If you thought Amazon hiring over 52,000 people was a lot, PricewaterhouseCoopers has something to say. The storied accounting firm recently announced it will hire 100,000 people over the next five years as part of a $12 billion initiative to expand its efforts in environmental, social and governance advice. If you’re keeping track of acronyms, that means PwC is hiring in ESG.
The hiring initiative is part of a new global strategy PwC is calling “The New Equation,” which the company says is focused around helping its clients develop and cultivate trust.
“If the last year has taught us anything, it is that we simply cannot go on doing things the way they’ve always been done – and for us, that includes how we help our clients achieve big things,” Senior Partner Tim Ryan wrote. “Our job is to help them ‘peek around the corner’ and understand how the trends shaping our world may affect them in the years ahead. What we know is that trust will be the defining factor in how businesses are able to achieve both profit and purpose.”
PwC’s major effort to capture the ESG market is a clear sign that the Big Four firms — PwC, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, and KPMG — expect the future of business to heavily involve the environmental and social impact their clients have, especially as industries, brands and consumers become increasingly environmentally conscious.
The pandemic didn’t hamper PwC’s hiring efforts like it did for so many other companies, but instead sped up the process. Since August, PwC’s hiring has increased by a staggering 871%, jumping from 117 open positions to 1,140, according to Thinknum data.
The Big Four have mostly maintained pace with each other over the past year in terms of headcount growth, according to Thinknum Data. Both EY and Deloitte have grown by 11% in the last year, while PwC’s LinkedIn headcount has grown 1.6% in the same time period. LinkedIn data shows that Deloitte boasts the largest workforce of the Big Four with approximately 324,000 employees. EY and PwC trail behind with 306,000 and 251,000 employees respectively. KPMG lingers in last with 187,000 employees, according to its LinkedIn page, though its U.S. page has 45,300 employees.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online, jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings, and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.
