The Partner Brief | Edition 8
Ask almost any partner why people join and stay and you will hear the same set of claims. We are not like the Big 4. Our culture is our differentiator. People stay here for the long term. There is often a kernel of truth in this. Many mid-tier and regional firms do feel and operate differently from the largest networks.
The problem is that nearly every firm now tells some version of the same story. In a market where candidates have far greater access to information than they did a decade ago, “we’re different” has stopped functioning as a strategy and started functioning as wallpaper. What matters is no longer what partners say in a pitch. It is what current and former employees can verify about progression, workload and long-term opportunity. Those two things are increasingly far apart.
Recent large-scale surveys paint a consistent and uncomfortable picture.
ACCA’s Global Talent Trends 2023 report, based on over 8,000 respondents across 148 countries, found that 69% of finance professionals were planning to move role within two years, with 44% expecting to do so within the next 12 months.¹ Workload, work-life balance, pay and career progression were the top drivers. Burnout and the mental health impact of sustained pressure featured heavily throughout the findings.¹ Public practice respondents reported particularly acute concerns about long hours and whether their roles were sustainable over the long term.¹
On flexible working, the picture is similarly uneven. Even where hybrid policies exist on paper, a significant proportion of practitioners report that flexibility is constrained in practice by client demands and local culture rather than supported by clear, consistently applied norms.¹ The policy exists. The reality often does not match it.
On progression, the data is harder still to ignore. The AICPA’s long-running Trends reports show that while women have made up roughly half of accounting graduates and entry-level staff in US public accounting for many years, they still account for only around a quarter of partners.² The Accounting MOVE Project, which benchmarks the advancement of women across US accounting firms, repeatedly identifies the senior manager to partner transition as the critical point at which women leave the pipeline. Informal promotion practices and a lack of transparent criteria are cited as the primary barriers.³
In other words, many firms’ claims about being meritocratic, flexible and people-centred are only partially borne out in the data. The intent may be genuine. The experience is more uneven than most partners are willing to admit.
Three structural shifts have undermined the power of “we’re different” messaging, and none of them are going away.
The first is the collapse of information asymmetry. Ten or fifteen years ago, candidates relied primarily on firm websites, recruiters and a handful of personal contacts. Today they triangulate from multiple directions at once: benchmarking reports and salary guides from professional bodies and specialist recruiters; public platforms such as Glassdoor, Indeed and Fishbowl; WhatsApp groups and alumni networks that span firms and geographies.¹ The result is that narratives about culture, workload and progression are checked constantly against real-world testimony. What a partner says in a meeting on a Tuesday afternoon will be tested against what a former senior manager said in a group chat that same evening.
The second is that the talking points have converged. Virtually all firms now claim hybrid working, investment in technology, development opportunities and a supportive culture. ICAEW’s research on the mid-tier notes that firms increasingly position themselves on similar axes, balance, culture and client closeness, as they seek to differentiate from the Big 4.⁴ When everyone claims broadly the same things, the claims cancel each other out. Differentiation can only come from what is measurable and verifiable in practice.
The third is that expectations of transparency are rising, and rising fast. Younger and mid-career professionals expect far more clarity over promotion criteria, timelines and long-term earning potential than earlier generations accepted.¹ ³ They want concrete evidence: explicit descriptions of what it takes to move from senior to manager to director, examples of people who have progressed via flexible or non-linear paths, and a credible story about equity and long-term financial participation. An abstract promise of “partnership one day” does not cut it any more. They have seen too many people reach senior manager and then stall or leave.
In that environment, aspirational language without facts to back it up does not just fail to persuade. It actively damages credibility.
Firms that are managing to stand out in this market are doing so in quieter but more concrete ways. Three patterns are emerging consistently.
They are willing to put numbers on the table. Rather than broad claims, these firms share actual data, at least internally and sometimes in moderated form with candidates, on what career progression genuinely looks like. That means typical time-in-role windows at each grade, promotion rates over recent years disaggregated where possible by gender and office, retention rates at key career stages particularly at manager and senior manager level, and broad bands for partner buy-ins and earnings framed as ranges rather than promises.³ The details vary and not every firm is ready to share everything. But partners who can sit in front of a candidate and say “this is what usually happens here” with reference to real trends rather than anecdotes are finding it significantly easier to build trust.
They make the ownership story concrete. As alternative ownership models, private equity investment, ESOPs, fixed-share and salaried partnerships, become more visible across the profession, mid-career professionals are increasingly evaluating firms through the lens of long-term financial participation.⁴ Firms that are handling this well explain the realistic routes by which someone in their early thirties might begin to access profit-share, deferred awards or other forms of upside. They describe how they are adapting partnership structures, introducing non-equity tiers or staged capital contributions, to make ownership more accessible. And they are honest about the trade-offs: the expectations that come with equity, the risks partners carry, and how the firm supports new partners financially and in their development. This does not require sharing a drawings table line by line. It does require moving well beyond “you could be a partner here one day.”
They prove culture through specific design choices. Firms whose cultural claims ring true can usually point to tangible, observable decisions that support them. They have deliberately reduced maximum hours expectations in certain months and can show the trend over time. They have codified hybrid patterns for particular service lines so that flexibility is predictable rather than left to individual discretion. They have restructured busy season teams and introduced automation specifically to address burnout, then tracked what happened to retention afterwards. They have built transparent processes for project allocation, secondments and leadership opportunities so that access is not driven solely by who you happen to know or whose office is nearest the partners.³ These changes are not easy and they require partners to adjust habits that have existed for decades. But they are precisely the kind of moves that candidates hear about through informal channels long before they walk through the door.
From our vantage point, working exclusively with accounting practices on audit, tax and accounting roles, and spend much of our time in conversation with both partners and candidates, we see this disconnect with some regularity.
Partners describe their firm in aspirational terms. They talk about what they are building, where they are heading, the kind of place they want it to be. Candidates describe the same firm in experiential terms. They talk about the hours they worked last busy season, the clarity or lack of it in their last progression conversation, and what happened the last time someone on their team asked for genuine flexibility.
Where those two stories align, even imperfectly, firms do not need an elaborate employer brand to attract strong people. A frank conversation about trade-offs, backed by some basic numbers and real examples, is usually enough. Where they diverge, “we’re different” becomes not just unconvincing but counter-productive. High-potential candidates discount what they hear in the room and default to the back-channel view. The more polished the pitch, the more suspicious they become.
The firms gaining an edge in this market are not necessarily those with the most sophisticated branding or the most generous benefit packages. They are the ones willing to examine their own data on progression, workload and retention honestly, prepared to adjust structures and expectations when the evidence points to a problem, and comfortable having direct, adult conversations about what a career with them genuinely looks like, including the parts that are hard.
In a market where every practice says it is different, the only differentiation that holds up is what stands scrutiny inside your own numbers and in the stories your people tell when you are not in the room.
About Baker Thornton
Baker Thornton specialises in connecting accounting firms in the UK and CPA practices in USA and Canada with qualified audit, tax, and accounting professionals who possess deep understanding of practice environments and operational demands. Our focus is on sustainable placements that enhance your team's technical capabilities for emerging regulatory and market challenges, from MTD implementation to capacity planning for peak periods.
Should you be developing your 2026-2027 workforce strategy, we welcome the opportunity to discuss your practice's specific requirements.
¹ ACCA (2023) Global Talent Trends 2023. London: Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. Available at: https://www.accaglobal.com/content/dam/ACCA_Global/professional-insights/talenttrends2023/PI-GLOBAL-TALENT-TRENDS-2023%20v11.pdf
² American Institute of CPAs (2021) Trends in the Supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits. New York: American Institute of CPAs. Available at: https://www.thiswaytocpa.com/collectedmedia/files/trends-report-2021.pdf
³ Accounting and Financial Women’s Alliance / Wilson-Taylor Associates (2022) Accounting MOVE Project: Navigating the New Career-Fluid Culture. Available at: https://wilson-taylorassoc.com/move/accounting
⁴ ICAEW (2024) Evolution of Mid-Tier Accountancy Firms. London: Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Available at: https://www.icaew.com/technical/practice-resources/evolution-of-mid-tier-accountancy-firms
⁵ Kokina, J. and Davenport, T.H. (2017) ‘The emergence of artificial intelligence: how automation is changing auditing’, Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting, 14(1), pp. 115–122. https://doi.org/10.2308/jeta-51730