While everyone is trying to balance staying healthy with having something to wipe your ass with these days, one big concern we’ve been seeing is whether or not accounting grads should count on their existing offer letters or consider printing out those recruiter emails to use as TP. It’s a valid concern, no one knows what tomorrow might bring: not us, not the peanut gallery, and unfortunately not recruiters either. That said, a little guidance goes a long way in these chaotic times.
The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that three of the Big 4 have confirmed that yes, seniors, your existing offers still stand [paywall]:
Major accounting and consulting firms together hire tens of thousands of newly minted graduates every year through a fall recruiting process that can make many seniors’ spring semester a worry-free one. Company spokespeople for Ernst & Young, Accenture PLC, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and KPMG LLP confirmed that the employers plan to honor offer letters already extended to graduating seniors for 2020.
The WSJ doesn’t have a ton of details so we’re not sure if “seniors” means strictly actual seniors or includes graduate program students with offers as well. We’ll see if we can get some clarification on that. Additionally, you’ll notice Deloitte missing from that list; we’ve reached out to them to see if they’ll jump on the bandwagon regarding new hire offers.
We did manage to scrape up a discussion on Fishbowl including comment from someone at Deloitte, so take that for what it’s worth until we get more official information.
Even without the reassurance from our favorite assurance firms, it has always been a pretty safe bet to assume that new hire offers were safe at least for the foreseeable future. We can’t picture a scenario in which firms would risk their hard-earned relationships with the schools they recruit from, unless things go full-on Fallout in which case you’re going to be worrying more about feral ghouls than tie-outs. Fun!
