Most Finance Hires Fail Before the First Interview
When a finance appointment does not work out, the post-mortem almost always examines the interview. Did we test the right things? Should we have added a stage? Was the panel too junior? Occasionally it examines the candidate. It very rarely examines the document that started the whole thing — and in my experience that document is where most of the damage was done. The job description determines who applies, what they believe they are joining, and what they will be measured against. Get it wrong and no amount of interview rigour recovers it, because you are choosing carefully between the wrong people.
The four failures, in order of frequency
Across finance searches that go wrong, the specification errors cluster remarkably tightly.
1. Advertising one role and describing another
The commonest by a distance, and it has a characteristic shape: the title and the opening paragraph describe the ambition, while the responsibilities describe the reality.
The clearest example is FP&A. A specification opens with strategic planning, decision support and business partnering — then lists the monthly management accounts, the reporting pack and the variance analysis. Both halves are true; the second half is eighty per cent of the job. Planning candidates apply, join, and discover that the close has a deadline and planning does not — so planning loses every month. Eighteen months later they leave and the failure gets attributed to fit. Our FP&A Manager job description template and FP&A Analyst equivalent both put the split at the front for precisely this reason.
The same pattern appears in tax, where a specification written around compliance is used to hire someone the Finance Director expects to advise on transactions. It appears in financial control, where a Head of Finance role is described as a Financial Controller role. And it appears at Finance Director level, where the specification describes board-level strategy and the reality is producing the board pack.
The fix is uncomfortable and free: write down the split as it will actually be, not as you would like it to sound. Candidates who find the real job interesting are the ones you want.
2. The shopping list
Every finance responsibility the business has ever needed, at one level of seniority, on one salary. It produces a specification nobody matches and a shortlist of optimists — people who have done a third of it and are prepared to say otherwise.
In closed or thin markets it produces no shortlist at all. A regulated firm requiring client money, prudential reporting, Consumer Duty MI and statutory accounts at manager level is describing three jobs, and the number of people who have genuinely done all three is close to zero. The same applies in tax: our VAT manager job description makes the point that requiring CTA on a compliance-weighted role narrows an already small pool for a signal you do not need.
The fix: separate essential from desirable honestly, and count how many essentials you have. More than six or seven and you are describing a function rather than a person.
3. Omitting the facts candidates use to self-select
This one is not about ambition or length — it is about specificity, and it is the difference between a specification that reaches the right pool and one that reaches everybody.
Finance professionals screen specifications for a small number of concrete facts, and the absence of any one of them costs applications. Scale — turnover, entity count, team size — because it calibrates everything else. Reporting framework, because FRS 102 and IFRS are different jobs. Structure: single entity, group, consolidation, multi-currency. The team beneath, because an FC inheriting a functioning finance team is doing a different job from one inheriting a bookkeeper. And in regulated firms, the regime — naming CASS 5 rather than “client money” reaches a smaller and vastly more relevant pool.
Fund accounting is the sharpest illustration, because it contains a split most employers do not think to state at all: whether the role produces net asset values in-house or oversees an administrator’s. Those are different skill sets and different people, and someone whose entire career has been production frequently finds oversight unsatisfying. Our fund accountant job description guide puts that decision first for that reason.
4. Describing an idealised function
The final failure, and the one that costs most after appointment rather than before.
Specifications describe well-run finance functions. Reality frequently involves a close that takes fourteen days, a balance sheet unreconciled since the last audit, a system nobody trusts and a supplier ledger with entries from 2023. The candidate discovers all of it in week two — and the people who would have found it energising were filtered out by an advert that made the role sound like maintenance.
This is genuinely counter-intuitive and it is consistently true: an honest description of what is broken attracts better candidates than a description of what is working. The people who fix finance functions find broken ones interesting. The people who want a tidy inheritance are, almost by definition, not the ones you need if the function is not tidy.
What a specification that works looks like
Four components, and the order matters.
The proposition first, not the duties. The business, the stage, what makes the role interesting, and what this person will own that nobody currently does. If that list is short and involves the bank, the board or a transaction, you have a Finance Director role. If it is a list of reporting and control tasks, you have a Financial Controller role and will save an expensive year by saying so.
Then the facts candidates self-select on — scale, framework, structure, team, regime.
Then the responsibilities, written as they will be, with the split stated where one exists.
And finally, what success looks like at twelve months. Three or four specific outcomes: the close at day eight, a forecast the board relies on, the audit closed without adjustment, the founder’s time on finance materially reduced. This section does more work than any other. It tells the candidate what they are being hired to change, it gives you something to measure against, and businesses that share it at offer stage report better first years because both sides know what the job is.
The salary question
One specific and avoidable failure worth separating out: withholding the range.
The logic for withholding is understandable — flexibility, avoiding anchoring, not unsettling incumbents. The effect is that experienced candidates, who have options and limited time, do not speculate. They skip the advert. What remains is a shortlist weighted toward people with fewer alternatives, which is the opposite of the intent.
The related error is pitching against last year’s benchmark. Qualified finance pay has moved considerably, and the gap between what businesses pay to hire and what they pay to keep has widened in a way that catches employers out. Benchmarking against current market data rather than against your own existing team is the difference between a search that closes in six weeks and one that stalls twice.
The interview then tests the right things
None of this removes the need for a rigorous interview — it makes one possible, because you are choosing between people who could actually do the job.
What that interview should test varies by discipline, and the most useful questions are usually the least generic. For tax, the two that matter most are asking about a position the candidate declined to take, and asking them to explain a tax concept as they would to a sales director — the first reveals judgement, the second reveals whether anyone in the business will understand them. Our in-house tax manager interview questions set out the full sequence including the scenarios that expose judgement no competency framework will.
For any regulated role, the equivalent is asking where the data comes from and how it reconciles. The regime knowledge is documented and learnable; what is not learnable from a manual is the experience of extracting numbers from an operational system never designed to produce them and explaining the difference a year later.
Why this is worth an hour
The economics are straightforward. A finance search at Financial Controller level or above takes six to twelve weeks to offer and adds a three to six month notice period. A mis-hire discovered at month four costs the salary, the recruitment, the vacancy, the second search, and the damage done in between — comfortably a year.
Against that, an hour spent writing down what the role genuinely involves, what state the function is actually in, and what should be different in twelve months is the highest-return hour in the whole process. It is also the one most consistently skipped, because the specification is usually written under time pressure by copying the last one.
The finance searches I have seen go well were nearly all decided at that point — not in the interview, and not in the shortlist. They were decided by a business that knew what it was hiring for and said so plainly.
A Note from Our Founder — Adrian Lawrence FCA
The job descriptions that produce the best shortlists are the ones that say what this person will actually own that nobody currently does, and what state things are genuinely in. I have read a great many that describe a business twice the size of the reality, or list every finance task in existence in the hope of finding someone who can do all of them — and both produce thin responses, because candidates at this level read specifications carefully and disqualify themselves from ones that do not add up. Spend an afternoon on two questions before you write anything: what would this person do next Tuesday that nobody currently does, and what will we hand over on day one. If you can answer both clearly, the search itself is straightforward. If you cannot, no amount of interview process will rescue it.
Adrian Lawrence FCA
Founder, Accountancy Capital — Fellow of the ICAEW. Verify via ICAEW.
