Good morning,
The ability for their companies to attract and retain talent is a top concern for CFOs. But the current war for talent isn’t ending anytime soon.
“I certainly think we will be living with this demand pace that we’ve seen for at least the next five years,” Clem Johnson, president of Crist|Kolder Associates, an executive search firm, told a group of CFOs last night in Chicago.
During Fortune’s CFO Collaborative, in partnership with Workday and sponsored by Deloitte held at Sepia restaurant, Fortune CEO Alan Murray had a discussion with Johnson about the demand for talent, the qualities companies are looking for in finance chiefs, and why CFOs who are certified public accountants (CPAs) are less in demand.
The CFO is the “nerve center of the enterprise,” Johnson told the finance chiefs in attendance. “You touch operations, supply chain, sales, and marketing.” He continued, “When we get a call from a board or CEO and they say, ‘We need a new CFO,’ it starts with a strategic lens in an almost commercial facing aspect that had never been there before.”
Traditionally, the role of the CFO was about managing risk and ensuring the enterprise has controls, he explained. “And then as things have continued to get more complex, sophisticated, and demanding,” CFOs find themselves “being ingrained in ops or commercial things,” he said.
An example? One of Johnson’s clients requested him to recruit a CFO “who's very fluent in pricing,” he said. “And pricing has not been the CFOs domain historically.” Finance chiefs are finding "more and more sub-functions" under their purview, he said.
A CFO who is strategic is so much in demand that those with an MBA are becoming more desirable to companies than those with a CPA, Johnson said. Crist|Kolder Associates’s recent survey of CFOs at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies found that in 2022, 51.5% of finance chiefs had an MBA, compared to about a third who were CPAs. There have been instances when clients see a resume with a CPA accreditation listed, and they lose interest in the candidate, Johnson said. “Most of the time, we convince them to get over the optics and focus on what the person has actually achieved in recent years.”
With the explosion of data and digitization, many CFOs are overseeing the tech function including managing data science groups, Johnson said. He’s even worked with companies where the CFO is the steward of data on consumer behavior, he said. For example, when hotels ask guests what they liked about their stay or even whether they’d like to receive a newsletter in the morning, "believe it or not, all of that data, somehow rolls up under a CFO’s purview in many of those enterprises," he said.