Finance recruiting for high-growth tech companies

Our customers are venture capital-backed, high-growth tech companies, from startup to growth stage and enterprise; they range from 15 employees to over 50,000. Companies usually call us about finance hiring when they close a funding round and have a hiring surge, are building a finance and accounting team from scratch, have had finance hires that didn’t work out, or need more recruiting capacity for G&A roles without adding W-2 recruiting headcount.

We fill staff and senior accountants, revenue accountants, and accounts payable, accounts receivable, and payroll specialists, as well as assistant controllers, controllers, and corporate controllers. On the finance side, we fill financial analysts, FP&A analysts, FP&A managers, and heads of FP&A, up to chief financial officer. We fill procurement roles too.

Finance and accounting are part of our G&A recruiting practice. As accounting recruiters for high-growth tech companies, we hire the people who close your books, build your forecasts, and report your numbers, directly onto your team.

Finance roles don’t come with a quota. In sales, a track record shows up in activity metrics and attainment. In finance, you have to define how success in the seat is measured before the search starts: closing the books on time, a forecast leadership can rely on, reporting delivered on deadline. We then ask candidates how their own success was measured at previous companies. People who have been accountable to clear outcomes on tight timelines can tell you exactly. People who haven’t tend to move too slowly once they’re hired.

Senior finance is one of the few places where learning on the job isn’t an option. A controller, a head of FP&A, or a chief financial officer has to arrive with the expertise the role needs. For earlier-career roles, it’s worth deciding up front what someone has to know on day one and what they can learn, and whether the seat needs a deep specialist or a generalist who adapts as the job description changes.

Sometimes business acumen is overlooked in favor of technical skill. The strongest finance people understand the other departments well enough to resource them correctly. They separate signal from noise on spend, instead of blocking budget for revenue, recruiting, or vendors from a narrow cost view. They translate complex accounting into clear language for executives outside finance, and tailor reporting to how your leadership team works. At a growth-stage company, that makes finance an asset to the revenue org.

The stage of your company also has a significant impact. Someone who ran finance processes inside a 50,000-person organization, or at a company in a different industry, often tries to port exactly what they did there. Business is situational. You want relevant experience and the adaptability to adjust to a different environment, culture, and org chart, and we test for that in the interview process.

Behavioral fit is easy to underestimate in finance. Companies accept that a salesperson needs a specific profile but forget that finance needs drivers and strong cultural fits too: people who work well under tight deadlines and quick turnarounds, collaborate across departments, and own outcomes personally.

Every finance search starts with the performance criteria: the core outcomes the role, or the department, has to achieve. We work backward from those to prioritize, define the skill sets the role needs, and make sure the job description and the interview process are built to identify them. It’s the same method we use when a company is building its finance and accounting function from scratch, starting with the first hire.

Upfront screening calls and references matter here as much as in any function. We tell candidates in the first round that we require references from previous direct managers at the offer stage. How candidates react to that tells us a lot.

At kickoff, we review the roles with your hiring team and align on the interview process. Within 48 hours after the kickoff meeting, we meet with the hiring managers again to have a calibration meeting. We bring 10 candidate profiles to the table to ensure that we’re aligned and only interviewing relevant talent.

1. 48hours

   Calibration meeting

2. 3-7days

   Initial recruiter screens

3. 7-10days

   Hiring manager interviews

4. 2-3weeks

   Full qualified candidate pipeline per role

5. 30days

   Initial hires

6. 90days

   On track against the hiring plan

Initial recruiter screens happen in 3-7 days, and hiring manager interviews in 7-10 days. You have a full qualified candidate pipeline per role in 2-3 weeks. Initial hires typically land in roughly 30 days, and you’re on track against the hiring plan by 90. Time-to-fill runs 15-60 days depending on seniority and scope.

A common hiring mistake is picking the best of the first handful of people you speak to. We focus heavily on outbound sourcing to engage with a lot of talent. This ensures that you’re able to hire the best people on the market.

Along the way, our recruiters meet with your hiring managers weekly and communicate updates daily in your chat channels. You also get weekly metrics from the delivery lead who manages recruiter performance. Our recruiters also have access to our tech stack that accelerates identifying and reaching out to top talent: strategic AI sourcing and AI resume matching, multi-step, multi-channel outreach, and job postings. Everything runs in your systems, and you own your data and your candidate pool.

Most of the finance and accounting hiring we do runs through Embedded Recruiting and RPO: a recruiter working only on your business, inside your systems. If your hiring is consistent, or there’s enough work for at least one full-time recruiter, it also cuts down on cost-per-hire. The engagement scales with your hiring plan, from adding capacity to your internal recruiting team to running recruiting as your talent function. You can see how these engagements run in our case studies.