• Involvement in every aspect of the client relationship
• Meeting with clients to gain an understanding of their business and tax situation
• Contact clients to gather information for the tax preparation process
• Review tax returns prepared by our staff and seniors
• Identify tax planning opportunities
• Development of staff and senior associates. Assist with training, mentoring and scheduling of assignments of employees.

Requirements:

• Bachelors degree in Accounting
• CPA license
• 7+ years of tax experience in both compliance and consulting
• Several years with large public accounting firms is a plus, especially if recent
• Strong leadership and project management skills
• Excellent written and verbal skills
• Prior supervisory experience

Diane Delgado LeMaire | Managing Director, Accounting & Finance Recruiting | Creative Financial Staffing, a division of Fitts, Roberts CPA Firm | 5718 Westheimer Suite 800 | Houston, TX 77057 | 713-260-5238 | dcd@fittsroberts.com  | www.cfstaffing.blogspot.com| www.twitter.com/CPARecruiterHOU| www.linkedin.com/in/dianedelgadolemaire

Happy Holidays!  

‘Tis the season to reflect on 2009 and look forward to 2010!

My next publication was not scheduled until January, but I wanted to take the opportunity to try something unique; a moment of reflection on the past and call to action for 2010!  December is the best time to reflect upon the last 12 months and measure your accomplishments.  Your ability to remember the details of all your hard work and accomplishments will never be better than now!  So, dust off your old resume and start by adding at least one accomplishment or new technical skill you’ve worked so hard for in 2009.  It does not have to be pretty. Just jot down some new facts about yourself that express your new accomplishments.

December is also a great time to look forward to 2010. Ask yourself: “What are my professional goals? Do I want to go back to school? Tackle a certification? Make a career move?” Ask for a promotion?   Below are links to local Universities and Certifications most requested by the employers I represent. I hope you find this information helpful.  

Certifications:

• CMA, www.ima-houston.org  
• CIA, www.theiia.org   
• CISA, www.isaca.org  
• CFE , www.acfe.com 
• CPA, www.tscpa.org   
• CFA, www.cfainstitute.org  
• CFP, www.cfp.net  
• CICA, www.theiic.org

CPA Certificate Programs:

• http://www.bauer.uh.edu/degrees-programs/cap/  
• http://swc2.hccs.edu/accounting/cpa_exam.htm  
• http://www.lonestar.edu/accounting-certificate.htm

Masters Programs:

• UH – www.bauer.uh.edu/graduate/  
• Rice – www.business.rice.edu/  
• UT – http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/houstonmba/
• HBU – http://www.hbu.edu/
• Sam Houston State – http://www.shsu.edu/mba/
• St. Thomas – www.stthom.edu/  

 Here is to a great 2010!

Diane Delgado LeMaire | Managing Director, Accounting & Finance Recruiting | Creative Financial Staffing, a division of Fitts, Roberts CPA Firm | 5718 Westheimer Suite 800 | Houston, TX 77057 | 713-260-5238 | dcd@fittsroberts.com  | www.cfstaffing.blogspot.com| www.twitter.com/CPARecruiterHOU| www.linkedin.com/in/dianedelgadolemaire

Report: Houston jobs outlook to improve

Houston Business Journal – by Casey Wooten Reporter

By Paul Davidson, USA TODAY

An encouraging jobs report Friday underscored the growing prominence of temporary workers who some experts predict could constitute up to a quarter of the workforce in a few years.

A big reason employers shed a far-less-than-expected 11,000 jobs last month is that temporary staffing agencies found slots for 52,000 additional workers, the most since 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said.

That’s a good sign because cautious employers typically hire temps in a recovery before bringing on full-time staffers.

“Companies are hesitant to say demand is lasting and they go first to the contract labor market,” says Manpower CEO Jeff Joerres. The No. 1 staffing agency’s business rose 10% to 15% last quarter, he says.

Other industry officials are reporting an even bigger jump, partly because of a long-term shift to contractors in the workplace. Temporary placements for Nelson Staffing, a Sonoma, Calif., staffing agency, are up about 20% the past five weeks and expect to climb another 5% early next year, marketing head Courtney Dickson says.

“Product launches used to take several years – now it can be only six months,” says Barry Asin, chief analyst at Staffing Industry Analysts, which studies the field. “You need a flexible workforce to ramp up and move to the next project.”

If a new product fizzles, contract workers can easily be let go. And so-called contingent workers can cost up to 30% less than regular employees because they typically don’t receive benefits such as health insurance or unemployment – a key selling point in a fragile economy.

JOBS FORECAST: Outlook for employment in all 50 states, 384 metro areas

Contract employees who sign on with a firm for several weeks or months constitute about 8% of the U.S. workforce, Asin says, or 10 million Americans. The lion’s share are independent contractors not tracked by BLS.

Gary Mathiason, vice chairman of Littler, the No. 1 employment law firm, predicts half the jobs created in the recovery will be filled by contractors, consultants and other temps.

Fifteen years ago, most temporary slots were for office work, but more than half are now filled by professionals such as engineers and physicians, Asin says. Business Talent Group, which places executives, saw its second-quarter business rise 70%.

“You can choose your projects and if something’s not working out, you can move on” or “take a hiatus,” company co-founder Amelia Tyagi says.

The trend is giving rise to new services. Start-up oDesk serves small businesses that want to monitor the computers of remote employees. Client Erik Budde, CEO of AboutAirportParking.com, says six of his nine employees are contractors: “In this economy it’s nice to have that flexibility.”

Like some gothic serial novelist, the Bureau of Labor Statistics delivers another chapter of the same grim tale on the first Friday of every month. In October, the unemployment rate spiked to 10.2 percent, the highest since April 1983. Since December 2007, payroll employment has fallen by 7.3 million jobs. The ratio of unemployed workers to job openings is 6.1 to 1; in December 2007, it was 1.7 to 1. But some recent data points, and an understanding of the behavior of companies at different phases of the business cycle, suggest we’ll have job creation sooner rather than later.

Before things get better, they have to get worse more slowly. That’s already happening. After the credit meltdown, companies prepared for Armageddon by hacking jobs indiscriminately. Between November 2008 and April 2009, employers reduced payrolls by 645,000 per month. But in October, BLS reported that the U.S. economy lost 190,000 jobs, and it revised down the job loss figures for August and September. First-time unemployment claims are falling. Other data give more reason to hope. In the third quarter, productivity—econospeak for companies doing more work with the same amount of labor—rose at a 9.5 percent annual rate.

We’ve just witnessed the fastest two-quarter productivity surge since the first year of the Kennedy administration. Economists can read these omens the way Roman priests read chicken entrails. And here’s one of their explanations: Just as investors and businesspeople don’t believe things could ever go wrong at the peak of the boom, they have difficulty imagining things can get better at the trough of the bust. And so they respond to rising demand not by hiring new employees but by coaxing existing employees to work harder. But just as hamsters can run only so fast on their treadmills, there are limits to productivity growth. “If you look at economies over many centuries, you can’t grow productivity for 7 or 9 percent for more than two or three quarters,” said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director at New York-based Economic Cycle Research Institute, whose leading employment indicators are looking up. “At a certain point, people will start to collapse at work.”

Should the economy expand in the fourth quarter at the same 3.5 percent annual rate it did in the third quarter—as it shows every sign of doing—companies won’t have any choice but to hire, says Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners. “There’s an outside chance we could see job growth by the end of the year.” In October, even as companies were cutting jobs, John Deere and Caterpillar recalled some laid-off factory workers and City Center, the mammoth casino-hotel-condo complex in Las Vegas, began hiring 12,000 workers for its December opening.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in October companies announced they plan to hire 57,520 workers, the highest number since July 2007—and nearly eight times the total from October 2008. Layoffs and restructurings are continuing at blue-chip companies: Time Inc., Johnson & Johnson, and Microsoft have announced workforce reductions in recent weeks. But we shouldn’t expect job growth to come from the Fortune 500.

According to a new study from the Kauffman Foundation, companies less than five years old created nearly two-thirds of net new jobs in 2007. Growth will come from the two guys subletting an office suite in Palo Alto who may be creating the next Google, or from the hole-in-the-wall Mexican spot that could be the next Chipotle. That’s what Leo and Oliver Kremer are hoping. The twentysomething brothers last year left Berkeley for New York. Victims of the slack job market, they decided to create their own jobs—by opening Dos Toros Tacqueria, a San Francisco-style Mexican food joint near Union Square. “Really, it was a great time to open a business,” said Leo Kremer. “You can negotiate for good rents, and find really great locations.” After a few Craigslist postings generated more than 200 résumés, they hired eight full-time and seven part-time workers. With its biodegradable utensils, chairs made from reclaimed barn word, and locally raised chicken, Dos Toros, which opened the night before Halloween, is tapping into the ethos of sustainability.

If the incipient recovery in the economy is to be sustained—and if the bearishness about employment will be overcome—it will be by the likes of these two bulls. Jessica Ramirez contributed to this story, which also appears in Newsweek.

Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com and follow him on Twitter. His latest book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, has just been published in paperback. Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2235477/

Experts say many of the job openings out there are not advertised – resourceful applicants just need to seek them out.