Talent Shortage Is Shapeshifting

Hey everyone, I’m Brion and welcome to EverydayCPE. Today I want to talk through something that’s been bugging me: a brand new survey on the accounting talent shortage, and a number in it that doesn’t seem to add up at first.

There’s a survey out from Personiv, picked up by both Accounting Today and Bloomberg, that says the average finance department now has 17 open roles. Last year it was five. The year before that, it was two. That’s a massive jump.

Here’s the part that confused me. In that same survey, 63% of leaders said they’re using AI to reduce hiring pressure, up from 23% last year. And 93% say AI is reducing their headcount needs, with 94% also using outsourced talent.

So we’ve got open roles exploding and AI supposedly solving the staffing problem, both at once. I wanted to dig into what’s actually going on.

It’s not always what it looks like

The first thing I’d flag, anytime you’re looking at headcount surveys, is that hiring numbers aren’t always what they look like. There have been a lot of reports on “ghost jobs” — companies posting roles they don’t really intend to fill, just to signal growth to investors. I’m not saying that’s the whole story here, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

The second thing: finance hiring has been slow for the last couple of years, maybe longer. Companies have been cost-conscious with interest rates, tariffs, all the usual uncertainty, and a lot of them have also just been waiting to see how good AI was actually going to get before committing to headcount. My guess is 2026 might be something of a breaking point. I’ve got clients who went years without hiring and are now pushing hard to backfill, because they’ve hit the ceiling of what a skeleton crew can do. To actually take advantage of AI, ironically, you sometimes need more people, not fewer.

None of this is brand new, either. The sense that there’s a talent shortage in accounting has been near record highs for years. Accounting’s been a declining major for a long time, driven partly by the fact that the hours-to-pay ratio just hasn’t kept up with other finance careers, and partly by years of offshoring junior work. So there’s a real, longer-running supply problem underneath all of this.

What’s new is the size of the jump in open roles, and the fact that it’s happening at the same time as this AI push.

The hardest roles to fill are the most automatable

Here’s where I think the real story is. The hardest roles to fill right now — senior accountant, staff accountant, tax accountant — are also the roles companies have been trying hardest to automate. That tracks. Those are the entry-level, grunt-work roles where you learn the business, but they’re also the most repetitive, rules-based work. The catch is that despite pockets of real AI success in places like AR and AP, there hasn’t been a sweeping transformation yet. The bottleneck is still what it usually is: data, process, and controls. If your data isn’t clean and your controls aren’t solid, it’s hard to actually deploy AI against that work.

There’s also a sharp stat in there: 51% of leaders rank rising salary expectations as their number one hiring obstacle. I think that’s the real crunch. Accounting hasn’t kept pace with other high-paying finance roles, and at the same time firms have been pushing toward automation and offshoring. So there’s a real open question of whether the market corrects, whether people accept lower pay, or whether — and this is what I think is actually happening with younger talent — people would rather hold out for nothing than take a role they feel underpays them.

One more data point: roles are taking longer to fill on paper, but the percentage needing 60+ days actually dropped, from 49% to 42%. That sounds like good news. I don’t think it is. I think it means more of those roles are getting closed out by automation instead of an actual hire, not that hiring suddenly got easier.

So, if you’re leading a firm or a department, treat hire-versus-automate-versus-outsource as a real, deliberate decision every time a senior, staff, or tax accountant role opens up, and write down why you picked what you picked. If you’re an accountant, the lesson is the same one we keep coming back to on this channel: knowing the technical accounting work isn’t enough anymore. You need to know the AI tools too.

Key Takeaways

• Open accounting/finance roles jumped from 2 to 5 to 17 per company over the last two years
• AI-for-headcount usage nearly tripled in a year (23% to 63%), and 93%/94% of leaders now lean on AI/outsourcing respectively
• The hardest roles to fill (senior, staff, tax accountant) are also the most automatable — but data, process, and controls issues are still the real bottleneck
• Rising salary expectations are leaders’ #1 hiring obstacle, and accounting pay hasn’t kept pace with other finance careers
• Treat hire, automate, and outsource as a genuine three-way decision for every open role, and document your reasoning

Want the CPE credit? Take the full lesson on EverydayCPE and earn 0.2 CPE credits: https://everydaycpe.com/courses/technical-finance/talent-shortage-is-shapeshifting/