You may have read about it. You may have talked with others about it. There's…
By John Borrowman, CPC
Borrowman Baker, LLC, BV Staffing + Consulting
Gallatin, TN
If you have the impression there has been churn in the BV labor force, you aren’t dreaming. We have some numbers.
For three decades, our vantage point has afforded us a view of the workforce that employers don’t have. For one thing, the profession faces a paradoxical challenge because it is a business of judgment. If you need to hire someone with enough experience to have demonstrated that judgment, you are limited to hiring within the profession.
That constraint became a problem in late 2020 and early 2021 when demand from asset management/investment practices sucked talent away from the BV profession. We looked at a snapshot of BV Leavers from April to October 2021. Our dataset is, by definition, incomplete. We saw two revealing points:
- The longest tenure among them was 21+ years. The shortest was a mere nine months. The median was 31 months, barely enough to recoup a training investment.
- For about 75% of them, BVFLS was their first job out of college. Mismatched expectations—on both sides—undoubtedly played a significant role.
Fast forward to today. We have updated numbers to share. For the first three quarters of 2024, we tracked 47 BV Leavers. This number is skewed upward owing to some large-firm layoffs. So, there appears to be a slowdown in the outflow of labor.
We could also track 122 who left one practice for another during the same period. That’s 3 to 4 a week. (Again, the actual number is likely to be higher.) On the face of it, that seems startling. On the other hand, it’s a tiny percentage of the 2,000 to 3,000 professionals we estimate in the labor force.
Just don’t try making that point to a practice leader who lost 1 of that 122.
John Borrowman
