The Bar Just Got Higher: What's Actually Happening in Accounting Hiring Right Now
I've been writing about the accounting job market for years now, and the conversation keeps shifting under my feet. A few years ago the story was a talent shortage. Firms couldn't find enough people, and if you had a pulse and a transcript, you had options. That story hasn't disappeared entirely, but it's no longer the whole picture. Right now I'm watching something different play out, both in the headlines and in my own network: it's gotten a lot easier to get fired, or laid off, than it was even eight years ago. I want to walk through what's driving that, and more importantly, what it means for you depending on where you sit in your career.
Let's start with what's actually happening. The Big Four have been cutting jobs in waves over the past two years. KPMG eliminated roughly 100 partners in its U.S. audit practice this spring, about 10% of that group, after not enough people took a voluntary early retirement offer. PwC has laid off thousands of employees across multiple rounds since 2024, much of it concentrated in tax and assurance. Deloitte has trimmed PTO, frozen its pension plan, and cut paid family leave for a lot of its workforce, while continuing to invest heavily in AI. This has all been covered by Accounting Today, Bloomberg Tax, and plenty of other outlets, and if you're a student about to enter this field, you should know it's happening before you walk in the door.
I want to push back on the easy narrative here, though. A layoff and a performance termination are not the same thing, and conflating them will lead you to the wrong lesson. Plenty of good performers are getting caught in these workforce reductions for reasons that have nothing to do with their work, things like a firm restructuring its advisory practice, a client cutting outside spend, or a partner retiring and taking their book of business with them. If that happens to you, the right response is not to assume you did something wrong. Sometimes you didn't. A layoff is a business decision, not a referendum on you personally.
Performance terminations are a different animal, and that's the piece I actually want to spend most of this post on, because I think there's a real, structural reason it's gotten easier to get fired for performance, separate from the macro layoff environment entirely.
Smaller teams, fewer places to hide
Ten years ago, if a partner had a certain amount of work to get through, the solution was usually to throw more people at it. More staff meant the work got spread out across more hands, so if one person on a six-person team was a little behind or a little weak, it took a while for that to become obvious; the team absorbed it.
That's changed. AI and automation have genuinely altered how much work a smaller team can move through, and engagement teams have gotten leaner as a result. When you're one of three people instead of one of six, your output is a much bigger share of the whole, and there's no crowd to disappear into. If you're ineffective, it shows up fast and it shows up clearly. I don't think this gets talked about enough, because the conversation around AI and accounting jobs tends to focus on whether AI is going to replace people outright. What I'm actually seeing play out is quieter and, in some ways, more consequential for individual careers: AI hasn't eliminated the team so much as it's compressed it, and a compressed team makes individual performance a lot harder to hide behind.
Communication skills have become part of that visibility problem too. I won't put someone in front of a client if I don't trust how they communicate, and increasingly that bar applies even to purely internal roles. I've heard plenty of recent stories about staff accountants who only need to talk to their own team and still struggle with it. There was a stretch of years where you could be a little rough around the edges socially and still get by on raw technical output, grinding through workpapers and letting the work speak for itself. I don't think that's true anymore. On a smaller team, your communication is part of the work product, not a soft skill sitting politely next to it.
Who's actually doing well right now
If I had to point to who's thriving in this environment, it's mid-career people, generally managers and above, who built a real technical and interpersonal foundation before the pandemic and are now using AI tools to extend that foundation instead of relying on it as a substitute. I do a lot of technical accounting research, and when AI research tools started getting good, I expected that to threaten that part of my job. It's done the opposite. The technology has made me faster at something I already know how to do well, which has made me more valuable, not less.
A client of mine recently did their own research on a technical accounting question tied to one of their contracts, leaned on Copilot to help, and landed on a conclusion I happened to disagree with. I did my own research and reached the opposite answer. They mentioned they'd used Copilot. I had too, but I'd also actually read the underlying guidance instead of trusting the summary it handed back. That's the difference right now. The tool is identical for both of us. What I did with it wasn't.
That's the uncomfortable part for anyone early in their career. The people doing well today built their foundation the slow way, before tools like this existed, and now get to use those tools to move faster on top of a base that's already solid. When I think back on my own first few years, the thing that actually built my skill wasn't sitting in a training session, it was research and troubleshooting through workpapers, sitting with a problem I didn't immediately understand and working through it slowly until I did. If you're a student or a first or second year staff right now, you haven't had the chance to build that base yet, and the same tools that make experienced people faster are quietly removing the kind of slow, frustrating, repetitive work that used to build it in the first place.
The behaviors that actually gatekeep your growth
I've told my students for years that at every stage of your career, there's usually one skill acting as a ceiling on your next promotion. As a staff accountant, it's almost always technical skill. By the time you're a senior trying to make manager, the ceiling shifts to people management and client communication. That framework still holds. But I think there's a layer underneath it that matters even more right now, and it isn't about skill at all. It's about behavior.
The students and early-career professionals who are going to struggle in this environment aren't necessarily the ones who lack technical skill on day one; everyone lacks that on day one. It's the ones who don't ask enough questions, don't seek out feedback, or don't act on the feedback they do get. It's the ones who reach for Google or an AI tool the second something gets hard, instead of sitting with the problem for a few extra minutes first. Those are behaviors, not skill ceilings, and behaviors are entirely within your control starting today.
So here's what I'd actually tell you to do. Separate, honestly, what's out of your control from what isn't. If your firm conducts layoffs and you're affected, that may say very little about you. But if you're getting pointed feedback about your communication, your initiative, or your judgment and you're explaining it away instead of acting on it, that part belongs to you. Sit with a hard question longer before you ask for help. Ask more questions of the people above you, not fewer. Put yourself in front of people, internally and externally, even when it's uncomfortable, because communicating clearly isn't a nice-to-have sitting beside your technical work anymore. It is the work.
The bar is genuinely higher than it was when I started, and I don't see that changing.