Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Tax Practice Leader

If your practice handles multi-state or multi-entity tax work, that's a narrower specialty than general tax preparation leadership, and it's worth screening for explicitly on either platform rather than assuming general tax experience transfers cleanly. A leader who's only worked single-state, single-entity returns may underestimate how much coordination multi-jurisdiction work actually requires.

Hunt Club's referral network can be useful here since a peer introduction carries real signal about whether a candidate has handled genuinely complex multi-state work, not just claimed familiarity with it on a resume.

Running a full search process during your busiest weeks pulls attention away from client deadlines and often produces a worse hiring decision. If a leadership gap is urgent but the calendar is unforgiving, a fractional or interim leader sourced through Bolster can stabilize the practice while a more deliberate Hunt Club search runs on a realistic timeline after the deadline crunch eases.

SHRM's 2025 benchmarking data shows a wide gap by seniority: $5,475 on average for a nonexecutive hire, versus $35,879 for an executive one once agency fees, postings, and internal recruiting hours are all folded in¹. A retained Hunt Club search for a permanent practice leader tracks toward that higher number; a fractional engagement through Bolster runs as a smaller ongoing rate instead.

For the underlying compensation, BLS's May 2025 data put the median wage for accountants and auditors at $83,680 nationally, with the top quartile reaching $109,810². A tax practice leader managing multi-state complexity typically commands well above that median.

Median time-to-fill for a nonexecutive role sits at 44 days from requisition to offer accepted per SHRM's 2025 numbers, and executive searches typically take longer still³. Count backward from your next filing deadline to see whether a Hunt Club search even fits the calendar, or whether a faster Bolster engagement is the more realistic near-term option.

Ask candidates to walk through a real multi-state filing scenario they've managed, including how they coordinated across jurisdictions with different deadlines and requirements. A candidate who can only describe process in the abstract, without a concrete example, hasn't actually done the work at the level your practice needs, whichever platform originally surfaced them.

Clients with complex, ongoing tax needs often have a direct relationship with whoever currently leads their engagement, and a leadership change is riskier than it looks on paper. Plan a structured introduction between the outgoing leader, if there is one, and your largest clients, rather than letting the transition happen silently and hoping clients don't notice or worry.

Modern tax practices run on specific software stacks for multi-state apportionment and filing, and a candidate's fluency with your particular tools matters, but it shouldn't outweigh technical judgment on genuinely ambiguous filing positions. Software skill can be taught faster than judgment can be developed, so weight the interview accordingly on either platform.

Ask candidates to walk through a real ambiguous filing position they've navigated, including how they researched it and who they consulted, rather than only testing their comfort with a specific software interface. A candidate who can describe that research process clearly is showing you exactly the judgment your practice will lean on the next time an unusual situation comes up.

Have a contingency plan ready before the search even starts: who covers escalations if a permanent hire isn't in place by a key deadline, and at what point you'd pivot from a Hunt Club search to a faster Bolster engagement instead. Firms that wait until a search stalls to consider that pivot usually make the decision under worse pressure than they need to.

Set that pivot point as a specific date on the calendar, not a vague feeling of things going too slowly, so the decision gets made deliberately rather than in a moment of last-minute panic two weeks before a filing deadline hits.

Use these checks to protect the calendar:

• Screen explicitly for multi-state and multi-entity experience rather than assuming general tax experience transfers cleanly.
• Start the search outside filing season, or bridge an urgent gap with a fractional or interim leader sourced through Bolster.
• Count backward from your next filing deadline to see whether a Hunt Club search fits the calendar at all.
• Ask candidates to walk through a real multi-state filing scenario, including how they coordinated across jurisdictions with different deadlines.
• Name who covers escalations if no permanent hire is in place by a key deadline, and when you would pivot to a faster engagement.