Today, I'll share some ideas on how Chief Audit Executives and other Internal Audit Leaders can attract more candidates to interview for their open positions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a decrease in accounting graduates, reducing the pipeline of potential Internal Audit staff, seniors, and managers. In response, many employers have become more intentional about retaining good internal auditors by offering better pay, enriching work experiences, or faster promotions.

As a result, job requisitions for needed Internal Audit positions remain open for longer periods. And these prolonged vacancies can cause significant challenges for internal audit teams—resulting in missed deadlines, overworked staff, and lowered team morale.

This problem is a result of many Internal Audit teams following the same steps that their peers do when they are seeking to hire - they create a job requisition, post it on-line, cross their fingers, and hope for the best. Unfortunately, using this strategy won’t solve the problems mentioned above.

INTERNAL AUDITOR LEADERS NEED TO REIMAGINE THEIR APPROACH TO FILLING THEIR OPEN POSITIONS

If you are looking for ways to find more highly qualified candidates to interview and fill your open job requisition faster, consider these four strategies.

1. Re-imagine job postings
2. Proactively recruit
3. Increase the awareness of your team, your team’s brand, and role
4. Always be recruiting

1 . Re-imagine job postings

Most job postings outline the role requirements and expectations for the Internal Audit candidate. It’s always about “what can the candidate do to help the company”.

While this is important, it misses a crucial aspect—what's in it for the candidate? Many job requisitions fail to highlight the benefits the employee will gain from the position, being part of this particular internal audit team, or joining the organization itself.

To solve for this, begin including these benefits in your job descriptions. Then support these benefits with written or video testimonials from current and past team members to include in the job posting.

If you do this and then compare your open requisition with others similar type of open roles, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how well your open role may stand out.

2. Proactively recruit

Employing a hiring strategy of “post the role and wait” is never a good idea. Even if your open role does receive candidates, it relies on working with other team members in your organization (Sourcing and Human Resources) who may not be getting candidate information to you timely.

Instead of waiting on others who may have less motivation to close these open roles, I’d recommend taking matters into your own hands. You can start by leveraging your own network. Begin with your team and expand to your current colleagues in IT and Finance, followed by your former colleagues. Have any of them worked with auditors who left a positive impression?

You can also connect with IIA, ACFE, ISACA chapter leaders, and your AuditBoard or other technology vendor team to see who they know who might be considering new career opportunities.

And if and when you identify potential candidates, ask your contact to help with an introduction. Connect with the candidate on LinkedIn and propose a virtual coffee meeting to further the introductions and to talk shop.

3. Increase the awareness of your team, team’s brand, and role

‍If your Internal Audit team lacks a strong brand in the audit community, building one can dramatically improve your ability to fill open roles quickly.

Start by boosting your team's engagement in both local and online audit communities. Motivate your team members to participate actively.

Does your team use an innovative audit strategy or technique? Present it at a local IIA chapter meeting. Encourage your team to share audit ideas and strategies on LinkedIn—we need more practitioners doing this! When a team member achieves something noteworthy, gets promoted, or moves to a new role within your organization, celebrate their success online.

Many other audit teams don't showcase their successes, which can make your team stand out and appear more attractive to potential candidates.

When posting an open role online, avoid the cliché "I'm hiring" or "Come work for me" comments. How boring and unoriginal!

Instead, tell a story—your story or your team's story. Explain what you're striving to achieve, why it's crucial to the company's success, and how this role contributes significantly to both the team and the company. Your story might provide the motivation a candidate needs to apply.

The best internal audit leaders are also vocal advocates for their company. In my opinion, this makes a real difference.

4. Always Be Recruiting

Keep in mind, employing any of the strategies above doesn't guarantee you'll immediately fill your open role. However, you should find more candidates to interview, and faster. That said, there's always a lead time from creating a requisition, getting it approved internally, working with HR, and finally sharing the role publicly.

Many experienced hiring managers agree that the easiest time to find a candidate is often when you don't need one. If it's important to ensure open roles don't stay vacant for long, it's advisable to adopt an "always be recruiting" approach.

Proactively networking and encouraging your team to promote its culture, regardless of open opportunities, will catch the attention of the internal audit community.

If done consistently over time, you'll find that more candidates will proactively inquire about joining your team, whether there are open roles or not.