The assurance and audit profession is facing a talent crisis. Fewer graduates are choosing it as a career, and the perception of what auditors actually do hasn’t kept pace with reality. At the same time, AI is fundamentally reshaping the work itself, automating repetitive tasks and opening up entirely new service areas around cyber risk and sustainability. The profession needs different skills, different mindsets, and a completely different value proposition for the next generation of talent.
So how do you transform a workforce of over a hundred thousand people while simultaneously making the profession attractive to a generation that wants purpose, flexibility, and career agility?
My guest this week is Sandra Oliver, Global Assurance Talent Leader at EY. In our conversation, she shares how EY is reskilling auditors at scale, bridging generational divides around technology adoption, and repositioning audit careers as a launchpad for business leadership.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Attracting Gen Z to the audit profession
• AI’s impact on day-to-day audit work
• Upskilling 130,000 professionals in AI
• Bridging the generational technology gap
• Reverse mentoring between junior and senior staff.
• Purpose and meaningful work as talent drivers
• How will audit careers evolve over the next five years?
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00:00
Matt Alder
EY employs 130,000 people in assurance across 140 countries whose jobs are fundamentally changing as AI transforms the audit profession from the ground up. So how are they reskilling an entire workforce and attracting the right future talent in these disruptive times? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from EightfoldAI. Eightfold AI’s interviewer agent is transforming how organizations hire. Powered by Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence foundation, the AI interviewer is an autonomous and assistive agentic interviewer that thinks, adapts and evaluates like your best recruiter, operating 24, 7 across time zones and languages while assessing every candidate fairly and consistently. It works across the entire interview process, from initial screening to final assessment, enabling teams to make faster hiring decisions, deliver a seamless candidate experience and complete interviews in under a business week so you can find your best fit talent.
01:13
Matt Alder
To find out more, just head over to Eightfold.ai. That’s Eightfold.ai. Hi there. Welcome to episode 767 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. The assurance and audit profession is facing a talent crisis. Fewer graduates are choosing it as a career, and the perception of what auditors actually do hasn’t kept pace with the reality. At the same time, AI is fundamentally reshaping the work itself, automating repetitive tasks and opening up entirely new service areas around cyber risk and sustainability. The profession needs different skills, different mindsets, and a completely different value proposition for the next generation of talent. So how do you transform a workforce of over 100,000 people while simultaneously making the profession attractive to a generation that wants purpose, flexibility and career agility? My guest this week is Sandra Oliver, Global Assurance Talent Leader at EY.
02:39
Matt Alder
In our conversation, she shares how EY is reskilling auditors at scale, bridging generational divides around technology adoption, and repositioning audit careers as a launchpad for business leadership. Hi Sandra and welcome to the podcast.
02:55
Sandra Oliver
Hi Matt. Great to be here.
02:57
Matt Alder
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
03:03
Sandra Oliver
Sure. So I’m Sandra Oliver. My role is the Global Assurance talent leader at EY. So I am part of the Global Assurance leadership team and I’m really focused on driving an integrated talent strategy that’s focused on our supporting our business priorities and really transforming our workforce. And that represents more than 130,000 people in over 140 countries.
03:29
Matt Alder
Fantastic stuff. So I just wanted to start by talking a little bit about generations in the workforce. So obviously EY hires a significant number of graduates every year. You’re sort of bringing Gen Z into the profession, into your profession at scale. What are you seeing in terms of different expectations, capabilities, things that are shaping accounting and insurance as a profession.
03:54
Sandra Oliver
Yeah, so you know, we are, we definitely are active hires of people from canvas, from campus. Excuse me. And so we have a lot of younger professionals joining us. So Gen Z is a group we’re very focused on. And when we think about that generation, they’re very focused on professional development, career progression, mentorship, and they really have a more pragmatic approach to work life balance and well being and really we might call that work life integration. But they’re very focused on career and career agility. So what, you know, what can their experience offer them today? What can they do, you know, as they look to upscale themselves, particularly in this environment with, you know, evolving technologies, which I know we’ll talk about.
04:46
Sandra Oliver
And so when we think about recruiting them and attracting them to the profession, we have to be very focused on what the benefits of career and audit, you know, bring more broadly talking to this younger profession. And it’s been a focus of RI citywide as well as the profession as a whole. And so we think about that. It’s really important that we emphasize the critical role that auditors play when it comes to building trust and confidence in capital markets and society more broadly. And so really telling the why and what we do and the value that brings the clients in the broader marketplace is important. We’re also, as I mentioned, just really thinking about the stress of the demands of the job in order to ensure that we’re creating a better work life balance for all our employees.
05:39
Sandra Oliver
And this, you know, not only includes, this includes several things. One in particular is just giving employees more access to mental health services, ensuring they have the support they need during intense and, you know, kind of higher hour time or stressful parts of the work of our work periods. We also think it’s important to give people more flexibility and the opportunity to really take the reins of their careers in their own hands to make decisions about the things that they want to do, whether it’s, you know, client assignments or having a little more agility in navigating their career, next steps and different opportunities within the firm. We also think it’s really important that we kind of showcase that starting your career in audit is really a platform towards becoming a business leader.
06:32
Sandra Oliver
The knowledge that they gain by Working in the various clients and industries and sectors, you know, really can be and have seen it be enable people to really develop a strong business acumen. You know, we are seen by these, by companies that, you know, they may want to go work for and senior executives is really the training ground for their future. So we’re really trying to highlight that value when we talk to them. The last thing I was just going to up was just how we look at not just the financial reporting of the audit, but also the non financial. So when you think about sustainability and ESG and those types of things, it really shows the impact that the profession has on society. So those would be the things we focus on with this younger profession.
07:19
Matt Alder
You mentioned technology kind of earlier in your answer and I kind of want to dive in and talk about AI and what’s going on in your profession. So obviously it’s being integrated more and more into professional services work. How is that changing the day to day experience of the people working there? I suppose particularly in terms of the types of tasks that they’re focusing on. What is it changing?
07:43
Sandra Oliver
Yeah, it’s changing a lot. To your point really when you think about, if I just think about the audit first, it has evolved significantly because with AI complexity, so do companies. The complexity of their financial statements and their processes also grows. You know, we’ve seen our professionals not only deal with more complex audits, but also increased regulatory demands and rapid technology changes that are happening at companies, potential cyber risks. But you know, as I said, the AI impact we think is rather significant, but so are the opportunities. To your point, when you think about day to day and how that impacts our professionals, we are already seeing that AI can handle a vast number often very time consuming and repetitive tasks. We’ve already been empowering our people to use AI throughout their work days and through their work responsibilities.
08:42
Sandra Oliver
But importantly, humans are still at the center of everything we do. So when we think about AI in the day to day, AI is complementary. It’s not replacing the need for accountants or auditors, but it is absolutely enhancing their roles. So this is really resulting in our professionals being AI empowered. So you know, the focus is on skilled auditors really overseeing work. That is where we see that in the future and right now, AI can execute many tasks that are basic, repetitive, nonjudgmental, objective work. And this really has been pivotal because we see this as a transformation that’s really enhancing the experience for both our professionals and our clients.
09:29
Sandra Oliver
We are integrating AI into our workflows, you know, and so when you think about that really allows our professionals to focus on the data, understanding it, providing you know, value and insight to our clients, strengthening the relationships with clients. So that really is our future shift to being a period of like where we’re continuously audit real time data and information.
09:55
Matt Alder
I’d imagine that one of the biggest challeng is with the technology evolving so rapidly it must be around learning and development in terms of how you make sure people have the skills they need to do this. I mean to talk us through that aspect of it a little bit.
10:11
Sandra Oliver
Yes, I mean technology and then upskilling our professionals is really at the heart of our strategy. You know we are, it’s very important to us that we upskill everyone in AI and data analytics to make sure our auditors are you know, tech literate, tech expertise and really meeting the evolving environment. And you know we’re doing this through several ways. We’re doing this through AI learning maps. We have a program called EY Badges which is a collaboration with Champion Networks where people can choose to upskill themselves based on how they identify their proficiency level. Hands off, hands on practical experience is also very important and these are a few of the ways that we are focused on it. But when we think about the priority of training our people it really is having us rethink how we do learning overall.
11:12
Sandra Oliver
And the AI capabilities that our people have will vary with our younger Gen Zs of course be much more digital savvy compared to more experienced people. But we are constantly thinking about that as we roll out our various generative AI tools and various analytics. You know, example of that being capabilities like our EYQ assurance knowledge which we released this globally in 2025 that is really at all levels helps our professionals search and summarize EY technical accounting audit content. So when you think about that, it’s integrated into our workflow, into our Canvas platform. It really facilitates finding that information, you know, very easily versus having to research it before. So you know, while we talk about learning, the hands on experience of just using these tools is also a part of our continuous learning environment.
12:13
Sandra Oliver
So we’ve got continuous learning through experimenting with the tools, we’ve got online learning and various hands on activation center sessions that we also hold for our people. And really we’re leveraging the AI based platform that really exists every day that our people have access to. So overall when you think about learning, we’ve been our people. Our assurance professionals receive about 10.7 million hours of learning this past year, 81 of those hours on average was in person learning. So really you know again a deep focus on how we reskill and bring these tools to life for our people.
13:02
Matt Alder
And do you mentioned there the, that obviously you’re doing this across the whole kind of spectrum in the organization. Different, different levels, different generations, all that sort of stuff bring life is for us a little bit more in terms of what have you had to be kind of aware of and how has that sort of panned out?
13:19
Sandra Oliver
Yes, we are very focused on bridging, I guess you would call it the generational gap that exists, you know, within our workforce. And so we do try to cater to all the, all our different, the needs of our people and they noting that they may be different. So as I mentioned our younger professionals that are digital natives, you know, they use AI with ease. They’re using it already in their personal life. So we definitely are focused on how do we remind them and train them on the responsible use of AI, how should it be used in the audit. And we are using, we’re doing that through our mandatory learning, core learning.
14:01
Sandra Oliver
And it’s not just technical but again it’s real life examples on how do you use the tools, how would you engage with the client using AI, how do you really just bring it to life through your everyday. And, and when you think about the more senior executives at the firm, they are not as tech savvy, they are not as comfortable in the tools. And some of the things that we’re doing in addition to the mandatory learning and our, the badges that I mentioned is first of all making sure they understand it’s a priority as leaders that they upskill themselves, status quo won’t work and hoping that you know, AI goes away, it doesn’t have the impact that we know it’ll have isn’t going to work.
14:43
Sandra Oliver
And so ensuring they understand the focus, the priority as well as pairing them with younger professionals, we’ve really found that doing some things like reverse mentoring has really brought to life how to use it. Learning from our younger professionals on the way they think about AI and they think about engaging it has really been a great way to kind of bridge the generational graph, generational gap. But overall all of our people to all levels are receiving, you know, mandatory in person learning as well to ensure that they see how the tools are to be used and the responsible use around it.
15:20
Matt Alder
Coming back to something that you talked about right at the beginning of the conversation which I want to dig into A little bit more. And that’s about the, you know, the role that purpose and meaningful work play in careers in your sector to attract that new talent in. Tell us a little bit more about that.
15:37
Sandra Oliver
Yes, so you know, I think if you would have talked to my colleague, which you might have, you know, or any colleague at the big four firm. Over the last several years a big focus of us across the profession has been on attracting talent and really ensuring that, you know, the accounting profession is seen as a sought after profession. And when you look at various surveys out there, whether it’s the Global Accounting alliance survey in February 2024 or you know, looking at us CPA exam candidates in the last, you know, 17 years, you’d see that the accounting, you know, profession has declined in attractiveness.
16:17
Sandra Oliver
So when you think about those studies and the focus we’ve had is really how do we start to change the perception of accounting and auditing to our younger people so that they continue to see the profession to be more attractive and certainly the ability to have a broader impact outside of the financial statement audit as I talked about, is a big piece of that. When you think about the evolve, the transformation that companies are under, the risk profiles are changing. So with technology, with the use of AI, we see the opportunity to provide more test services around companies use of AI. We see the potential risks of cyber going up which are going to change the type of work we do.
17:02
Sandra Oliver
We know that the focus on doing this type of work in addition to governance of things outside the financial statements around ESG will continue to be a big focus. And when we think about that and what our people want to have a broader impact on society and capital markets, we think this is going to really tie to the attractiveness.
17:30
Matt Alder
As a final question, if we started to look three to five years ahead in the future, I mean how do you see careers in this sector evolving? So you’ve sort of talked about some of the changes just then, but if someone was sort of coming in and joining now, what might things look like in three to five years time in the future?
17:48
Sandra Oliver
Yeah, so I’m very excited to see the evolution of the career and audit over these next three to five years because I think it’s going to change it for much more positively. And when we think about and at a fast pace. So you know, when we think about the traditional accountant or auditors that maybe just were strong accountants, we’re going to see everybody to be much more tech savvy. They are going to Have a deeper knowledge of businesses that they support, the capital markets they operate in. I think they’re going to be very curious about technologies and agile around embracing, you know, different technologies that continue to arise. You know, we’ll likely see a significant use of AI throughout all aspects of the financial statements for companies. And so that’s going to require that AI be used at large scale across the audit.
18:45
Sandra Oliver
Large amounts of data. Large amounts, you know, will be very data driven. We already are today. But the pace for which we will be, you know, that we will be able to analyze and audit data will increase dramatically. We are already seeing that as we think about, you know, the quality of the analysis that we do, the interpretation of how we can take that information, provide insights, look for risks, share that with companies and their finance functions. To really think about predictive analytics instead of being so historically focused, you know, we’ll use this large scale data to really think about what should we see instead of what did we see or why didn’t we see it. As I mentioned briefly, you know, there’ll be a greater focus on non financial information.
19:33
Sandra Oliver
You know, stakeholders and companies are increasingly interested in the environment, impact of companies on the environment, society, governance. So that’ll continue to increase, you know, changing regulations as business practices and technologies involve, the regulations are going to change with them and the governance requirements around them. So I think that’ll be very important for auditors to stay up to date with those changes. You know, there’ll be more demand for transparency that stakeholders are continually asking for more transparency in their financial reporting. So that will need to evolve as companies think about the impact of AI to their financial statements and the way judgments are determined to ensure that those are clearly shared with stakeholders and that all of these things will really require a skill set evolution.
20:25
Sandra Oliver
You know, this will continually make, you know, or ensure that future auditors are really continually upset themselves and you know, be more advanced in data analytics skills as well as understanding latest technologies and industry trends. And the last thing I would maybe point out is that it’s really going to allow us to be in a mindset and a practice of continually auditing. This will shift from annual audits kind of being very back end focused, you know, after year end, to continuously continually auditing with real time identification of issues which will be a real shift from traditional audit practices. So I believe, you know, this kind of all of these changes are going to be extremely positive for companies, capital markets and really embed a truly data driven audit that I think will be very attractive to the for our profession.
21:22
Matt Alder
Sandra, thank you very much for talking to me.
21:24
Sandra Oliver
Great. I enjoyed it. Thanks for thanks for inviting me.
21:28
Matt Alder
My thanks to Sandra. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on 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.
