If you need to recruit someone with specialised expertise in accountancy and finance, then you’ll need to think about more than qualifications, knowledge, and skills. You’ll also need people who can leverage those things, and thereby add value to your business.
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Technical Skills vs. Business Acumen
ACCA and CIMA certifications provide an invaluable means of understanding whether a given professional is qualified to perform a job. But in many cases, being qualified might be considered a bare minimum. A good finance professional should not only be able to understand financial data, but also to extract real insight from it, and apply that insight to commercial and strategic decisions.
Soft Skills Matter
New professionals in finance are often surprised at how little time they spend engaged with numbers and data. To be effective, after all, these people will need to be able to integrate into the team around them, and explain often complex financial matters in a way that facilitates strategic decision-making. If you aren’t able to talk to non-financial stakeholders in a way that they can understand, then you can expect to be overlooked in favour of a person who can.
Let’s suppose that there’s a financial optimisation that might lead to marginal gains for the company over the coming years. A good financial professional might be able to spot the right course of action. But unless they can express that in a way that can be understood and appreciated by key stakeholders, the insight is likely to be useless. The same goes in instances when more serious financial implications are being considered.
Cultural Fit and Long-Term Potential
Different businesses have different cultures and values. If a given financial professional is really going to thrive, then they’ll need to make a good fit with the team. A failure to properly integrate might lead to high levels of staff turnover. This means that proper vetting and onboarding are often essential ways of getting value for money. Finance recruitment partners will often provide these services, and thereby help a business to locate the talent that it needs to prosper. After all, an automaton can go through a CV and filter out the candidates who don’t possess the appropriate technical qualifications. But establishing that a candidate is truly qualified, in the non-technical senses, is often just as critical. This often means working with the right outside agency.
