How to Recruit Your Next CFO – Alliance Recruitment Agency

This blog helps you understand how to identify an ideal CFO for your company. You will also find insights into the process of CFO recruitment, beginning with the executive search process, then moving on to the hiring approach. You also get tips on reducing overall recruitment time and costs from some of the best CFO headhunters.

The CFO, Chief Financial Officer, is the one who gets your company the trust of your investors, creditors, bankers, and suppliers. The insights, advice, strategic inputs, planning, implementation practices provided by the CFO helps finance leaders in a company reduce every kind of financial risk associated with any dealings, projects, initiatives, and other moves.

Initially, the position was mostly focused on strategic financial planning, implementation of all financial moves and initiatives, supervision of financial risk and compliance management, and related functions.

In the past five years, with enormous changes brought about by financial technology systems in financial activities management, a CFO should also be able to understand how any kind of digital transformation moves and new operations models would impact liquidity, cash flow, business stability, market share, and financial vulnerabilities of a company.

Your next CFO should not be a reflection of your past CFO, who might have had very little experience in financial planning, analysis, and risk management related to emerging operation models. Also, the difference between how financial threats occurred and were managed in the past has dramatically changed from how it is managed today.

It is, therefore, a great idea to work with an experienced CFO recruitment agency. You get the services of expert CFO headhunters who have acquired niche knowledge about the different roles played by a CFO in your industry. Experienced CFO headhunters also know about the best practices in CFO recruitment in your industry and the various methods of mapping talent for the position while avoiding risks.

The first step when it comes to hiring your next CFO is to brainstorm and portray how your ideal CFO will be with regard to your future business growth goals.

How Should Your Ideal CFO Be?

1. Experience – 10-15 Years or Over 20 Years?

As CFO is one of the leading positions and most companies prefer hiring a finance professional with 15+ years of experience in financial management in the industry. If you are a startup and require a younger individual with a more proactive approach towards emerging trends in financial management, you could check the level of knowledge and experience in key financial areas related to finance for your startup.

If your company requires a tough individual with exposure to a broad spectrum of financial sector activities, you should look for more experienced professionals. Someone with the ability to manage conventional and modern financial planning and management practices with hardcore industry insights would be someone older with 20+ years of industry experience.

2. Tract Record – Focus on Organic or Inorganic Business Growth Companies

You might be a company that is totally into organic growth and plans to expand markets through your own new outlets, branches, franchises, and operations. In that case, your financial planning and risk management needs experts who have practical knowledge and experience in making these moves possible through good financial strategies.

Your next CFO also should have a track record of accomplishments in organic business growth through robust financial moves. Hiring someone who has led mergers and takeovers might not be the ideal CFO for you unless you envision business growth in the future acquisitions and investments in buying flourishing business units.

3. Skills – Technology, Risk, Financial Planning, What Else?

Moving on to the skills required by this important position, a CFO should have all the necessary skills, beginning with the very basics of financial planning, so as to keep the business safe from any kind of financial problems or losses.

When it comes to financial risk elements, just playing safe does not always help. Your CFO needs to be an ingenious risk management expert who could take risks that work in your favor, increasing your market share.

4. Ability To Collaborate With External Stakeholders

It is no surprise that collaboration is one of the biggest ways of growing a business, and when it comes to the part of stakeholders, the CFO is the one who has your back. A CFO needs to collaborate with external stakeholders to make sure that a market crisis or new regulations, or market dynamics do not put the company in troubled waters. For such achievements, the CFO needs to have outstanding collaboration skills.

CFO Executive Search Process

Once you have put on paper or documented how your ideal CFO should be, you can start the CFO headhunting process. Creating a detailed future CFO persona helps in making the search highly customized to meet your company’s specific requirements.

Generally, these are the key stages of the CFO executive search.

1. Research – Map CFO Talent in Your Market, Industry

Coming to the process of CFO recruitment, the very first step is to do the research and CFO talent mapping based on competitive and market research. This activity would help you figure how your CFO would stand with all the competition in the market. Based on the inputs, you could further refine your future CFO profile and job description.

2. Prepare a Detailed Search Criteria Based on Insights From Required Analytics

People analytics has become an integral part of talent search and acquisition for top positions. Do not worry about taking a few days more to do a detailed data analysis based on market talent mapping insights, competition benchmarking, and your specific business needs to filter out the key traits, abilities, and knowledge that serves in creating a benchmark profile for your company.

3. Start By Shortlisting 3-5 Ideal Candidate Profiles

Let the CFO headhunter first source the top 3-4 candidate profiles that meet all requirements based on your customized search and selection criteria. You could study them, assess their track records and achievements and find out if these are the profiles that would benefit you the most. You could then plan your CFO candidate outreach and engagement activities.

4. Reach Out, Assess Outcomes and Refine Your Candidate Search

Prepare highly impressive job descriptions or profile descriptions, company presentations, and other material that will be used to reach out to the ideal candidates to engage their interests. Based on overall responses, your CFO headhunters will further refine the candidate search and source brilliant candidates.

5. Fix Interviews With 8-10 Best-Match Candidates

Once your CFO recruiter has interacted with the candidates, they would find out their key motivations, strengths, and weaknesses and connect you with those candidates who are worth your attention. CFO recruiters also assist with interview scheduling and management.

CFO Hiring Approach

You might have reconsidered your CFO recruitment objective at some stage, or you might feel forced to reconsider the CFO recruitment approach based on new insights gained about CFO positions.

There are different ways in which you can get the services of a CFO. If you feel that hiring for a permanent position should be done at a later stage, but you do need CFO services in the immediate future, you would be happy to know the different options.

1. Consultant CFO Hiring

You could hire a consultant CFO if you require CFO services for the new initiatives you are taking in the immediate future. The consultant CFO would serve in an advisory role, helping you with strategic insights, financial planning overview, corrective measures, and sound, expert business advice to avoid risks and make the right moves. Their services would be available through appointments and meetings and need to be paid on a per hour or per-project basis.

2. Interim CFO Hiring

This hiring involves a short-term professional to be hired who would stay for some time, like a few months, until you are ready to hire someone for a long-term role. This hiring approach helps when a business needs constant support in getting back on track, but a short time period is enough for them and is also cost-efficient for the business’s budget.

3. Permanent Position CFO Hiring

If the business requires constant support and needs a CFO for a long time, or is just looking to grow more and more, then the permanent position CFO hiring approach is the right option. Hiring for a permanent CFO position is ideal when a business has a long-term and continuous need for CFO services, and the company has found the ideal professional for the position.

How To Recruit Without Overspending

1. Partner With a CFO Search Agency

The CFO recruitment costs a lot. You need expert CFO headhunters who can get the recruitment done in the most outcome-oriented manner within 2-4 months. The lesser the time and the fewer the candidates you need to call for site visits, lunch, presentations, interviews, etc., the lesser the overall spending on CFO recruitment.

2. Cut Down CFO Search and Hiring Time by Up To 50%

Expert CFO recruiters or CFO headhunters help in saving time by up to 50%. This is because they already have wide talent access, established connections with superior talent in the market, and can connect you with best match candidates without much struggle.

3. Manage Interviews In An Expert Manner

The CFO headhunters even manage the interviews in an expert manner which comes from their specialization and consistency in the recruitment field, helping in finding the right candidate for the position of CFO.

4. Ensure Detailed Background Checks

The CFO recruiters ensure a detailed background check, minimizing the possibilities of any hurdles or frauds as much as possible. These recruiters even have connections that provide a better and more reliable background and references check compared to ordinary recruiters.

5. Reduce Recruitment Costs and Risks

The next benefit is reduced costs and risks, as the CFO recruiters cut down the costs spent on the in-detailed process of recruitment and provide with better data, that too a huge one to choose from. By optimizing the overall CFO recruitment stages, you will be able to cut down costs without affecting the hiring outcomes.

Alliance Recruitment Agency

Alliance Recruitment Agency is one of the most trusted C-level recruitment agencies, with experience spanning 11+ years, 1,000+ top executive and mid-level management recruitment projects, and extensive talent access.

You could hire the services of our CFO headhunters to make the CFO hiring process more efficient, effective, and compliant with high standards. We follow hiring best practices, and our CFO executive search solutions have helped numerous companies and startups make the right hiring decisions that totally satisfied them.