Professional and Corporate Services
Recruitment, HR Consulting and Workforce Strategy for accounting, legal, compliance and corporate services teams.
Professional and Corporate Services
Recruitment, HR Consulting and Workforce Strategy for accounting, legal, compliance and corporate services teams.
Professional and Corporate Services
Recruitment, HR Consulting and Workforce Strategy for accounting, legal, compliance and corporate services teams.
The hiring problem in professional services
Every firm is fishing in the same pool. The domestic pipeline of qualified accountants thinned years ago and has not recovered, so the candidates you want, qualified, client ready, three to eight years in, are the exact people every other firm is calling. Most are not on Seek. They are employed, reasonably content, and will only move for a conversation that opens with something other than a job advertisement.
The work has moved too. Compliance is increasingly offshored or automated, which changes what a local hire is for. Firms are no longer buying throughput, they are buying judgement, client handling and review capability, and those are harder to assess from a CV than technical skill ever was.
Legal has its own version of the same squeeze. Firms trained fewer juniors through the lean years and are now competing for a mid-level cohort that does not exist in sufficient numbers, which is why lateral hiring at three to six years post admission has become the hardest search in the market.
Underneath all of it, regulatory load keeps climbing. Expanded anti money laundering obligations now reach professional services firms that have never had a compliance function, which creates demand for people who can interpret an obligation and embed it in daily practice rather than just document it.
Where we help
Senior appointments where the best people are not applying
Direct approach and confidential search for the roles that will never be filled from an advertisement.
Partner and director succession
Identifying, assessing and developing the next tier, or bringing someone in when the internal bench is thinner than the plan assumes.
Building an advisory bench, not a compliance bench
Assessing for client handling, commercial judgement and review capability rather than technical throughput alone.
A first risk or compliance hire
Scoping what the role actually needs to do before you write the job description, then finding someone who can build the function rather than administer it.
Business support that scales
Executive assistants, practice managers and business support professionals, plus the structure that stops the function breaking every time the firm grows.
Roles we recruit in Professional and Corporate Services
Accounting and finance
Bookkeepers, accountants, managers, senior managers, financial controllers, CFOs and partners, across practice, financial services and internal finance functions.
Legal
Lawyers across all levels, paralegals, practice managers and legal support.
Governance, risk and compliance
Risk, compliance, AML and internal audit professionals.
Business support and administration
Executive assistants, office managers and business support.
Corporate services
Company secretarial, procurement and facilities.
When to talk to us
- A senior role has been open for months and the advertising response is not improving
- A partner or director is retiring and the succession plan is a name on a page rather than a person who is ready
- You are moving compliance work offshore and need to work out what the local team should look like afterwards
- A regulatory obligation has landed and there is nobody internally who owns it
- You need to approach someone specific, discreetly, without it becoming known in a small market
More than recruitment
Professional services firms often come to us for a hire and find the real question is structural. How the team is shaped, who is ready for the next level, whether the partnership model still fits. Workforce Strategy handles that, HR Consulting covers employment and compliance matters, and Prosperity’s accounting and advisory teams already speak your language because it is their own.
Backed by Prosperity Advisers Group
We are backed by Prosperity’s directors and specialists across accounting, tax, advisory, audit, wealth, lending, payroll and salary packaging. That is what lets a conversation about a hire move into a conversation about structure, cost or succession without changing provider.
Talk to us about your next hire
Dominic Roberts
Director, Prosperity People Solutions