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Letters to the Editor Big Five Provide Diverse, Global Experience Mr. Ketz clearly fails to recognize that Big Five firms such as KPMG provide tremendous opportunities for accounting graduates by offering an unusually wide range of professional experiences. By offering recent grads experiences as diverse as being on a team structuring global mergers and acquisitions to going behind the scenes in forensic accounting, KPMG is expanding their career choices in a way few other businesses can. We rank high in meeting recent accounting graduates’ needs when weighing career options. Our research indicates students weigh such factors as a firm’s growth, reputation, training programs and diversity of practice. While our starting salaries are competitive, we believe Mr. Ketz places too much importance in this one area. At KPMG, we’ve found that students want to work where they will be recognized and rewarded for their contributions while also having options to new opportunities and experiences all within the same organization. Finally, Mr. Ketz refers to a letter we sent out in 1994 about plans to reduce accounting grad hires. While the letter pointed to a reduction in campus hiring plans in 1995, that trend did not continue. In fact during the past five years, we have increased our number of campus hires an average of 10 percent a year to provide the talent to KPMG’s assurance and tax practices, which have experienced double-digit growth in the same time periods. Our recruiting efforts of accounting students continue to grow. We’ve expanded our outreach in a number of ways, such as increasingly popular intern programs (see our Campus Recruiting Web site: www.kpmgcampus.com) We are also expanding our outreach programs to high school students and to undergraduates in their first two years of study, and, as a result we believe we’re educating students about the many career opportunities at our firm and in this field. |
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We find Ed Ketz’s article on Big Five hiring practices misses the mark on a number of critical fronts and does not provide a true picture of the myriad opportunities professional services firms are offering accounting graduates.