Accounting Today - June 2012

the Supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits, minority hiring in the profession has seen slight improvements, but overall stagnation.

From 2008 to 2010, total minority hiring rose from 22 percent to 25 percent. Broken down by ethnicity, Hispanic hiring increased from 4 percent to 7 percent of total hires over the two-year span; Black/African-American hires stayed steady at 4 percent; Asian/Pacific Islander hires also remained fixed, at 12 percent; and American Indian/Alaskan Native hires fell from 2 percent to zero. Meanwhile, females, who in 2008 had a slight edge on the male hires, found an even gender split in 2010.

Diversity
FROM PAGE 1
RECRUITMENT

The Big Four credit these minimal recruiting gains to a profession-wide trend of introducing under-represented minorities to accounting at a younger age.

Thirty-six percent of Ernst & Young’s campus hires are minorities — an increase from a mid-1990s number of about 10 percent — according to the Big Four firm’s Americas director of inclusiveness recruiting, Ken Bouyer, who attributes the improvement to a holistic strategy.

Initiatives like the Rutgers Future Scholar
Program, where Bouyer spoke to nearly 200
low-income, academically talented seventh-
graders last summer, are targeting younger
students, but Bouyer also stresses the per-
sonal touch. “We’re real people, in a great
profession, incredibly successful, and we
have the ability to make a lot of significant
change,” he explained. “I myself grew up in
Queens, the inner city, and I personalize the
story for those coming from a similar back-
ground. I say, a talented pool like yourselves
should consider the profession. The message
resonates well with students.”
Marcus Harden, executive director of the
nonprofit Accounting Career Awareness Pro-
gram in Seattle, which offers a college pre-
paratory pilot program to minority students,
finds that the students’ discovery of account-
ing firms’ “cool clients” — like Microsoft, Nike,
Starbucks and Amazon — resonates.

In one instance, a shared passion did the trick for one of the students Harden mentored. When the young African-American soccer fanatic visited Deloitte, he discovered that employees participated in company games. “There was this look on his face,” Harden recalled. “‘I can do this and still play soccer for fun?’ It inspired him to apply to the accounting program at Howard University,” which he now attends. “He wants to work at Deloitte;

before, he didn’t know what he wanted to do
or why he was there. That’s what an aware-
ness program can do.”
This interpersonal outreach is important,
said Bouyer, but to really move the needle,
a much bigger message is essential. Heidi
Brundage, the AICPA’s senior manager of
the A&A product line and professional de-
velopment team, agreed. “From a minority
perspective, we’re not doing a good job get-
ting them into the profession — forget keep-
ing them and developing them into leaders,”
she said. “We don’t make the profession look
attractive enough, or as successful as the law
and the medical profession. Accounting
doesn’t hold the same cache, if you will, as
some other professions. If I’m a minority, and
I’m going for the top, oftentimes it’s ingrained
in me — medicine and law are the place to be.
We need to change that perception.”
According to Calvin Harris, national presi-
dent and chief executive officer of the Nation-
al Association of Black Accountants’ National
Board of Directors, this issue of marketing the
profession to under-represented minorities
is an ongoing problem to be solved. He re-
members a past AICPA campaign, depicting
the accountants of sports figures on posters,
as having the right idea.

For now, Harris said, NABA, which was established in 1969 and today has 6,500 student and professional members, has shifted gears to helping firms foster an environment of inclusion.

RETENTION

This holy grail of an inclusive environment is critical to retention, an area where many of the firms recording positive under-represented minority and female hiring progress are struggling.

Deloitte’s pipeline has been successful, at least at the very top. Chief executive Joe Echevarria is of Hispanic/Latino origin and chairman Punit Renjen is of Indian origin. The firm’s former chairman, Sharon Allen, was also the first woman elected to that office in the Big Four.

“[Diversity] is more than just the numbers
— it’s about the culture and how individu-
als are treated, accepted, and their ability to
thrive as key contributors, professionals and
leaders,” said Deb DeHaas, chief inclusion
officer for the Deloitte U.S. firms, via e-mail.
“For us, one of the most important indicators
is what our people are saying. Our annual tal-
ent survey includes multiple questions that
help us gauge our inclusive culture.”
Those numbers, nonetheless, are dire. The
Howard University School of Business Center
for Accounting Education’s February 2010
study, Retaining African-Americans in the
Accounting Profession: A Success Model, re-
ported that only 1 percent of public account-
ing partners are African-American, and only
3 percent of chief financial officers at Fortune
500 companies are minorities.

GENDER DIFFERENTIAL PwC believes that the mentor of an under-represented minority or female employee need not necessarily match the face of their protégé, according to Maria Moats, the firm’s chief diversity officer. As a whole, the firm employs 27 percent minority employees and 45 percent women, and at the entry level, its associate class is 46 percent female and 31 percent minority.