What our Employer of the Year shortlisting can teach you about hiring

At A4G, we don’t buy in talent, we build it.

Five of our seven Partners, including both Joint Managing Partners, started their careers here as Level 1 trainees. Emma White is one of them. She joined as an 18-year-old trainee and worked her way through nearly every part of the business to get to the top.

Thirty-one years ago, A4G began as a small accountancy practice above a hairdresser with 5 staff. Today we employ more than 75 people. Across the firm, our team collectively represents 549 years of service, and a quarter of our people have been with us for over a decade.

That isn’t an accident. It’s the result of a recruitment and development approach we’ve stuck to for over 30 years, and it’s a big part of why we’ve grown every single year since we started. It’s also why we’ve just been shortlisted for the Accounting Excellence Employer of the Year award.

We’re proud of the shortlisting. But we’re prouder of what got us there.

What our approach actually looks like

• We don’t buy in talent, we build it. Rather than relying on senior hires to fill gaps, we’ve spent over 30 years developing trainees into future leaders. That’s why the majority of our current Partners started at Level 1.
• We start the pipeline early. For 27 years we’ve been engaging with local schools and colleges, classroom sessions, careers fairs, help with CVs and interview prep, so young people can see a real, achievable path into accountancy long before they’re job-hunting.
• Recruitment happens on a schedule, not a whim. We launch our trainee recruitment every February, aligned with National Apprenticeship Week. Shortlisted candidates attend a recruitment evening with speed interviews and group exercises, a second shortlisting stage follows, and offers go out in June for a September start. It happens every year. Some years we take on three trainees, last year we took on five. We still recruit throughout the year when we need to, but the trainee recruitment happens at the same time, every year, no matter what.
• Everyone gets two people in their corner. A Team Leader supports the day-to-day workload, while a separate Training and Development Manager focuses purely on long-term progression. That way, development never gets dropped when things get busy.
• We fund the qualifications. AAT, ACA, ACCA are all fully funded.

How to do this without 30 years’ head start

You don’t need a seven-level career framework to get the benefit of this. Five places to start:

1. Look at the bottom of your to-do list. If work keeps sinking there and never gets done, that’s very often the shape of your next role. Build a system robust enough for a beginner to run it, and you can hire for potential instead of experience. This is the exact thinking behind our Founder, Macolm Palmer’s book, Making Your Business Less Dependent on You. Download it here if you want a longer guide to getting things out of your head and into a system someone else can run.
2. Put recruitment on a recurring date, not a reactive trigger. Even “we review team capacity every January” stops hiring from only happening in a crisis, when you’re most likely to get it wrong.
3. Write down what “good” looks like at each stage. You don’t need seven levels, a shared understanding of junior, intermediate and senior removes the guesswork and makes progression feel fair.
4. Separate getting the work done from getting on. If one person owns both a junior’s daily workload and their development, development is what slips. Even an informal mentor, separate from the direct manager, closes that gap.
5. Recognise long service publicly. A shout-out, a small event, a simple thank you, it tells the team that staying and growing here is valued.

We won’t find out the result of the Accounting Excellence Awards until later this year, but whatever happens, being a finalist has already reminded us of something worth holding onto: culture isn’t built through one initiative, or one award. It’s built every day, through the way we support each other and it’s exactly why we’ll keep doing recruitment the way we always have.

If you’re weighing up whether you can afford to hire, our A4G Freedom programme is built around this – identifying what shouldn’t be sitting on your desk and structuring a plan to hire for it with confidence.

If it’s the people side you’re less sure about, contracts, policies, day-to-day HR issues, that’s exactly what our outsourced HR service, run by Donna, is there for.

You can read more on why we hire straight from school in our earlier piece, Why we invest in trainee recruitment. Or for the fuller “how to” on building a business that doesn’t rely on you, Malcolm’s book, Making Your Business Less Dependent on You, is here.

If you’d like to talk through your own hiring or training plans, get in touch, we’re always happy to share what’s worked for us.