The recruiter an accounting group built for itself.

Prime People · Est. 2008 · 1 James Place, North Sydney NSW 2060

Prime People is an Australian accounting and finance recruitment firm based in North Sydney, established in 2008 as the recruitment arm of the Prime Partners group. We place people into accounting, finance and professional services roles through executive search, qualified interim and permanent placement. We are a private Australian business and have no connection to Prime People plc, the listed recruitment group in the United Kingdom.

Established

2008

Head office

1 James Place, North Sydney NSW 2060

Phone

02 8378 2421

Email

enquiries@primepartners.com.au

Markets

North Sydney (HQ), Orange NSW, Gold Coast

Part of

The Prime Partners group

Why an accounting group started a recruitment firm

Because the agencies weren't working.

Accounting firms have a specific hiring problem: the difference between two candidates with identical job titles is often invisible to anyone who has not done the work. A generalist recruiter reads "Senior Accountant, three years" and sends both. A partner reads the same CV and can tell within a page which one has actually run a client relationship, and which one has been handed prepared files.

In 2008 the group decided the practical answer was to recruit its own people, properly, with someone who understood the technical distinctions and had a reason to care whether the hire lasted. That became Prime People. The discipline that came from serving an internal client who could immediately tell when a shortlist was lazy is the thing we still trade on.

How the direct-mandate relationship works

Every role we advertise is briefed to us by the firm that will do the hiring. For the group firms, roles are pulled live from each firm's own vacancy feed at the moment you load the page, rather than copied into a database that slowly goes stale. If a role has been filled or withdrawn, it stops appearing. There is no manual step in between where an old listing can survive.

Two things follow from that, and they are the reason we structure it this way.

• No ghost jobs. We do not advertise roles that are not open. Agencies do this to build candidate pipelines, and candidates have learned to expect it, which is why so many good people have stopped replying to job ads.
• No CV farming. We do not collect CVs against fictional roles to sell later. When you apply through us, there is a hiring firm at the other end who briefed the role and will read the shortlist.

The firms whose roles come through the board include Prime Partners, Count Out Loud, Australian Business Register, SMSF Central and Arbour Advisory. We also run client mandates and retained searches for employers outside the group.

We also take direct mandates from firms outside the group. National Audits Group, an independent external audit practice, is a client rather than a group firm. Its roles sit on the board on exactly the same terms as the rest, briefed directly by the people doing the hiring and live only while they're genuinely open.

The work we take on

Three service lines, described in full for employers on the for employers page.

Executive search

C-suite and senior leadership mandates handled with absolute discretion and rigorous methodology. Used when the appointment matters enough that the strongest candidates have to be approached rather than advertised to.

Qualified interim

Rapid deployment of CA and CPA qualified contractors for project-critical needs and transformation, including interim CFOs. The right instrument when the need has an end point.

Permanent placement

Intermediate to manager-level appointments across public practice, advisory and corporate services. The bulk of what we do, and where a well-built brief does most of the work.

Six practice areas

We recruit only in accounting, finance and professional services. Working in one discipline rather than across many is what makes the technical judgement possible: business services and tax; SMSF and superannuation; CFO and finance leadership; governance and compliance; corporate and client services; and specialist sectors including creative industries and screen production, cross-border and foreign-owned entities, and regional New South Wales practices.

That last group is worth naming because it is unusual. Screen production accounting and SMSF administration are both small, specific pools where the credible candidates are known to each other, and where a generalist search tends to return people who have been adjacent to the work rather than in it.

North Sydney, Orange and the Gold Coast

North Sydney is our base and where most placements land. We also recruit into Orange in regional New South Wales, where the group has a presence, and on the Gold Coast.

Regional and metropolitan searches are genuinely different exercises. In Orange the candidate pool is smaller, and the pitch has to be honest about what the town offers, which suits some people very well and others not at all. We'd rather say that at the briefing than at week six of a stalled search.

Who you deal with

Our consultants come from inside the accounting world rather than from generalist recruitment, which is why they can hold a technical conversation with a candidate instead of pattern-matching keywords. That background is the whole point of how we were set up, and it is what candidates tell us they notice first.

Our market data is public

We put our market data where it can be checked. The insights library carries the 2026 accountant salary guide, a comparison of the CA and CPA pathways, the pathway into the profession, an honest test for whether a firm is a good place to work, and a look at R&D tax consulting careers. Every figure is attributed to a named source and dated so you can see when it will need refreshing.