Try hiring a mid-level accountant right now. Post the role, wait, watch the applications trickle in if they come at all and you’ll understand the shift firms are grappling with faster than any statistic could explain it.
It’s not that firms have gotten worse at recruiting. The available talent pool has quietly shrunk, and the old playbook – post, interview, hire, repeat, can no longer keep pace with the speed of growth.. The question firms are asking has changed too. It’s less “how do we hire more people” and more “where else should we even be looking.”
Why the pool is shrinking and it’s not one thing
It’s rarely a single cause. It’s a handful of smaller shifts that add up.
Fewer students are choosing accounting in the first place, so the pipeline of graduates entering the profession each year keeps getting thinner. At the same time, a large chunk of the experienced workforce is heading toward retirement, taking with them the kind of institutional knowledge that doesn’t show up on a CV. Add in more firms competing for the same shrinking group of qualified people, and salaries climb while availability doesn’t. And the people who are out there want different things than they used to, flexibility, a real career path, a life outside the busy season which changes both who you can hire and how long they stay.
None of this is a firm doing something wrong. It’s just the market they’re hiring in now.
What it actually looks like day to day
Recruitment cycles stretch from weeks into months. The team that’s already there absorbs the gap in the meantime, which is fine for a while and then very much isn’t. A lack of available staff can slow down growth, whether that means taking on a new client or launching a new service line. And the cost of finally filling a role climbs right alongside everyone else’s, because everyone’s fishing in the same small pond.
Looking beyond the local pool
More firms are reaching a similar conclusion: hiring only within a five-mile radius (or one country’s worth of graduates) isn’t really a strategy anymore, it’s a constraint they’ve inherited rather than chosen. Widening where you look for talent doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means accessing skilled people who happen to sit outside the postcode you’ve been limiting yourself to.
This is where offshore accounting has moved from “interesting idea” to genuinely practical option for a lot of firms, not as a shortcut, but as a way of building a team that isn’t entirely at the mercy of one local market.
How this works at The Dot HQ
Our Professionals on Demand (PODs) aren’t a call centre or a rotating pool of whoever’s free. They’re dedicated to your firm specifically, working inside your existing systems and processes so it feels less like outsourcing and more like hiring, just without the four-month wait.
A few things that tend to matter most to firms considering this:
• Dedicated, not shared. Your PODs work exclusively with your firm, which means continuity, the same people, learning your clients and your way of doing things, rather than starting from scratch every time.
• Your systems, not ours. No new software to learn, no workflow overhaul. The team works inside what you already use.
• Built to flex. Scale up for busy season, hold steady the rest of the year, capacity that moves with you rather than a fixed headcount you’re stuck with either way.
• Time back for the work that matters. With routine work covered, your local team gets to spend more of their week on clients, advisory, and the strategic stuff that’s usually the first thing to get squeezed out.
The talent shortage isn’t a phase firms are waiting out, it’s the new baseline. Which means the firms adjusting to it now, rather than hoping it resolves itself, are the ones likely to keep growing comfortably while others stay stuck refreshing the same shrinking list of candidates.
If your local talent pool is limiting your growth, it may be time to look further. Talk to The Dot HQ about building the team you need.