The New Generation Gap

Brian Back, an executive recruiter who specializes in finance and accounting, knows there’s a labor shortage when demand for his firm’s services spikes. “Right now, the demand is absolutely intense,” says Back, president of Bloomington-based Ambrion, Inc. The firm’s six-person executive recruitment team, he says, is currently trying to service a staggering 155 search requests. “A lot of this work isn’t stuff we were out soliciting. Our clients are piling it on, and we know they’re piling it on every recruiter in this town.”

Back says that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which injected stringent good-governance and financial-accountability standards into the public sector, has severely strained accounting and finance departments across all industries. According to Paul Beard, president of McKinley Group, Inc., an executive search firm in Minnetonka, Sarbanes-Oxley has helped ignite demand for accountants and finance professionals the way the Y2K scare sent companies scrambling for IT professionals in the late 1990s.

"If you're looking to fill a senior leadership role, the people you want to court are being courted by all these other companies as well. So you have to have your game plan on in terms of how to sell this opportunity."

“There is a strain on the management ranks, in particular, in accounting and finance—you can feel it,” Back says. “There is a lot of work to be done and all this pressure in terms of deadlines and compliance issues. There is immense pressure on these departments to stay staffed, remain staffed, and to win the recruiting battle that’s going on for what talent that’s out there in the accounting and finance world.”

Their recruitment efforts certainly aren’t aided by the state’s predictably lower-than-average unemployment rate. In October 2006, Minnesota’s unemployment rate was 3.9 percent, one-half a percentage point below the national rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “When you look at unemployment in a niche like accounting and finance, the rate gets painfully low,” Back says. “Companies are really struggling.”

The pain extends beyond finance and accounting, according to a collection of Twin Cities executive recruiters, who identified low prospect “inventories” in marketing, engineering, information technology, and health care. “Without exception, there are shortages in all those areas,” says David Gavin, president of Northland Employment Services, Inc., a recruiting firm in St. Louis Park.

And the forecast doesn’t look to brighten anytime soon.