complex maze of sophisticated tax executive placement. There are firms searching for you and we will show you how to effectively connect with key hiring managers at companies who do not pay recruiter fees on your own. Once you are taught the process, you will have a higher appreciation for expert tax recruiters and their coaching time.
Have a question? Contact Kat Jennings at kat@taxconnections.com.
Begin your TaxConnections Membership Here: https://www.taxconnections.com/membership/sign-up
Please Forward This Article To Anyone You Know Who Needs Help During A Firm Downsizing.
