Finance talent check: Who will be in demand?

The demand for finance talent has grown significantly in the last few years, but the kind of talent finance executives want has changed.

Although not every finance job is equal, two CFOs at vastly different enterprises agreed that they look for workers who can contextualize, analyze, and translate the complexity of the business to help make better decisions. And yes, that does include AI.

“Now, what makes a real difference is, can you audit and integrate the output you’re getting from AI?” Dan Zhang, CFO of AI-native project management software company ClickUp, said.

“The people that I see really thriving in this age, they know how to test the hypothesis that the AI made. They will ask questions like, ‘Show me the details. What would break it?’ and they have counter arguments to every proposal that AI put[s] in front of them,” Zhang said.

Different, but similar. Lisa Zeeveld, CFO of outsourced finance work staffing firm Belay, said that clients’ need for Belay’s services has only grown in recent years, specifically among small and mid-sized businesses.

For smaller businesses that don’t require a full-time CFO yet, a fractional or part-time CFO, bookkeeper, or accountant with expert knowledge is able to meet their needs, Zeeveld told CFO Brew. And that’s still what they’re looking for regardless of what large companies are doing with AI.

“They don’t have the same resources larger corporations do. We have not seen in our business a lack of leads; you’ve got your guy who is running his plumbing company, and he doesn’t know a thing about bookkeeping. Either his wife has been doing it, or he’s been burdening his CPA with using QuickBooks,” Zeeveld said, “and so he’s not thinking of, ‘How do I just all of a sudden automate this and get rid of that person?’ Because technically, if you have a full-charge bookkeeper, they’re really acting as a controller and they’re acting as the CFO in your business.”

Small to mid-sized businesses are requesting someone who can add significant knowledge that only an experienced finance leader can offer, like “decipher[ing] and translat[ing] what they’re seeing on the P&L,” Zeeveld said.

In addition, she added, “You have a lot of business owners who are asking, ‘As we move into this era of more private equity dollars, there’s a lot of dry powder that’s starting to build up. What does that look like in order to sell my business? What are multiples? How do I understand that?’”

“So I think that, specifically talking about your controllers and your CFOs, they’re becoming the strategic partner to that business owner, or to that CEO, more so than ever.”

Talent vs. demand. Before a business hits a certain scaling point, though, is when the need arises to add finance expertise internally, Zhang said.

“You maybe outsource some of your functions, and you’re putting in the part-time consultant; you have the best ROI. The reason why there is a point in time [when] you need to bring that in-house, and you need to go much deeper and marry that with your business context, is because at some point the business context will outweigh the transaction part of the activities,” she added.

Industry-wide, Zhang sees a gap in larger enterprises between what the current finance workforce can do and what CFOs like herself are looking for. “There is a 10x demand on people who can design systems on AI, but the current talent force, I think they’re not trained, and they’re not mentally prepared to shift most of our focus to design a system, instead of doing the work themselves.”

“If you look at the current finance team, and now, doing the work, it’s commoditized now. And what really matters is, how can you break a problem down into a doable scoping for AI to do the work, and then you build a quality gate to make sure the quality is there,” Zhang said.

“In the last 10 years, the talent in [the] finance profession [was] mostly like the shape of ‘I.’ We specialized very early on; ‘I’m in corporate finance, I’m in revenue accounting, I’m in tax,’” Zhang said. “But I think that in the next few years, you will see that the people with a T-shaped knowledge and talent will be the most popular, and the hottest talent in the market. Meaning that they have a very broad surface that cross[es] over to the other finance functions very early on.”