The competition for qualified accountants in Ireland has not quietly eased off. If anything, the pool of practice-trained talent is getting smaller while the number of firms and industry employers chasing it grows. Against that backdrop, some firms are doing something different — and it is starting to show in their ability to attract and keep good people.
RBK’s recent Great Place to Work certification is one of the more visible examples. But the certification itself is not the point. What it signals is that certain firms are paying serious attention to how they are perceived as employers — not just how they are perceived by clients.
Culture Is Now a Recruitment Tool, Whether You Plan for It or Not
Here is something worth sitting with: most candidates I speak with research a firm’s culture before they ever respond to a job posting. They look at LinkedIn. They ask peers. They remember what they heard at a conference two years ago. By the time they are talking to me, they have already formed a view.
That means your culture is already working for or against you in the talent market — regardless of whether you have made any deliberate effort to shape how it comes across. The firms that are winning hires right now are the ones that have stopped leaving that to chance.
Great Place to Work certification is one structured way of gathering evidence and making it visible. But even without a formal programme, firms that communicate clearly about how they treat people — flexible working arrangements, progression timelines, support for exams, what life actually looks like at manager level — are standing out in a market where most firms say very little.
What Qualified Candidates Are Actually Weighing Up
When a part-qualified or newly qualified accountant is deciding between two or three offers, salary matters. But it is rarely the only thing, and sometimes it is not even the main thing.
What I hear consistently: people want to know how long it realistically takes to progress. They want to know what the firm’s approach to hybrid working looks like in practice, not just in policy. They want to understand whether the partners are people they can learn from and whether the firm invests in its people genuinely or just says it does.
Firms that can answer those questions clearly, with specifics rather than generalities, close more hires. Firms that cannot — or that give vague, evasive answers — lose candidates to firms that can, even when the salary offer is lower.
This is where employer branding does practical work. It is not about marketing spin. It is about being able to articulate honestly and specifically what it is like to build a career at your firm.
What the Firms Getting This Right Are Actually Doing
A few things I see in common across firms that are consistently attracting good people:
They have thought carefully about what makes their firm a genuinely good place to work — and they can name it. Not “great culture” and “collaborative environment,” but something specific: a dedicated training programme, a clear path from senior to manager with no ambiguity about the criteria, a partner group that is genuinely accessible, a hybrid arrangement that is flexible in reality and not just on paper.
They make that visible. Through LinkedIn content, through how they show up at careers events, through how their existing staff talk about the firm. Word travels in this sector.
They ask for feedback and act on it. The Great Place to Work process is essentially a structured version of this — surveying your own people honestly and using what you learn. You do not need external certification to do that. You do need the honesty to ask and the willingness to hear difficult answers.
They move. When a strong candidate is at offer stage, they make decisions quickly. Every day of delay costs credibility.
The Firms That Will Struggle
The firms that will find the next two or three years hardest are the ones treating recruitment as a reactive exercise — only engaging with the market when a seat is empty, with no profile to offer, no clear narrative, and a slow process.
In a market where candidates often have multiple conversations happening at once, the firms with no visible employer brand are starting well behind the line.
The good news: this is genuinely fixable. You do not need a large HR function or a marketing budget. You need to be clear about what you offer, honest about where you are still improving, and deliberate about how you communicate both.
If you are trying to work out where your firm stands as an employer right now — or what specifically is causing you to lose candidates at offer stage — I am happy to have that conversation. No agenda, just an honest look at what you are competing with.
