Why You Should Consider Non-Finance Hires to Address the Coming Staffing Shortage

As AR leaders brace themselves for a limited hiring pool in the next few years, it’s important to consider non-traditional candidates.

Instead of limiting your recruitment to only those with AR experience, think about the skills you’re hiring for and where people with that experience are currently working. 

AR Voluntary Attrition on the Rise

Nearly one in four AR staff say they plan to leave their current team within a year; nearly half will defect within three years, according to a survey of more than 400 financial operations professionals conducted by IOFM in Fall 2024.

Many of those departures will come from your mostly loyal baby boomers, 40% of whom plan to retire within three years. Compounding the challenge is that younger hires don’t plan to remain with their current AR teams as long:

Expect departures in the next three years from:

• 38% of your Gen Xers (those born between 1965-1980)
• 47% of your Millennials (those born between 1981-1996)
• 82% of your Gen Xers (those born after 1996)

The news isn’t all bad. In fact, staff attrition can be reversed significantly by:

• Investing in your team members (through adjustments to salary, training and career path),
• Protecting work/life balance (by enabling work from home and limiting burnout by reducing the total hours worked),
• Enabling staff to be heard (by building mutual trust with their managers, making sure their opinions are heard and helping them recognize the impact they are making on their team and the broader organization).

Reducing turnover is only part of the answer for tomorrow’s top AR leaders. It’s also important to think about where the next round of hires may come from.

Why AR Leaders Should Look Beyond AR For New Hires

When hiring new AR staff, it’s only natural to look for candidates with AR experience. But that pool is drying up, explains Tiffany Stout, a talent acquisition specialist with LSI Staffing.

“If you wait until your team starts announcing their retirement to begin your succession strategy, you’re already behind.” Stout says. “As the talent pool moves away from traditional accounting roles, those who delay adapting their hiring practices will be at a serious disadvantage to secure the strongest non-traditional talent”

Instead of only looking for professionals with AR experience, she suggests AR leaders break down the AR role into component parts and look for similarities in other jobs.

“The core competencies of AR – like managing conflict, deliberate follow up communication and handling objections – aren’t unique to accounting,” Stout says. “Customer service reps use these same skills every day. If we keep hiring based only on job titles like “AR clerk”, we’re overlooking talent who already have what it takes to succeed.”  

AR hiring managers need to be able to tell a story about someone’s prior experience rather than assume from a seemingly unrelated job title that there’s no parallel.

The table below identifies jobs that have applicability to AR roles.

Overcoming the Skeptical CFO

Even if you buy into the idea that non-AR roles can provide relevant AR skills, your CFO may not necessarily agree, Stout adds. 

“You may have to help CFOs reframe how they evaluate experience,” she says. “That starts with storytelling – making the connection between a candidate’s background and what success in AR really looks like. Highlighting how a candidate's experience resolving complex customer issues, directly prepares them for managing payment disputes.

“Not every role on your team demands high value from day one, and that’s okay. The key is adjusting your value centers: Place your formally-trained accountants in technical roles, and open the more task-driven or entry-level positions to capable, non-traditional candidates with transferable skills,” she adds.

Stout says to look for candidates with soft skills; the technical AR skills are easier to teach.“In most situations, what you’re really hiring for is tenacity and sound judgement –  those traits can’t be taught,” she says. “You can teach systems, you can train process. But if someone can’t think on their feet or follow through, no SOP will fix that”

Questions to Ask When Hiring

 Interviewing a non-traditional AR candidate is different than when talking with someone with AR experience. You’re not asking them to regurgitate their resume; you’re asking them new and penetrating questions to get to their soft-skill and relevant experiences.

Stout suggests asking: “Can you tell me about a time you had to ask someone – like a friend or family member – to repay a debt or follow through on a commitment? How did you approach it and what did you take away?”

Other questions to consider include:

In the end, to replace the staff lost to voluntary attrition, you’re going to have to be creative. The sooner you adapt to the “new normal”, the better the talent you’ll have access to.