The recruitment process is central for managing human capital and attracting staff motivated to pursue a career in auditing. Soft skills such as communication, leadership, and self-management abilities are often emphasized during recruitment, as they are seen as key to future leadership and are increasingly regarded as important for audit quality.
However, new research suggests that this emphasis on soft skills risks creating expectations that are not met when gaining initial work experience, making newly recruited auditors skeptical about pursuing an auditor career. This is because early work experience centers on technical tasks requiring hard skills, such as financial accounting and auditing procedures, and is not about deep utilization of soft skills.
Using longitudinal survey data from major audit firms in Sweden, it is shown that junior auditors who experienced a high emphasis on soft interpersonal (social) skills when recruited espoused higher turnover intentions after one year of work experience. This pattern remained after controlling for initial turnover intention. However, it is also shown that the audit firms to some extent can mitigate this effect by matching their focus on soft skills during recruitment and the following perceived skill focus for work development during the first year.
These results have several implications. Retaining sufficient personnel and developing talent is a dire challenge for audit firms. Therefore, audit firms might need to tone down their soft skills focus during recruitment (and to tone up their hard skills focus), not to create misfit images of what it means to become a skilled auditor and work with auditing. Alternatively, they need to be better at focusing on and developing junior auditors’ soft skills during their first year(s) as auditors, so that expectations set during recruitment are met.
Article reference:
Carrington, T., Johansson-Berg, T., & Johed, G. (2025). Risks of overemphasising soft skills in junior auditor recruitment. European Accounting Review, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638180.2025.2564796
The article, which has open access, can be reached via the following link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09638180.2025.2564796
