What sort of “person” are you looking for?
11th March, 2009 | 9:03 am | By Graham Crombie - Audit and Assurance Services, Partner and Chief Executive

Welcome to my second blog and thanks to all those who provided feedback from my first effort.  It has been an interesting couple of weeks since my first post.  We continue to see information in the media painting a gloomy picture but I am detecting a more balanced view of issues facing our economy and businesses.

We have run some staff sessions looking to balance the information out in the market and we are starting a series of client functions on 3 April on a similar theme.

These thoughts were in my mind on Monday evening when I was presenting at our recruitment function at Otago University.  It is a sign of the economy we were working in that the market for graduates was so competitive that the recruitment process was getting earlier and earlier.  The session we were running on 9 March 2009 was for people who would start with Polson Higgs at the end of March 2010.  Given the market conditions the question I was considering was has this now changed?

As usual the senior students in the room were a mixture of the enthusiastic, curious, informed and dare I say hungry.  Questions covered the normal areas such as numbers we were looking to hire, what help to we provide with training, can you help with overseas transfers, what sort of clients will I work on etc. 

I thought the most perceptive question of the evening came from a young lady immediately after we had been talking generally about the job market.  She asked, given this market, what sort of “person” were we looking for.

To me this is the crux of where professional services firms will thrive in our current market.  Our business is about relationships.  Our clients need to trust the Polson Higgs brand enough to share critical issues they are facing and take advice on major decisions.  That brand is built by individuals.

It is always interesting when you ask people about firms they convert it to their experiences with individuals – “They are a good firm – Mrs X is a top person etc”.  Nobody says they are really good at tax returns.  In challenging times these relationships become key as people are forced to make difficult decisions under pressure.

This translates to the type of people we look to hire.  It is a given now, with the undergraduate training and our internal courses that people receive along with the IT systems that support work practices that we can do the work.  Excellence is achieved when our people can communicate the outcomes of this work to clients in a way that makes sense.  Excellence is one of our values and we define it as “doing the right thing”.

Bringing this back to the type of person we are looking for obviously somebody who can work in that environment is the answer.  What do they look like?  I would suggest the following is a good start:

• Relates well to people
• Listens
• Keeps an attitude of wanting to learn about the individual and their business
• Knows what they don’t know but knows where to go to find out
• Sound technical base
• Most importantly is positive

Good luck to all those out there looking for new jobs.  From what I saw on Monday things look positive for the people entering our profession.

I hope to use future blogs to expand on some of these ideas.  I am keen to hear your thoughts on this.  Please contact me at graham.crombie@ph.co.nz

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