To prevent valuable CPAs from seeking out external opportunities, look to the key reasons causing potential push factors for finance professionals.
If you’ve been surprised by a resignation lately, you’re not alone. Even in steady market conditions, accounting and finance professionals continue to explore new opportunities.
More often, it’s about what’s missing in their current role: challenge, recognition, flexibility, market compensation, and career growth. And most of these factors? They’re well within your control.
To build a high-performing, loyal CPA team in Toronto, organizations must proactively identify and address the hidden factors that push strong performers to move on.
1. Lack of Career Growth or Advancement
When progressive CPAs can’t see where they’re headed, they start looking elsewhere.
In accounting and finance roles, upward mobility isn’t just about promotions. It’s about clear pathways for development. If a CPA has been in the same position for years without gaining new responsibilities or skill sets, even a stable and well-paying job can start to feel like a dead end.
In a recent survey, nearly half of professionals who switched jobs cited “limited career growth” as their primary motivator.
What You Can Do:
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- Provide career development opportunities to gain new exposure, skills and experiences that will bolster their stature in the organization and lead to career growth
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- Offer mentorship opportunities by helping your team gain exposure to senior leaders in meetings or getting involved in projects or initiatives with new audiences
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- Consider internal rotations or lateral moves into other functional areas to broaden skillsets without waiting for vacancies
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- Map out what a pathway to growth within the company looks like in terms of timeline and capabilities required to reach the next level.
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Career growth doesn’t always mean a title change—it’s often about scope of responsibility, learning new skills, and gaining exposure to development opportunities.
2. Lack of Recognition or Appreciation
Recognition is one of the most overlooked—and most powerful—retention tools in your organization.
When hard work goes unnoticed, employees begin to disengage. This is particularly true in accounting roles where deadlines are tight, work is often behind-the-scenes, and success can be invisible unless intentionally acknowledged.
Employees who don’t feel valued and recognized are significantly more likely to begin seeking new opportunities.
What You Can Do:
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- Build a culture of appreciation through informal shoutouts, thank-you emails, or internal messages among your team or department
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- Provide your key contributors with small gestures of thanks like a gift card to their favourite coffee shop to show your appreciation for overtime and meeting deadlines
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- Encourage leadership to acknowledge and point out the contribution of your team after a busy period—when appreciation comes from the top, it resonates more deeply
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Small gestures often have outsized impact on retention.
3. Poor Work-Life Balance or Burnout
Burnout remains one of the most common (yet least visible) contributors to turnover—especially in roles that carry seasonal intensity like budget season and quarterly reporting.
Peak periods with longer hours, tight deadlines, and an “always-on” culture are not sustainable for most professionals—particularly those balancing family demands, health and wellness, or personal development outside of work.
What You Can Do:
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- Respect boundaries by setting expectations around work email response times, meeting hours, and PTO use
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- Offer time-off in lieu of excessive overtime, especially if above-normal for the period
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- Train managers to spot early signs of burnout and intervene with workload redistribution or additional support
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Work-life balance isn’t just about flexibility—it’s about sustainability. And when ignored, burnout leads to attrition.
4. Boredom or Lack of Challenge
Strong performers are naturally drawn to environments where they can stretch, grow, and contribute meaningfully. If the work becomes repetitive or stagnant, they’ll disengage—not out of disloyalty, but out of a desire to keep developing.
When CPAs are underutilized or pigeonholed, they often leave not because they’re unhappy—but because they’re uninspired.
What You Can Do:
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- Offer stretch assignments or cross-functional projects where finance can contribute beyond the numbers
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- Let team members rotate through special projects (like ERP implementations or acquisitions) to build exposure
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- Recognize when an employee may have outgrown their current role and initiate career pathing conversations
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Boredom is a slow, quiet driver of turnover. But it can be reversed with intentional engagement.
5. Compensation Falling Behind Market Dynamics
One of the most tactical—but real—reasons for CPA turnover is a gradual erosion of compensation competitiveness.
When employees have been loyal for several years, standard annual increases (often 2–3%) can lag well behind the external market—especially for in-demand skill sets. The result? A growing pay gap between internal value and external market rate.
This misalignment creates a natural pull for employees to explore the open market—where compensation resets often lead to immediate 10–20% increases.
What You Can Do:
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- Benchmark your internal salary bands against current market rates, not just inflation
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- Proactively adjust salaries for long-tenured, high-impact CPAs whose compensation may have fallen behind
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- Consider this a cost-effective retention tool—it’s far less expensive than recruiting and training a new hire at the same or higher salary level
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Don’t wait until a key member of your team resigns due to a large compensation gap.
Final Thought: Exit Interviews Come Too Late
If you’re only learning why employees leave after they’ve resigned, you’re behind the curve.
Instead, start asking deeper questions during one-on-ones, performance reviews, or pulse surveys. Are your team members still learning? Do they feel recognized for their contributions? Are they challenged—but not burned out? Are they being paid in reasonable alignment with their external market value?
Turnover isn’t just a talent issue—it’s a leadership opportunity.
CAC helps organizations identify talent gaps, improve engagement, and retain high-performing CPAs by getting ahead of these issues—before they turn into turnover.
Need help building a finance team that stays?
Connect with our CPA recruiting experts to talk strategy, salary benchmarks, and proactive talent retention.
