Banks are firing, accountancy firms are hiring. Accountancy firms are not just hiring in small numbers; they are hiring in huge numbers. Deloitte has declared its intention to hire 68,000 people over the next four years. That’s equivalent to nearly two Goldman Sachs’ worth of employees. This year it hired 49,000 people.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is equally ebullient. It hired 45,000 people in the 12 months to last June.

There’s definitely a big, big growth story underway at accounting firms. Financial services consulting work, expansion in China, IT consulting and consulting in general have helped immunize them against the pain. But the head of recruitment at one investment bank points out that their hiring figures are also exaggerated and may prove ill-advised.

“The Big Four hire all these people because they lose so many of them post-qualification,” he argues, speaking under condition of anonymity. “These recruitment figures are based on the assumption that banks will hire a lot of their trainees after three years. If we don’t, they’re going to be stuck with an excess of people.”

Anecdotally, the Big Four in the UK lose around 30% of their newly qualified ACAs immediately after qualification, with many of them going into industry or banks, either as product controllers or M&A and equity research professionals.

The head of recruitment at one Big Four firm tells us the proportion of post-qualification departures is substantial and ought to, “keep people awake at night.”

“A lot of people go into the audit practice as a starting point. Once they’re qualified, they decide they want to earn more .It’s something we struggle with,” he says. “There will always be organisations out there whose pain point is so high that they will pay to attract our people away.”

Accountancy firms’ hiring figures reflect the expectation that they will lose people to higher paying competitors (banks). If higher paying competitors have no need of ACAs in future, they could find themselves quite seriously overstaffed.