CFOs are struggling to hire people with the right balance of quantitative and strategic skills in today’s increasingly tech-centric corporate environment.
Adnan Bokhari knows how to balance a ledger. He’s a practicing CPA who was named CFO of JA Worldwide, a global nonprofit youth organization, about a year ago. His wife is also a CFO and a CPA. But their three kids? They have zero interest in following in their parents’ footsteps. It’s not just a case of rebellion, either. Bokhari has noticed a broader trend: Fewer and fewer young people are interested in his line of work.
“The risk/return matrix is not appealing,” Bokhari remarked during a recent webinar with The CFO Alliance, a peer group of some 9,000 finance pros.
Chief financial officers arguably have never had a bigger role. They oversee the entire financial operations of a company: from strategic financial planning and risk management to advising on investment decisions and ensuring regulatory compliance. And they typically boast a deep understanding of accounting principles, analysis, and business strategy—essentials in guiding an organization toward its goals.
There’s just one problem, Bokhari says: “We’re competing with glamour.”
Indeed, it’s hard to make accounting sexy when “Instagram influencer” is a viable career option.
CPAs, or certified public accountants—a prerequisite to becoming a CFO—meanwhile, are battling a low-compensation perception. If becoming a CFO is the goal, the average salary—at least within a private company generating less than $20 million in annual revenue—is $194,000. After all those grueling years of education, a CPA might well hold their paycheck up to those of other professions and think, “Was it worth it?”
As Bokhari puts it, “If you look at all the other professions that require similar years of formal education and the other barriers that are associated with it, [or] you get to the point of actually becoming an accountant and you compare yours with the salaries of others starting professions, it’s not exactly equitable at all.”
Many of the participants on the CFO Alliance webinar nodded. Bokhari’s observations, they agreed, highlight a serious issue in the corporate finance world: making numbers cool again. Until that is resolved, it seems the dream of inspiring a child to become a future CFO remains just that: a dream.
What Keeps CFOs Up At Night
Bokhari isn’t alone. A recent survey conducted by the CFO Alliance of 450 CFOs revealed a surprising twist in their nightly worries. When asked, “What keeps you up at night?” the top concerns weren’t just usual suspects like revenue and operational efficiency. The true monster under the bed was hiring and retaining employees.
Over 50% of the respondents confessed that they are not just crunching numbers but also doing succession planning and ramping up their mentoring efforts. As it turns out, teaching the next generation of finance whizzes is a priority, but mastering the art of mentorship and delegating duties to up-and-comers is proving difficult—especially when they don’t want to show up to the office.
That’s just the post-Covid way, Joel Quall, CFO of tZERO, a financial blockchain technology company, laments. “A mere four years ago, everyone went to the office five days a week,” he recalls. “Now you have a different culture that—right, wrong, or indifferent—don’t want to come to the office every day. They want to be hybrid, or they want to work from home entirely, a hundred percent of the time.”
The situation is worse if a company pays exorbitant rent for a metro-area office and no one shows up, Quall adds. “There has to be a happy medium. It’s been a struggle to get everyone to come back to the office.”
Even when the talent roster is in place at the office, too often a tech-savvy team appears perfect on paper but lacks the crucial skills higher-ups would like to see.
Recall the many high-profile CFO announcements from the past year: SoundCloud’s Drew Wilson departed amid rumors of a potential $1 billion sale of the Berlin-based streaming company. Dennis Weber became CFO of Swiss International Air Lines, effective May 1. And Marc Page will take the role at London-based Metro Bank Holdings starting September 2.
Turnovers and new arrivals like these are happening at a rapid clip, underscoring just how tight the job market is at the CFO level. That’s also the case for steppingstone roles, such as vice president and executive vice president. The likelihood of these candidates getting hired or promoted should hinge not just on their qualifications to perform the function but also on their ability to create tangible value within the company, says Christian DeChurch, CFO of Centri Business Consulting.
Many finance and accounting professionals, however, are only “technicians.” That means “they’re really good with numbers but not able to connect the numbers to a strategic vision or value creation plan,” DeChurch adds. “Also, the pace of play these days is too fast, and waiting until you have all the answers will only put you more behind.”
Going forward, the best candidates will likely have a knack for wielding emerging tech. Automation tools and artificial intelligence will revolutionize talent acquisition and development strategies by radically expanding the CFO skillset.
“I believe it will have a major impact,” DeChurch predicts, starting from an implementation perspective as it pertains to finance and accounting—the CFO’s bread and butter.
“In order to become better operators, businesses are transforming their current tech stack into something more meaningful,” he says. “Secondly, the data output from the new tech stack will need an analyst mindset, not number crunchers. This will be new for many who are used to debits and credits, and now must tell the story through the numbers and explain the ‘why’ throughout the business.”
One Mentee At A Time
DeChurch posits a simple reason why CFOs across the globe are stressing out over hiring and retention. It’s “because many folks think of themselves as ‘the boss’ and not a mentor,” he tells Global Finance. “Work, like many other things in life, is an apprenticeship model with mentors and mentees. If people don’t sign up for your program or a mentee quits your program, then you need to look in the mirror.”
Many companies have used mentorship programs to foster leadership development to great effect, including Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, IBM, and General Electric. If that doesn’t work, it’s on you, DeChurch concludes flatly.
“I don’t believe people are afraid to work hard and go above and beyond, but they want and need guidance, a voice, and an ownership or accountability stake in the project,” he says. “There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. We are responsible for mentoring folks into today’s demands and transforming them into analysts, [teaching them about] being more strategic and adding real equity value, what it means to project manage an IT implementation, how to have hard conversations, how to negotiate critical agreements, and everything else that might come out of left field.”
For Robin Helfer, a former CFO of clothing company Ashley Stewart, mentorship starts at the college level, because fewer students overall want to study accounting and finance.
“We’re seeing more people go toward other majors that really didn’t exist years ago, like business analytics, as an example,” she says. “And I’d say in general, attracting accounting talent is just an issue, because you need additional credits in order to be certified. I think that is a hindrance as well.”
But while the lure of new, trendy majors is a serious problem, she isn’t waving a white flag. Helfer is a committee member at her alma mater, Binghamton University, and its School of Management Alumni Advisory Board, which is tasked, among other issues, with keeping the talent pool from drying up.
“It is one of the major obstacles that we, as CFOs, face,” Helfer says. “We have to figure out a way to continue to attract talented students into the accounting major so that it’s ultimately feeding the talent pipelines for our organizations.”
