The age-old question, do you hire the best available talent or hold out for those non-negotiable ‘unicorns’?

As always it depends on your type of role, urgency, and most importantly of all, budget.

Hiring the available talent does not necessarily mean lowering your goals on the quality of the hire, it means hiring what is right and giving the business the ability to access this talent appropriately.

This is SRM’s guide to making the right decision on your next hire.

1. Define the hire

All finance roles can be a search for a non-negotiable unicorn, but a true non-emotional appraisal of the role can help create a wider more diverse pool of candidates to hire from. This is turn will enable a quicker, more efficient and ultimately more successful hiring process.

Our advice here is to define clearly what is “non-negotiable” Vs “nice to have”. When critically appraising this, it is important think about the whole employment market not the immediate company need:

• Must-haves: Can’t do the job without, for example, technical skills, leadership experience, cultural alignment.
• Nice-to-haves: Can be coached or learned on the job, for example, specific tools (IT systems) and industry knowledge.

The pitfalls of many hiring processes in Finance is to mislabel ‘nice-to-haves’ as ‘must-haves’ and thus creating a more unique (and harder) profile to find.

In reality, most qualified finance and accountancy roles are extremely transferable. A management accountant in one industry should be able to learn the KPIs of another industry. Similarly, in an age where the vast majority of candidates have smart phones and use multiple different platforms both in their personal and professional lives, IT systems and tools can certainly be learned.

If performed without emotion this defining process will give you a shortlist of truly non-negotiable skills and thus widen your pool of high-quality available talent.

2. Urgency

We’ve all been there (don’t worry it happens a lot) where the hire is needed as quickly as possible due to some unforeseen circumstances. However, it can be managed and still allow for the best talent to be hired.

When defining the hire, remember to consider that the average notice period for a finance professional in the UK is now firmly set at 3 months. Add the recruitment process to this (an average of 4-6 weeks) and you are looking at a 4-6 month process until you have someone start. The question is how do you manage this process to hire the best talent?

Option 1 – ignore the timeframe issue and hire as you normally would.

This could mean extra pressure internally, but it will allow you to go through the process of defining the role and look at the best possible talent from the widest possible field.

Option 2 – only look at time relevant candidates

If the speed of hire is most important, then the non-negotiable becomes notice period or lack of. This is obviously a decision to make, but that one non-negotiable means the pool of available talent diminishes immediately and, with it, choice. If you are looking at only immediately-available talent (on average 5% of whole employment market), this will mean making compromises on things which in option one wouldn’t need to be compromised

Option 3 – use interim resource.

This isn’t to advocate temp to perm (it duplicates option 2), it is to create space to focus on option one. Whilst defining option 1, look into parts of the role which need to continue no matter and whether the remaining team can cover. If not distil this skillset into a short-term temp. It is often more junior than the permanent hire, but it releases pressure on the team allowing the best available talent to still be recruited.

As with any recruitment process nothing is fool proof, but thinking through the urgency questions can frame the talent you are seeing and help you make those decision on compromises.

3. Budget

Unfortunately, budget is the one defining element that is often out of your control. Market forces will dictate whether the budget you have mean you can hire the best talent in the market.

Each finance role will have a range in which salaries can be found, and depending on the role these bandings could be wide or narrow. If your budget sits between these bandings, then finding what you are looking for should be relatively easy. But how do you ensure this?

1. Define the ‘nice-to-haves’ and ‘must haves’ before price is confirmed. Cross-reference this with external advice as to whether the skillset exists in the wider market.
2. Speak to an external recruitment adviser on current market rates on the role you have designed.
3. Hopefully the budget fits the expectation. If not, use the external adviser to review the ‘must-haves’ and ‘nice-to-haves’. This will allow you to bring it within budget with the least amount of compromise.
4. Get sign-off internally with all of the above.

By engaging with advisor’s before taking the role to market, you can manage both personal and internal company expectations on what can be expected during the hiring process. This will widen the pool and give you a true representation of the best available talent.

Step-by-step guide

In summary, this is SRM’s definitive guide to hiring the best available finance talent:

• Step 1 – how urgent is the role? Which of the 3 options is best for your current situation?
• Step 2 – define the role unemotional and critically review ‘must-haves’ and ‘nice-to-haves’. Remember, when hiring accountants, most skills are transferable and sector as well as technology can be learned.
• Step 3 – does this skillset exist externally? Consult with trusted external advisors (SRM can help here).
• Step 4 – is the assumed price expected? If not, use SRM to redesign the role to match the expected price.
• Step 5 – get sign-off internally.
• Step 6 – find the best available talent.

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