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Inside the 2025 Finance and Accounting Talent Crisis: Q&A with Personiv’s Matt Wood
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Finance and accounting leaders are grappling with a growing crisis that’s reshaping hiring strategies and redefining what it takes to attract and retain top talent. According to Personiv’s newly relea...
Finance and accounting leaders are grappling with a growing crisis that’s reshaping hiring strategies and redefining what it takes to attract and retain top talent. According to Personiv’s newly released 2025 Finance & Accounting Talent Market Outlook, the talent shortage has reached a new peak, with open roles and time-to-hire metrics both sharply on the rise.
We recently spoke with Matt Wood, Global Head of Finance & Accounting Outsourcing at Personiv, to unpack the latest data and explore what it means for finance leaders. From root causes and business impacts to the strategies teams are using to adapt, Matt offers strategies on how the industry is evolving and what organizations can do to stay competitive in this evolving landscape.
The talent shortage has reached crisis status in the past year. My organization regularly surveys CFOs and other accounting and finance decision makers, and the most striking finding in the Q1 2025 survey was that the average number of open finance and accounting roles jumped by 150% since Q1 2024. Last year, the average was 2 open roles per company. Now it’s 5.2, and the leaders we surveyed expect that figure to increase slightly through the end of this year.
It’s also taking longer than ever to fill those roles. Last year, it took an average of 44 days to hire for an open role. This year, 49% of survey participants said it takes an average of 60 days or more to fill open positions at their companies.
It’s important to understand that the talent shortage didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve seen the pipeline slowing down and emptying out since 2016, when enrollment in accounting and finance degree programs started to slow, and it’s really catching up to the industry now.
Awareness of the problem is catching up, too. We’ve seen more leaders in the space acknowledging talent scarcity each year since 2020, and this year 87% agree that it’s a problem, which is the highest percentage yet. These leaders also say the shortage of talent is their biggest problem, ahead of concerns about inflation, uncertainty in the wider economy, or compliance and regulation. A lack of abundant talent is the defining feature of a new normal in the industry.
Apart from the short-term consequences of unfilled positions, like work delays and process bottlenecks, there’s the longer-term risk of negative spirals. Some organizations are already facing this kind of situation, where roles remain open for months, so other employees have to pick up the slack. Then they may start to make errors because they’re feeling rushed or tired, and morale starts to drop.
That’s the part of the cycle where organizations may then start to see employees burning out or leaving the company in search of a job that’s more rewarding and less stressful and out of balance. And of course, with every employee that leaves, there’s another role to fill and more work to distribute among the remaining employees, which increases the pressure on them and raises the risk of turnover even more.
We don’t survey prospective employees or students, but in the survey report we cite recent data from Stanford University and Deloitte that offers some insights into what younger workers want, which is primarily things like work-life balance, learning opportunities with the latest technology, and good pay and benefits.
Accounting and finance have a reputation for long hours, especially during peak seasons. There’s also a perception that accounting and finance don’t keep up with emerging technologies, so that can raise concerns among workers who want to develop their technology skills to further their careers.
Pay is where we see a clear and well-documented issue. In the report we chart Bureau of Labor Statistics salary data for other data-focused, analytics- and process-oriented careers like software developer and data scientist. The average accountant and auditor salary is around $90,000. The average data scientist makes $28,000 more than that per year. And the average software developer outearns the average accountant or auditor by more than $47,000 per year.
Those are stark differences, so it becomes easy to see why a young person who’s comfortable working with data and analytics might choose one of those options over accounting, especially if they have concerns about work-life balance and opportunities to work with new technology.
Well, most organizations aren’t in a position to dramatically increase the compensation they can offer new hires, at least not in the short term. What we’re seeing is an ongoing use of outsourcing, which many accounting and finance teams have done for a while now, and a rise in adoption of AI-powered automation to handle basic, repetitive tasks. With automation in particular, organizations can also benefit because those basic, repetitive tasks can get done faster and with less risk of errors caused by distraction. This year, more than half of our survey respondents said their organizations are seeing the biggest impact from automation in AR and AP, and nearly a third said they’re seeing the biggest impact in payroll and general ledger and financial close.
Automation and outsourcing can relieve the pressure on existing employees. When those open roles that create more work for everyone are filled through outsourcing or automated with AI, those employees are less likely to make mistakes due to fatigue, they’re less likely to feel burned out and look for another job somewhere else. Automation and outsourcing both can reduce costs for the organization, and that can free up resources to invest in growth or better compensate employees. So then we start to see an upward trend where the combination of fewer dull tasks, less task overwhelm and better pay can reduce turnover and maybe even attract candidates to fill some of those open roles.
The first step is for the organization to acknowledge that the talent shortage isn’t just a fluke and it’s unlikely that the talent pipeline is going to refill to pre-2016 levels any time soon. This is just the new normal for the industry. When everyone aligns on that, it opens up the possibility of investment in automation and perhaps a greater use of outsourcing.
Understanding the new normal also makes it possible to focus on what current and prospective employees need to join and stay with the organization. That’s work-life balance, which automation and outsourcing can help with. It’s also learning opportunities that involve today’s and tomorrow’s technologies. Working with AI-powered automation solutions is a good example, especially because we all expect AI to become increasingly important across many dimensions of work. And of course, finding savings to make accounting salaries more competitive with related fields is critical as well.
This year’s survey results show that more organizations are embracing these new ways to make up for talent scarcity. The companies that are already moving in that direction will be in the best position to appeal to new candidates and retain their existing team members, to avoid the doom loop of burnout and unfilled roles and instead build a positive cycle of productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction.
Learn more in the Personiv 2025 Finance & Accounting Talent Market Outlook.
Matt Wood, Global Head of Finance & Accounting Outsourcing, Personiv
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