A little off OP’s topic, but the conflict of interest rules extend into client services. The Big 4 audit engagement partner has to rotate off the audit engagement every cycle (4 to 5 years?). Also, a Big 4 firm cannot provide full services (consulting, tax, advisory, etc.) to its audit clients.
Regarding OP’s posting, having Big 4 firm experience on a resume is almost as good as having a top 25 to 30 MBA school on the resume. The exception is T7 to T12 schools.
audit services is now called assurance services in the Big 4 or any accounting firms
@UCBUSCalum : “Audit” is not relevant to this discussion.
Rules pertaining to audit (Enron accounting scandal which led to the downfall of one major accounting firm = Arthur Andersen) do not apply in most situations to other areas under discussion here to the best of my understanding.
Most Big 4 firms are divided into 3 or 4 practice areas: Audit, Tax & Advisory/Consulting among them.
Audit tends to be the lowest paying & most boring grunt work. The other practice areas can be dynamic & in high demand specialty areas.
Mostly that is related to Audit work… so it definitely depends
True but untrue – “some” consulting service professionals spend a significant amount of their time as specialists on audit engagements - like IT risk and valuation people for example. So it totally depends. I have spent time at more than one large accounting firm - including Andersen.
I did get some advice from my colleagues on this because I have done the big accounting firm consulting thing in the past and know a few people - so she kind of created a bit of a hook. What she did was show herself as a very well rounded student in a male dominated field (D2 lacrosse, PT job in school, maintains scholar athlete status, has received some accolades in lacrosse as well, started a women in tech club at her school with a grad student) - so she was able to spin her no name small school into how she took advantage of that to really grow as a professional and a student.
Then my colleague told me to have her go to the Grace Hopper Women in Tech conference (lots of recruiting there she said) and also to apply for a scholarship to the conference which she did AND she was awarded one.
I am sure it would have been resume to the side without that advice.
The Big 4 use “audit” and “assurance” pretty interchangeably. From a practical stand point most of my former colleagues, CPAs I work with, and clients use “audit” to describe their background and specialty “I was in audit for 5 years”, etc…
@toomanyteens: re: your post #25. That is why I specified “in most situations”, and did not write in all situations.
With practice areas typically designated as audit/assurance, tax, advisory & consulting, only Deloitte has a true consulting practice ( possibly due to conflict worries ?)
How common are case study competitions for Big 4 internship hiring ?
I know PwC uses them.
Also, Big 4 accounting firms recruit on a regular basis from many no-name schools–but probably mostly for audit / assurance (although I do not know for sure).
Tax hires are often required to have earned a JD & LLM in Taxation or a Masters in Taxation for those with an accounting background.
Congratulations! I love stories like these. My daughter just landed an internship in a very competitive program with the federal government. She is at a state school, but is taking advantage of every opportunity she can find. Proof that kids not in elite programs can compete for competitive jobs and internships!
Yes. Big 4 firms do recruit and hire from “no name” schools. However, there more slots available for “targeted schools”. Generally, these targeted schools have top 25 or so business or business economics programs. In the West Coast, these targeted schools are Univ. of Washington (Seattle), UCSB, UCB, UCLA and USC. Occasionally, an Big 4 office (Seattle, SF or LA) may get someone from Notre Dame, Cornel, or other top schools in the country.
Tax hires in a Big 4 do not necessarily have to have advance degrees such as JD, LLM, Masters in Tax, etc. Since the Big 4 firms have excellent tax training programs, they will hire at the Bachelors degree level as long as the recruit qualifies to take the CPA exam and the firm will provide the training.
Whether it is tax, assurance/audit, advisory or consultant, the training at a Big 4 firm is excellent. It is like taking graduate school courses.
My understanding is Advisory and/or Consulting (Deloitte being the one Big 4 that totally separates the two) is more selective in terms of the schools they recruit. Largest pool by far is audit / assurance practice. So a school that claims it’s recruited by the Big 4 doesn’t mean it’s recruited for all practice lines. In fact quite the contrary. Each division has it’s own recruiting process, people, timelines, etc. Very common for a firm to take 20 kids in audit and 0 to 2 in Advisory at lots of schools.
@UCBUSCalum : I disagree somewhat with respect to your statements about recruiting for tax practices.
Probably the difference is in the functional area of tax for which one is recruited.
Certain areas require either “JD plus LLM in Tax” or, for those with accounting backgrounds, a “Masters in Taxation”. But, I suspect that this can & does vary by firm–even within the Big 4.
And, yes, the lesser known schools recruited by Big 4 accounting firms tend to be for the audit / assurance practice area.
But, I do not know a great deal about all Big 4 recruiting practices–just knowledge for some specialty areas. Usually internal candidates need a minimum of 3 years of “federal tax experience” to move into these specialty areas. And this is supported by Big 4 recruiting ads on various internet sources.
I run the PMO for the Advisory side of one the firms Learning and Development organizations - so thank you. 
It is somewhat true
@toomanyteens: Somewhat true ? Can you elaborate ?
PMO = Project Management Office
@UCBUSCalum : Can you elaborate on the training “is like taking graduate school courses” ?
Are you referring to classroom training ?
(I find this very interesting & it should be helpful to other readers.)
Yes PMO is project management office, I refer to all kinds of training - classroom, web based, other virtual, videos, apps, - we do all sorts of training (we like to call it learning, training sounds like for dogs lol)
Somewhat true in that there are generally less spots in Advisory, and more in Audit but it does vary from office to office (ie some offices have almost all Audit clients some are heavy in Advisory) – here is an important one for Accounting majors-
IF you can do a winter internship – less competition than summer, and so much experience (and overtime $$) because it is busy season for audit and there are lots of tasks that can be given to an intern – it is much harder to find meaningful tasks on a large consulting engagement.
My step daughter had enough AP credits to get her BS in 3.5 years, so she applied for and did a winter internship then went back to her 5th year in the fall. And not only that, the audit team extended her internship a couple of times because she didn’t go back to college in the spring. So she made a ton of money, got scads of experience AND got a job offer in the end. (she too was at a no name school)
In the practice areas with which I have familiarity through multiple family members, they had to create their own training. One did it to such an extent that he just wrote a textbook & left a director / regional manager position with a Big 4 to start his own firm.
Another relative at a Big 4 firm–also in a specialty area–was told “just figure it out yourself” when seeking help.
For the most part, he had to train himself.
Interesting to note that the only training he could find was a lengthy writing by the head partner of the national tax practice of a third Big 4.