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A whole new generation is entering the workforce at a time when work is changing for everyone. Getting the right talent is hard enough, but there are also considerable challenges in retaining talent and providing the right skills development to deal with the current speed of change in business and technology.
So, how can employers take a holistic approach to talent acquisition, talent management, and L&D that resonates with a Gen Z audience and engages the wider workforce?
My guest this week is Dilek Çilingir, Global Assurance Talent Leader at EY. EY has intensely focused on changing outdated perceptions around auditing as a career to bring new talent into the business. This is part of an overarching talent strategy that also focuses on upskilling and retention.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The talent market challenges facing the audit profession
• An increasingly complex work environment
• Busting stereotypes and marketing auditing as an attractive career
• Flexibility and Well-Being
• How attitudes to work are changing
• Job hopping versus role hopping
• The importance of ongoing skills development
• On-demand tech-driven learning
• How AI is changing things
• What will the future look like from a talent perspective?
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Matt: Support for this podcast comes from SmartRecruiters. SmartRecruiters is your all-in-one platform for faster, smarter hiring, making recruiting easy and effortless. SmartRecruiters are making some big changes, revamping their user experience, adding AI features, and refreshing the UI. I know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner. They understand the intricacies of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support. So, it’s exciting to hear that they’re making a bunch of updates. If you’re ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition, head over to smartrecruiters.com and find out what they’re up to. Trust me, your team and your future hires will thank you.
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Matt: Hi there, welcome to Episode 632 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. A whole new generation is entering the workforce at a time when work is changing for everyone. Getting the right talent is hard enough, but there’s also considerable challenges in retaining talent and providing the right type of skills development to deal with the current speed of change in business and technology. So, how could employers take an holistic approach to talent acquisition, talent management, and L&D that resonates with the Gen Z audience and also engages with the wider workforce?
My guest this week is Dilek Çilingir, Global Assurance Talent Leader at EY. EY has had a strong focus on changing outdated perceptions around auditing as a career in order to bring new talent into their business. This is part of an overarching talent strategy that also focuses on upskilling and retention.
Hi Dilek and welcome to the podcast.
Dilek: Hi Matt, thanks for having me today.
Matt: It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Dilek: Great. Sure. My name is Dilek Çilingir. I’m the Global Assurance Talent Leader, which means I’m an advocate for the 130,000 plus assurance people in more than 140 countries at EY. On a day-to-day basis, I oversee talent engagement strategies and the implementation, working together with the business to develop tomorrow’s workforce of EY assurance, and we’re trying to help them to thrive in an increasingly complex environment right now.
In addition to that, I just want to briefly talk to you about my background. I started in auditing as actually I wanted to understand how businesses work and I thought auditing is a quick way to do this. So as a junior auditor, I gained a lot of insight and experience into how companies operate, scale, and transform. And I had some international experiences as well, and some other roles, mostly in risk and forensics practice. So, I don’t have a traditional talent background, but my experience means I have learned how to lead a practice or a function and influence others.
Matt: Amazing stuff. And as you say, it is such an interesting time in the world of work at the moment. New generations coming to the workforce, everything is changing. What are the main challenges that you’re seeing in the talent market at the moment?
Dilek: If you’re talking about our profession, specifically, the audit profession, the main challenge for us is attraction to the profession. Historically, I have included retention as well, but at the moment at EY, the current retention rates are at the highest level, they’ve been in several years, even higher than pre-pandemic levels. Obviously at EY, as anywhere, we really work hard to retain our talent. But going back to the audit attraction, let me actually frame the problem in a simple way. So Matt, if you Google auditor and click images, tell me what you see.
Matt: Okay, so hang on. So, auditor and Google images, let’s have a look what have we got? I have predominantly people in suits and wearing ties, they’re mostly male. They’re all wearing glasses for some reason. And they are mainly just shuffling huge stacks of paper.
Dilek: Yes. And do you see like an 1980s style Casio calculator?
Matt: Yes, actually, yes. Yes, in almost every picture there is a calculator, the like of which I’ve not seen since I started my career.
Dilek: Yeah. And even actually in some of these pictures, I think I saw a magnifying glass.
Matt: There’s several magnifying glasses, actually.
Dilek: Yeah.
Matt: That’s the other– And some of them have a got a big sign saying “Auditor,” just to be clear on what they do.
Dilek: And who looks at that? and thinks, “Wow, that’s cool.” And I recently even seen some AI tools generate images as well, and they’re basically the same because of the bias in the system. So, you can see now why there’s an image problem. So, unless we address that coolness deficit, we can’t really expect anything to change.
Matt: No, absolutely. And why are people still thinking like that? Auditing as a profession, and how are you sort of responding to this as a challenge to make it more attractive to people and get people into your business?
Dilek: We have been spending a lot of time working on this exact question, and I say there are six factors and let me summarize them really quickly. First is, as you just saw, the image problem, also created by some of the incorrect narratives, is the first and the major one. The second problem is the reward, the remuneration, as there is a perception that the profession is underpaying compared to the other sectors. The third one is well-being, as audit is viewed as a long-hour profession. The fourth one is ecosystem and external factors, including a really regulated industry, which makes it difficult and includes the– Sorry, which actually then brings pressure and a bit of risk. The fifth one is the changing workforce demands, I guess. And the 6th one is access issues, which means that it’s not easy really to obtain the relevant qualifications to be an auditor.
So, there are several issues and we are working together currently as a profession with all the other companies to find solutions. But at EY, currently we are focusing on two things, the first one is, as I said, this image problem, because I think the profession needs to talk more about the relevance and value of an audit and to explain about trust and the confidence it provides, and also play on that for the purpose and work that Gen Z desires.
And also, I think we need to give a better understanding of the breadth of the possible career opportunities that actually start from a foundation, accounting or auditing. So, if you look at the Fortune 500 CFOs currently, you can see that at least 50 to 60 of them have an audit background. So, it’s a great foundation to have. Also, there are lots of complex issues at the moment in the business environment, and auditors are first ones to kind of go in and understand and increase their knowledge about all these business issues. So, there are lots of positives that we are not talking about at the moment, so that’s something that we are working on.
And the second one is wellbeing. So, when you talk with Gen Z and we’re going to, I think discuss that a bit later probably. The people would like to have flexibility. When we ask them what they mean as wellbeing, they say flexibility. And in our audit profession, in the work, we are able to provide a lot of flexibility to our people and we just want to make sure that it’s globally that way. And of course, we support our people on mental health. When they have a lot of pressure, we provide support as well. So, there are many things we are doing and we would like to focus actually more going forward.
Matt: You mentioned Gen Z there, and I think it would be good to get into a conversation about that and look at how attitudes to work are changing all those kinds of things. Just before we do that, what is it that you do to understand your target audience a bit better? So, what kind of research do you do? How do you kind of understand the needs, the things that are going to help persuade people to join the organization?
Dilek: Sure. Our company, if you look at the average age of the people working at our company, can you make a guess maybe, Matt? let me put you on spot.
Matt: Now, you’ve put me on the spot, haven’t you? I’m terrible at averages. I’m going to say 35, getting it right down the middle.
Dilek: No, it’s actually 27.
Matt: Wow.
Dilek: Yeah. So, we really need to understand Gen Z to be able to have a successful business and successful company. But what we’ve done is we did something very simple. We listen to them, we give them the opportunity to share their views and take actions so they see that they’re being taken seriously. One of the initiatives I established and I’m extremely proud of, is we call it Global Voices. So, I established this 200-strong employee forum representative of the global assurance practice that helps shape our business strategy. So, it’s a really impactful group and we listen to their insight and ideas. They’re really diverse pool of talent and we basically work on the strategy together. So, when we come up with something, we go back to them and get their views, we test it with them. Currently, actually, it’s not only using global assurance, but EY overall started using them as well. So, it’s really simple, we just listen to them and try to understand them better, include them in our decisions. So that’s how we understand them currently, Matt.
Matt: Tell us more about how attitudes to work are different from previous generations. What is it that’s changing? What are the most important things to this cohort of people that are coming into organizations and coming up through organizations at the moment?
Dilek: I’m not really sold on the idea that Gen Z is hugely different, but there are definitely some different attitudes shaped as a result of them having different experiences to previous generations. So, for example, the pandemic was an unbelievable experience for this generation that shaped a lot of things. And many emerged from the isolation with a clear focus on health and wellbeing and also an expectation of flexible and remote work. So, like many workers or even many of us, Gen Z also have enjoyed the time and money saved on commuting, the ability to work more flexible hours, and even the health benefits that this hybrid work has yielded.
So even my experience tells me now, wherever I go globally at EY, the offices are much quieter on a Monday and a Friday. And two days working from home each week is the expectation now. So, they have that, but it’s coming from the experience of the pandemic. Gen Z also places a strong emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion. For them, belonging is a minimum requirement. So, business leaders who understand and embrace this can actually create more inclusive work environments, which is very important for them, so that’s another big one.
So, Gen Z also seek careers that have a purpose making a positive impact on the world. I think they’re more motivated with the purpose, so the work they see as relevant to that is actually more of their choice.
Another one which is interesting is I think Gen Z is believed to job hop. So, I think people think that they really would like to change jobs quickly, but talking with these people and asking them, I don’t think that’s exactly true. What they really want is broader and diverse experiences, and if they can get it in their current job, they would rather roll hop, but not job hop. So, it’s only about getting these broader, diverse experiences.
And maybe lastly is as they’re the first cohort to have access to the Internet through their smartphones from an early age, they have a learning advantage and they’re motivated to learn because they want to develop themselves and be more productive, but they have a different approach to it. So, they learn differently than us. They value practical, active, hands-on experiences. They want to learn from their phones, they would like to turn to their phones. They value quality user experience. They expect learning to be technology driven. They want to learn as needed anywhere, anytime with small bites of information. So, I think the way they learn are different than the way I used to learn. So, we need to recognize this and respond to their needs.
Matt: Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point, and it’s good to hear organizations recognizing that and also harnessing it for the good of everyone really. And I suppose that brings me on to my next question. You mentioned right at the start that you’ve currently got sort of record levels of retention. How do you ensure that you keep that? But also, I suppose bring into that is this element of skills development because all jobs are changing very, very quickly. And I presume that’s kind of part of this kind of role hopping skills development, is that sort of a big part of the way that you seek to retain people?
Dilek: Yes, exactly. We know that people actually are drawn to us because of skills development and learning. So, it’s a big focus of us as a company as well. So, we have many different learning programs. So, we launched, for example, the EY Tech MBA by Hult, triple accredited and one of the world’s top international business schools. So, we have that, our people would be able to get the EY Tech MBA. We also have EY Masters In Business Analytics and in Sustainability. And we have these EY badges programs which are open to all EY employees as well. So, they have a lot to choose from in terms of learning. We also have leadership development. We really focus on that. We have several, different learning programs for that. And we also provide coaching and mentoring, which is very important for us as well.
And the other things, obviously, the experiences we provide as a multidisciplinary firm with several different services we provide, we’re also able to give our people the opportunity to do different things so they can work as an auditor for some time, but then they can actually go and work on sustainability. If they want to go and work on technology consulting, they can do that as well. So, it’s an advantage for us. So, we’ll be able to help them roll up and keep them rather than losing them. So, these are all the things we are doing.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. So, we’ve got this far in the conversation. I don’t think we’ve mentioned the words AI at all yet. In any podcast these days, you have to talk about AI at some point, it’s the law. What about AI and how it’s changing things and making things possible? What is the role of AI within kind of all of this?
Dilek: Lots of conversations about AI as expected. I actually was in a session 10 days ago in New York. We were talking about it. Of course, audit has always been at the forefront of adopting new technologies coming to AI. This has already been broadly adopted across not only in our firm, but I would believe the profession with document intelligence, knowledge delivery, providing insights about some potential risks, etc. But going forward, AI will help auditors with reviewing documents, contracts, invoices, conducting predictive analysis, being able to really test all the population of the information rather than samples, etc. So, AI will help auditors do a lot. So as a result, and we receive a lot of question whether– then the auditors will not have a lot to do or enough to do?
The answer is no, auditors will still have a lot to do because AI will obviously help with some of actually the boring stuff, the repetitive stuff that the auditors are doing now. But in addition, now the auditors will also need to do more work because they will need to make sure that these AI technologies at the companies are working properly as well. So, in addition to the work they’re doing now, they will start looking into that. So, although some of the work will be gone, there will be more work coming in as well as a result. So, AI is really interesting and very at the moment exciting for our people, because when you ask these Gen Z again, this cohort that I’ve been talking to you about, they’re really excited because they believe some of the work, not some of the great work they are doing now will be eliminated, but they also believe that they will do a more value-added work going forward. So, we are really excited about it actually. And at EY, we have already invested like $1 billion in the next generation assurance technology platform, including AI. So, we are looking forward to the future.
Matt: Fantastic. And I suppose this is a final question, just give us a little bit on your vision for the future. What do you think things will be in terms of talent and work? What will they be like in two- or three-years’ time?
Dilek: Sure. As I just talked about, there’s so much going on, especially in our profession and in business. So, AI we just talked about is big and there’s also now sustainability, which is obviously really, really important. So going forward, some of the roles that we have as auditors will evolve. So, we’ll need to have the relevant proficiency to provide these services. So, our people will need to not have the skills they have now as auditors, but they’ll need to have skills in technology, in AI, skills in sustainability. So, they’ll need to upskill themselves really going forward. Probably not only that, but also communication, being able to work in a hybrid environment, adaptability, creativity, so many new skills that they’ll need to work on. So, I think that’s something that will be coming.
We always say now or when we’re recruiting people, we always look at one skill. Now it’s called the skill, the curiosity. So, one thing which will be important going forward is actually staying curious to be able to adapt to this changing and complex business environment going forward, Matt. So that’s actually what I’m thinking. Things will continue to change and will need to continue to adapt to those changes.
Matt: No, absolutely. I could not agree with you more. Dilek, thank you very much for talking to me.
Dilek: Thanks so much, Matt, for having me.
Matt: My thanks to Dilek. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to mattalder.tv. You can search all the past episodes recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
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