Key Takeaways
- One in three new accounting and finance hires are leaving within their first year, according to a new survey from payroll platform BambooHR.
- AI tools are automating much of the routine, entry-level accounting work, allowing senior staff to handle tasks that used to be done by juniors and making entry-level jobs more challenging.
- BambooHR CFO Justin Judd says that more intentional onboarding and training will be key to retaining junior talent.
The finance and accounting industry is having trouble retaining talent, a new survey shows.
New data from BambooHR, a platform for employee payroll, benefits and onboarding, indicated that one-third of entry-level finance and accounting professionals quit within their first year. On top of that, employers are leaning heavily on experience: BambooHR’s survey found that companies had about three senior staffers for every entry-level hire.
The BambooHR research draws on two layers of data. The firm surveyed 1,248 full-time salaried workers, business owners, and senior leaders at small and midsize U.S. companies between March 24 and April 9, 2026. It then paired those findings with six years of anonymized workforce records, or more than 480,000 employee data points from 2,000 employers worldwide, spanning January 2020 through February 2026.
BambooHR CFO Justin Judd told CFO Brew earlier this week that high quit rates for junior staff likely stem from a growing gap between what new hires expect and what senior leaders deliver in workplaces rapidly reshaped by AI.
For years, entry-level positions in finance and accounting came with a predictable playbook, Judd said. Junior staffers were there to process the rote work, which typically meant entering data, cleaning and structuring data, building basic spreadsheets and assembling reports. “You’re finding data, you’re maybe building a database to extract that data,” Judd told CFO Brew.
Now, with AI and automation in the mix, a lot of the grunt work that once belonged to junior staff is now handled directly by more experienced workers. That shift, Judd noted, effectively blurs the old division of labor. “What that leaves is a question of, ‘What do I do in an entry-level role?’” he said.
AI is raising the bar for first jobs
For people just starting out in the workforce, AI is rewriting the job itself and making the role more challenging, leading to high quit rates, according to Judd. Instead of simply inputting numbers or cleaning up spreadsheets, managers increasingly expect new hires to interpret what the data means and contribute ideas about how the team should respond.
Judd is seeing this shift on his own teams. He expects “a lot” out of entry-level staff. “I may not just be asking you to do some basic data entry or data work, but actually help us think differently,” he said.
Companies are holding on to experienced staff longer and concentrating new hiring at the mid- and senior-levels, he said. At these levels, employees can provide “judgment” and “the ability to discern,” which he thinks technology still can’t match.
Judd said that the solution for accounting and finance’s junior talent retention issues starts with being far more deliberate about bringing people into the organization and training them. That means spelling out the job clearly from day one and investing heavily in structured onboarding and skill development, not just throwing junior staff into the deep end.
“That onboarding approach and plan needs to be even more solid than it has been in the past,” he said.
Key Takeaways
- One in three new accounting and finance hires are leaving within their first year, according to a new survey from payroll platform BambooHR.
- AI tools are automating much of the routine, entry-level accounting work, allowing senior staff to handle tasks that used to be done by juniors and making entry-level jobs more challenging.
- BambooHR CFO Justin Judd says that more intentional onboarding and training will be key to retaining junior talent.
The finance and accounting industry is having trouble retaining talent, a new survey shows.
New data from BambooHR, a platform for employee payroll, benefits and onboarding, indicated that one-third of entry-level finance and accounting professionals quit within their first year. On top of that, employers are leaning heavily on experience: BambooHR’s survey found that companies had about three senior staffers for every entry-level hire.
The BambooHR research draws on two layers of data. The firm surveyed 1,248 full-time salaried workers, business owners, and senior leaders at small and midsize U.S. companies between March 24 and April 9, 2026. It then paired those findings with six years of anonymized workforce records, or more than 480,000 employee data points from 2,000 employers worldwide, spanning January 2020 through February 2026.
