Job Description

Senior Associate

We are looking to meet an outstanding professional to join us as a senior associate. We are recruiting in all of our core practice areas: financial reporting, valuation services, and HR advisory. Senior associates receive high-impact training to prepare for direct client engagement exposure and a rapid progression to client management.

We serve the accounting and HR executive teams at Fortune 500 companies and beyond, assisting in the design, valuation, and accounting for compensation programs and other financial instruments. Our projects lean on finance, accounting, economics, and data analytics, equipping you with experience in rigorous analysis, packaging and presenting recommendations to C-level audiences, and data visualization.

If you enjoy problem-solving, are comfortable excelling in client service and geeking out with technical models, and have a collaborative, client-focused mindset, then we would like to meet you and discuss this exciting role. After an introductory discussion, we will work with you to determine which practice group would be the best fit.

The Senior Associate Role at Equity Methods

As a Senior Associate, you will have an immediate opportunity to apply your skills to client work. You will gain exposure to client communication, engagement structures, project deliverables, and how we engineer advanced processes to create outsized client value. You will be on a fast track to the consultant role, which is heavy in client interaction, supervising associates, building out new client engagements, publishing, and much more.

Senior Associates in the Financial Reporting Practice will

• Complete initial training in financial reporting engagements, ranging from broad technical training on the relevant finance and accounting concepts to the tools we use to design controlled reporting processes (e.g., working in SAS). This launch period prepares you on the fundamentals so that you intimately understand the work you will soon be supervising.
• Design, implement, and document processes to proactively manage risk and inject thoughtful control measures to ensure adherence with accounting standards, plan specifications, and client’s needs.
• Review deliverables and own successful client service outcomes. Contribute to packaging and framing to clients. Identify and lead process improvement initiatives.
• Participate in client delivery meetings and external audit review sessions, ensuring that clients understand the work product delivered and their external auditors grasp all essential features of the solution.

Senior Associates in the HR Advisory Practice will

• Complete initial training in compensation projects, ranging from broad-based compensation issues to incentive design to statistical pay equity analysis.
• Contribute to compensation strategy projects, in which we are engaged by public and pre-IPO companies to recommend new broad-based incentive programs that support critical business objectives.
• Capture recommendations and analytics for external and internal audiences in superbly structured and clear PowerPoint presentations and Excel worksheets.
• Perform research using clients’ 10-K and proxy statements to form viewpoints on market compensation practices, including pay levels, incentive structures, corporate governance, disclosure, and equity dilution.

Senior Associates in the Valuation Services Practice will

• Complete initial training in valuation projects, ranging from standard option-pricing techniques to Monte Carlo simulation for more exotic instruments.
• Design, develop, and test Monte Carlo simulation models to value various securities including equity compensation awards containing a market condition as well as a range of other financial derivatives.
• Design and implement the underlying data handling processes of valuation consulting engagements in which analytics are performed on historical data to inform forward-looking option-pricing assumptions.
• Communicate results with clients and provide support to external audit firms auditing the work.
• Serve as a primary contact for clients, spanning oversight of the core work to relationship management.

Our Culture and Method of Doing Business. We are:

• Zealous about exceptional client service and delighting every client, large or small.
• Lean and agile—we don’t have manager layers that get to sit back and just talk.
• Growth-oriented—both in welcoming new clients into the fold and seeing professional development in our outstanding colleagues.
• Feedback-heavy—because that’s how to unlock growth.
• Mentoring-rich—we’re not a competitive, eat-what-you-kill culture, and our consultants achieve professional growth via hands-on client experience and feedback from leaders.
• All about impact—our professionals love the opportunity to make an impact on clients, each other, and the long-run trajectory of the business.
• Eager to solve clients’ toughest problems—because that’s where the greatest impact is created even though these challenges are riddled with ambiguity and complexity.
• Devoted to plain-language deliverables that clients find easy to consume and yet rigorous—because clients value our ability to make the complex simple for them.
• Not a 9-to-5 job—because all the above items just take time, even for very smart and efficient people.

Qualifications & Requirements:

• 1 – 5 years of experience in a relevant consulting field, including public accounting, corporate finance, litigation support, economic or valuation consulting, tax, management/strategy consulting, or related.
• Prior experience in compensation, programming, or data analytics is not required. Excel skills are needed.
• Bachelors or Masters in a business discipline that relates to the role.
• Ability to quickly grasp complex accounting, finance, and economics principles and apply them to real-world fact patterns.
• Exceptional time and stress management skills in light of needing to manage a plate of complex projects with various deadlines, many of which are in flux.
• Strong detail- and accuracy-orientation. Successful candidate must demonstrate attention-to-detail with regard to internal/external communication, developing deliverables, and modeling.
• Ability and willingness to think critically and solve “out-of-the-box” problems independently.
• Background check required.

More About Equity Methods

Equity Methods serves a diverse clientele from dozens of Fortune 500 firms to early-stage pre-IPO firms. Our clients span the United States, in addition to some in Canada, South America, and Europe. We offer a diverse array of services that solve mission-critical priorities within corporate accounting and human resources functions.

At our size of ~100 professionals and countless brand-name clients, we combine the best of a large professional services firm with the best of an entrepreneurial growth venture. The culture fosters excellence in client service, innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement. We have a bias toward promoting from within and we celebrate the diverse strengths of our colleagues. We have consistently been rated a Top Company to Work for in Arizona