MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today, I'm delighted to welcome on the show Lana Morgan, who's VP of talent at TOA Global. TOA is an Australian based outsourcing service provider, which is specialized in accounting services and so I was interested in inviting Lana to talk about the art of hiring for a position that every company in the world needs internally, and then sometimes also with external support, which is accounting, which might sound like a bit of a dry specialized topic for some of our listeners, but we'll try to make it interesting, Lana.

LANA: Thanks, Max. It absolutely is a very interesting career for people who love numbers in particular. So I think accounting used to be dry but now it's absolutely very interesting. 

MAX: Yeah, great, I took up accounting when I was in school and I thought it was the foundation of all, the balance sheet, profit and loss statements. If you can't read those you're not going to get very far in business, so absolutely essential foundation. So, Lana, thanks for joining, thanks for coming on the show and sharing some of your specialist knowledge on this topic. Before we dive into recruiting accountants, tell us a little bit about TOA. Let's start with TOA, what do you do?

LANA: So TOA Global supports our local clients, so both in Australia, New Zealand, and then in North America and Canada, to find support from an accounting function so that could be accountants bookkeepers, or financial support staff, and they would work in our Philippines office on behalf of their clients. So we really need to present the clients with really great candidates that not only can do the functional aspect of their role, but they still have to be a good cultural fit. And they treat them like they would any team member. And during this period of the pandemic when lots of onshore companies have become remote, it is just like having a remote team member anywhere in the world so we provide that service to our clients. We have over 1600 employed accountants, bookkeepers and financial support people across all of our regions. So, including all of our support staff, we've got 2000 employees at TOA Global so we're growing, we're definitely in that growth phase, and really specializing in accounting, because a lot of our counterparts or our competitors do a little bit of everything, whereas we just focus on that niche market of accountants bookkeepers and financial support. 

MAX: Great, so I'm trying to make a mental picture of like 1600 accountants, all gathered up in a place so I guess there's a lot of coffee, and a lot of calculators.

LANA: Exactly so many calculators.

MAX: So, yeah it sounds like a great business to be in because, for people who go into accounting, to have that kind of support where you have 1600 peers that you can learn from and exchange with. So, you're allowed to develop your deep domain expertise, and to help onboard people that are younger in their career, right. 

LANA: Exactly, up and coming, accountants who have finished their qualifications in the Philippines, would have exposure to that global platform of our clients and to their peers as you said, who potentially have been in the role for a little bit longer who would guide and train them in their role. So our candidates are very much aligned once they've employed with the client who employs them, and they've got sort of mini teams within that group, the 600-800 ads spread over three different sites in the Philippines. So we're in Clark, in Cebu, and in Manila, the biggest site is in Clark so that 1200 there.

MAX: Okay. I can't wait to get into the topic so let me just ask you about psychology. I know we're gonna generalize a little bit. I apologize in advance. But the psychology of an accountant, so if you're an accountant, sorry for the generalization that may be coming up, but we're talking strategy here broad lines of course there are plenty of exceptions out there but what is the kind of environments that an accountant is attracted to, to begin with, what is the persona that we're targeting from a recruiting marketing standpoint?

LANA: When we're looking for someone who's entering the accounting career after finishing their degree qualification. It really is, I suppose, once upon a time it used to just be numbers if you're good at numbers, good at the analysis, you had good attention to detail, you would be attracted to doing accounting, and that would sort of be a job for life right you just go through and you would potentially work with one or two firms for your whole career. That profile of accountants now has changed so we are expecting a lot more from our accountants, we want them to be strategic, they're almost like a project manager, they're communicating with stakeholders, they're also making recommendations to the business based on their analysis. So, it really has evolved and as you said before every business needs an accountant, but we are now relying on that function a lot more to provide that strategic direction so even we're looking to make a decision, we get that information from that accounting function within our business and then we move forward, that profile of the accountants therefore when we're interviewing we need to make sure that they're comfortable communicating, and particularly at different levels of the business so they may be communicating at their level or with a very senior manager, they do have to be in a space where they can make recommendations and be a little bit more confident than potentially in the past. So it really has evolved as a more of a project manager as a career for someone who's a little bit more dynamic I suppose and what they used to be years ago.

MAX: Yeah. When you say adapt to your audience. It means to be able to move up from doing reporting for a departmental manager to all the way to the CEO of the board.

LANA: Yes correct, yeah so now we sort of rely on that function at all different levels of the business which wasn't the case, I would say 10 years ago, so it really has changed and evolved.

MAX: What are some of the macro trends that are helping your business grow from a talent perspective as well as technology, or just general trends. 

LANA: Yeah, we would say, from an outsourcing perspective we're really focused on the people, the technology and the processes. So it's really about making everything simple, easy to follow and be able to do things more efficiently through these platforms. So that's sort of what we're doing at the moment, from an internal perspective. So when it comes to recruitment, we utilise testing platforms and we do different types of assessments for these candidates as they come through. But one thing that we don't do is remove the personal touch. So we sort of feel like we still might need to make sure we're doing that, face to face interviewing. So when we say face to face, it's all online these days so we had to pivot very quickly during the pandemic. We used to run assessment centres on site and do a lot of our interviewing in the office. We now as the rest of the world do, we now do it all online. And it's actually proved to be really efficient. So, allows us to process that higher volume, and to make sure that we're re...