The state of finance hiring & careers

Introduction

CFOs responsible for their organizations’ strategy and digital transformation have less time to spend on the finance department’s day-to-day tasks. As a result, their employees need the skills and understanding to take on greater responsibilities. Combine that with the faster pace of technological change in finance, and you get finance roles that require advanced technological know-how as well as “soft skills” like leadership and communication.

Are finance leaders able to find people to fill such roles, especially in a labor market where, at least according to sector data, demand outstrips supply? To dig into the matter, at the end of last year Morning Brew, Inc. surveyed 352 finance and accounting executives about their hiring and staffing challenges, the quality of the finance talent in the market, and the impact of AI. What we found was a finance talent market on the cusp of significant change, but facing many complexities.

CFOs’ plans for hiring across their organizations get a lot of attention, but the difficulties finance chiefs encounter while hiring in their own department? Not so much. More than half the finance leaders Morning Brew surveyed said the hiring process is slower than in the past, and the quality of talent is weaker.

Six in 10 finance professionals Morning Brew surveyed (60%) said that hiring finance and accounting personnel was somewhat or much harder now than in previous years, while 24% indicated it was about the same.

Hiring can also take a long time. More than four in 10 respondents (41%) said it takes three to six months to fill a role on their teams, while 10% said it takes seven to 12 months.

And when Morning Brew asked about the ease of finding qualified candidates, 54% indicated it was harder compared with previous years (39% said it was about the same).

Job candidates, on the other hand, are spoiled for choice, Steve Saah, executive director of permanent placement operations at Robert Half, told Morning Brew. (Government statistics back that up.)

“The effective unemployment rate for most accounting and finance positions in most any major market across the country is probably in the one- to two-percent range,” Saah said. “We continually see them get multiple offers, and then oftentimes, when they go in and resign, they then end up getting counteroffers.”

The trend is likely to continue. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ occupational outlook handbook forecasts that employment in the financial manager category—which includes controllers, treasurers, and staff such as credit and cash managers—will grow 15% from 2024 to 2034, faster than the all-occupation average.

A long process

The labor market for finance professionals can be especially challenging for smaller businesses, Steve McNally, who served as CFO of manufacturer Plastics Technologies from 2018 through 2025, told Morning Brew. “ When you only have a very small finance and accounting team, any member of the team leaving is a hole in what you’re trying to do,” he said.

John Touey, a managing partner with Trilogy Talent Advisors, said hiring times for “large enterprises probably skew longer due to [bureaucracy] in hiring processes, while smaller companies may skew shorter but face worse outcomes in that they are often less competitive on compensation and have less brand awareness.”

While “supply and demand is by far the largest issue in the length of [the] hiring cycle,” according to Touey, there’s also a cyclical element: candidates’ risk tolerance, which is currently low.

“Many qualified professionals who would be willing to make a change in a robust economy are more inclined to sit tight in the current one,” Touey said. “There is a real LIFO [last in, first out] fear in the candidate pool because they see how long it’s taking their unemployed peers or newly graduated kids to find a job.”

Bona Allen, former CFO of Kajima Building & Design, agreed: “With the turbulence in the marketplace over the last year or so…and continuing today…fewer people are seeking to leave stable jobs, so the available talent pool has diminished.”

Skills shortage

The hiring game often isn’t as much about finding staff as it is about finding the right staff. Four in 10 respondents (40%) to Morning Brew’s survey said new hires are less prepared than they were in earlier years, and 31% said the overall quality of candidates was weaker, although 60% indicated quality was “about the same.”

“The talent shortage is more about [a] talent mismatch in skills,” McNally, who’s also a global board director and former global chair for the Institute of Management Accountants, said.

“In the past, junior-level roles were junior-level roles, whereas now, when we’re hiring into those roles, we’re already expecting these young professionals to have acumen in risk, in cyber, in sustainable leadership, in technologies. We need these individuals to already have a business partnership mentality,” McNally said.

Accounting managers surveyed by the Illinois CPA Society (ICPAS) in 2025 indicated that new hires were weakest in nontechnical areas such as making decisions independently under pressure or without explicit instructions, and drawing conclusions from data.

Are CFOs and their hiring managers setting their expectations too high? “Companies are increasingly looking for a fundamentally different profile than what is most readily available in today’s talent pool,” Touey said.

For corporate finance department leaders, the crucial question is, what skills are you hiring for?

More than three-quarters (77%) of finance professionals Morning Brew surveyed chose strategic thinking and problem-solving as the most important skills for the next generation of finance and accounting professionals. AI and automation proficiency (63%) and advanced data and analytics skills (59%) were the next most frequently chosen.

Those results reveal a “structural mismatch,” Trilogy Talent Advisors Managing Partner John Touey said, commenting on the results.

“Strategic thinking, AI fluency, and data analytics…are not areas in which we have traditionally trained our finance and accounting professionals,” Touey told us.

Early career finance professionals and business students are more likely to get training in some of the other most important skills noted in the Morning Brew survey: financial modeling and forecasting (chosen by 45% of respondents), technical accounting expertise (34%), and systems/ERP fluency (32%). “The function is being asked to evolve faster than the talent pipeline can adapt, and it seems like the gap is widening,” Touey said.

Priority setting

If today’s finance staffers are tomorrow’s CFOs, easing up on requirements like the ability to translate financial data into actionable insights or to communicate effectively with business heads, just to get a body in the door, is not the answer.

The expansion of the finance department’s responsibilities, especially in a milieu of data-driven decision-making, makes the abovementioned skills an imperative, not a nice-to-have.

What is a “strategic-thinking” finance leader? They ask the fundamental questions the business faces. According to an article by CFO Leadership Council Founder and President Jack McCullough, those include “Should we be competing in this market at all?” and “How do we position ourselves for the next decade, not just next quarter?”

More than half of the Morning Brew survey participants (55%) chose communication and data storytelling as a most-important skill in finance.

For Rob O’Hare, CFO of “buy now, pay later” lender Affirm, a key piece of that communication skill is interpreting the company’s strategy for stakeholders.

It’s about “setting priorities, making sure that we’re working on the right things,” O’Hare told Morning Brew. Essential to that is communication—“being able to articulate why those priorities are the right ones, both internally and in my role externally, to investors, and letting them know where we’re spending time, how we’re allocating capital, and what they should expect from us in terms of further growth and profitability.”

Analytics, automation preferred

The technology-related skills that Morning Brew survey respondents ranked very highly in importance—AI and automation proficiency, as well as advanced data and analytics skills—will also be crucial for next-gen finance leaders.

If it hasn’t already at most companies, [the role of CFO is] “going to get away from reporting and more to business enablement actions,” Robinhood CFO Shiv Verma told us.

“Historically, the finance function may have been seen as a reporting function: ‘This is what happened, and then I’m going to forecast what’s going out.’”

But it’s now up to CFOs and finance teams to help others in the business figure out, “How do we push the boundaries?” Verma said. “More of the automation and data and reporting and analytics is going to be done with the finance function, in conjunction with other parts of the firm.” Robinhood’s finance team partners “super closely” with its data science team, he said. “There are some things that finance takes the lead on, and some that they do.”

At Affirm, O’Hare is leaning into hiring what he calls “the financial system side”—the part of the finance organization that has a large automation component to its work.

“We don’t expect the average team member necessarily to be at the cutting edge of all of the tools that are available,” O’Hare said. “We want to make sure that we have people that are aggressively trying to bring automation and tools into the team.” Other team members, of course, will have “to be open to that change and flexible around using new tools.”

Keeping them

What attracts finance talent and keeps them engaged? Competitive pay and bonuses were most effective, according to 72% of the Morning Brew survey respondents, who also ranked flexible work (67%) and clear communication from leadership (53%) highly.

The next-most-cited engagement strategy was to give finance hires opportunities for career advancement, which resonated with the CFOs we interviewed. “Many young professionals, they want a career path,” McNally said. “They want to understand, ‘When I come in the door, where might I go next?’”

Customer data cloud platform Amperity emphasizes career growth also, CFO Amy Kelleran Pelly told CFO Brew. Job candidates “want the ability to grow their careers, be in an interesting space, and have the opportunity to know, ‘What does my job look like three and five years from now?’”

Upskilling for AI is an important part of the career growth plan for next-gen finance professionals. Finance leaders are seeing the positive impacts of AI, according to Morning Brew’s survey, but they pointed out plenty of potential threats to their organizations’ data quality and controls as well as employee productivity.

Half of the 352 respondents to our survey indicated that employees in their organizations have adopted AI slowly or very slowly, compared with roughly two-fifths (39%) who said their employees have adopted AI fairly to very quickly. One in 10 respondents said employees hadn’t meaningfully adopted AI technology yet (8%) or that their organization doesn’t permit AI use (2%).

Roman Telerman, CFO of application security firm Black Duck, called AI “a change agent, and so you can be fearful of it, you can adapt to it…the spectrum is broad.”

CFOs can make all sorts of promises to boost efficiency and productivity, and cut down on the time to complete tasks. But it’s up to the finance professionals, not the person training them on AI, to determine “how they best drive value or innovate in their role,” Conor Grennan, CEO of AI training consultancy AI Mindset, told CFO Brew in an email.

“That should be the best news ever to everyone,” Grennan wrote. “Every person is already equipped. They have the most important thing—domain expertise and the ability to communicate like a human.”

AI training doesn’t solve the problem—a mindset shift does, according to Grennan. In other words, employees “need to rewire how they work,” he said. “That’s a behavioral challenge, not a technical one.”

Training plans

Four in 10 survey respondents cited employee hesitancy or lack of confidence in using AI as a negative impact, and roughly the same percentage said their finance staffers needed additional training or upskilling.

Organizations can’t expect to hand employees a new tool and expect immediate results, Grennan said. He likened that thinking to “buying everyone a treadmill and expecting to lower heart disease.”

The best way to combat AI hesitancy, Grennan said, is “messaging—and it has to be a vulnerable message.” A message that conveys how AI will make them more valuable, rather than replaceable, “does more for adoption than any training program.”

Organizations are employing numerous AI training methods, according to the Morning Brew survey. The most popular is self-directed learning (think: videos or online courses); 45% of respondents said their company uses that strategy.

Other common methods included informal, employee-led training such as lunch-and-learn sessions (33%); formal, company-led programs (19%); and training that’s specifically tailored to accounting or FP&A teams (14%). However, 18% of respondents said they’re still exploring training methods, and 11% had no training planned.

Black Duck CFO Telerman said his team is currently adopting an AI chatbot assistant. “It doesn’t do the thinking for you, but it prompts thought.”

To get finance teams on board with harnessing the tool’s capabilities, “seeing is believing,” Telerman said. He described a recent example when he asked a finance employee to pull up information from a credit agreement. Rather than using the AI assistant, they went searching for the information manually.

Telerman said he shared his screen with the employee and demonstrated how to quickly use AI to find that same info. “Rather than having somebody look for it for half an hour, I had an answer in a minute,” he said.

Taking the good with the bad

A majority of respondents indicated at least one positive impact AI has had at their organization so far. The most frequently cited benefit was reducing manual or repetitive tasks, chosen by 51% of finance professionals. Those tasks could include journal entry categorization, matching invoices to purchase orders, and AP fraud detection. The next most frequently chosen positive impacts were faster insights and analytics (38%), streamlining of communication (30%), and better documentation and support (27%).

Amy Kelleran Pelly, CFO of customer data cloud platform Amperity, said her finance team used AI to help with incentive-plan scenarios. “Something that would have taken an individual literally hours of time to build and model up…scenarios and the communication vehicle with it, was literally a 30-minute exercise,” she told us.

But AI technology also introduces challenges. Beyond employee hesitancy and unfamiliarity, respondents cited issues such as unreliable outputs (34%); compliance, audit, or security concerns (31%); and AI “workslop” (28%). As CFO Brew previously reported, workslop, or low-quality output that needs human correction, cuts AI’s productivity gains.

Still, finance professionals need to get comfortable with using AI, Telerman said, especially if they want to develop the higher-level skills that could kick their finance career into overdrive.

Finance professionals who shun AI technology will likely find themselves being replaced by those who embrace it. “It’s not an ‘if.’ You have to force your teams to adopt it,” Telerman said. Finance leaders are making the message clear: “It’s a company tool that we use.”