Why the Best Senior Finance Candidates are Already Gone by the Time Most Businesses Start Looking
By Aran Purewal
Here is something I see play out regularly across Hampshire and the South Coast, and it almost always ends the same way.
A business identifies a need for a senior finance hire: Finance Director, a Financial Controller, a Head of FP&A. The need for the role is genuine and the intent to move is there.
But, before the search can start, there are internal conversations to have. A business case to sign off. A job specification to agree on. Diaries to align for interviews.
By the time the process begins, the strongest candidates have already accepted offers elsewhere. Let me say that this is not a story about businesses doing recruitment badly.
Most of the leadership teams I work with are thoughtful, professional and genuinely invested in making good hires. The delays happen because senior hiring sits alongside everything else a business is trying to do, and day-to-day business functions tend to feel more urgent, right up until the vacancy becomes a crisis.
What I want to do here is give you an honest picture of what the senior finance market looks like right now, why timelines matter more than most businesses realise, and what the organisations that consistently hire well tend to do differently.
How long does it actually take to hire a senior finance professional?
This is the question I wish more businesses asked at the start rather than the end of a process.
For permanent senior finance roles, the realistic timeline from briefing to a candidate starting looks something like this:
Weeks 1 to 5: Search, longlisting, interviews, offer and acceptance.
Even with a well-run, decisive process, this can rarely be compressed below five weeks for a Finance Director or Financial Controller level appointment.
Weeks 5 to 17: Notice period.
The majority of senior finance professionals in this market are on three months notice. Some are on less, a small number are on more. But three months is the working assumption you should plan around.
So, if a vacancy is identified in May and the process starts in June, you are realistically looking at an October start date at the earliest.
For businesses with year-end pressures, Q4 reporting cycles or growth plans that depend on financial leadership being in place, that gap has real consequences.
The businesses I work with that plan well tend to start thinking about a hire two to three months before they expect to need one. That sounds like a long lead time, but given the notice period arithmetic, it is often exactly right.
What is the senior finance market like in Hampshire right now?
Hampshire and the wider South Coast market has its own dynamics that are worth understanding before you start a search.
The talent pool at senior finance level is genuinely strong.
There are experienced Finance Directors, Financial Controllers and commercial finance leaders across sectors including manufacturing, professional services, technology, healthcare and defence. Southampton, Portsmouth, Basingstoke and the surrounding areas all have established finance communities.
The challenge is that the strongest people in this pool are rarely sitting idle waiting for their next opportunity. They are well-networked, visible to other businesses and often in conversations with multiple organisations at once, sometimes before they have even made a decision to leave their current role.
Salary expectations at this level have also shifted over the last couple of years.
Finance Director appointments across Hampshire typically sit in a range that reflects both the seniority of the role and the increasing commercial scope many FDs are now expected to cover. If you are working from a salary budget set two years ago, it is worth a conversation to sense-check whether it remains competitive in today’s market.
One pattern I see consistently is businesses that lose out on their preferred candidate often discover that the deciding factor was not salary at all. It was the pace of the process or the quality of communication during it.
Why candidate experience matters at this level
Senior finance professionals evaluate organisations during a recruitment process in exactly the same way that organisations evaluate candidates. That is easy to say and surprisingly easy to forget when you are the one hiring.
A candidate who has left a comfortable, well-paid role to explore the market is taking a risk. They are assessing leadership quality, business stability, the realism of what is being asked of them, and whether there is a genuine opportunity to make an impact. They are making that assessment based on everything they observe during the hiring process, not just what they are told in the job description.
When a business takes two weeks to arrange a second interview, or goes quiet after what felt like a positive first meeting, a senior candidate does not usually wait around wondering what happened. They draw a conclusion about how the business operates and they move on.
The things that make a real difference are not complicated.
- Clear timelines set at the beginning of the process.
- Prompt, honest feedback after each stage.
- Interviews that are well-structured and give the candidate room to assess the business as well as demonstrate their own capability.
- Transparency about the challenges the business is actually facing, not just the opportunity.
Experienced finance professionals are drawn to roles where they can genuinely add value. That means they want to understand the real picture, not just a polished version of it. Being honest about where the finance function is today and where you need it to be in two years is far more compelling than a job description full of adjectives.
What the businesses that hire well tend to do differently
After a long time recruiting at this level across this region, I have noticed some clear patterns in the organisations that consistently attract and secure strong finance talent.
They start before there is pressure.
The best conversations I have with clients often happen before a role formally exists. We talk about succession planning, capability gaps, where the business is heading and what that means for the finance team.
When a vacancy does appear, they are already informed about the market and ready to move.
They have internal alignment before they go to market. The brief is clear, the key stakeholders have agreed on what they are looking for, and there is a decision-making process in place before candidates are introduced. This sounds obvious, but the absence of it is one of the most common reasons searches stall.
They treat the process as a two-way conversation. Rather than running recruitment as a series of assessments, they invest time in helping candidates understand the business, the team and the opportunity. They know that the candidate is making a significant life decision and they take that seriously.
They move when they find the right person. When they meet a candidate they want, they do not wait for a second opinion that is not really necessary or an internal process that could flex. The business makes a decision and communicates it clearly.
None of this requires a large recruitment budget or a dedicated HR team.
It requires planning, good internal communication and treating the process with the same seriousness as any other strategic business decision.
The cost of getting this wrong
A vacant senior finance role is not a neutral state. The impact tends to spread in ways that are not always visible at first.
Reporting timelines slip. Commercial analysis is either delayed or produced by someone who is already stretched. Strategic projects that depend on financial modelling or business case development stall. And the finance team members who are absorbing the additional work start to feel it, which creates its own retention risk.
In some cases, businesses bring in interim support to bridge the gap, which is often the right call and something CMA can help with quickly. But the interim period still needs managing, and the permanent search still needs to happen.
The businesses that plan ahead avoid most of this. This is not by predicting the future perfectly, but by having enough of a handle on the market that when a role needs to be filled, they are not starting from scratch.
Thinking about a senior finance hire in the next six months?
If you are already planning for Q4, thinking about what the finance function needs to look like heading into 2027, or aware of a capability gap that is going to become important, now is a good time to start a conversation.
That conversation does not need to be a formal briefing.
It can be an informal discussion about the market, what realistic timelines look like for the kind of role you are considering, or what the salary benchmarks currently are for senior finance appointments in Hampshire.
I have these conversations regularly with clients and with finance professionals across the region, and they almost always lead to better outcomes than waiting until a role is officially open and urgency has set in.
If that sounds useful, feel free to get in touch directly. I am always happy to share what I am seeing in the market without any obligation on either side.
Aran Purewal is a Director at CMA Recruitment Group, specialising in senior finance appointments across Hampshire and the South Coast. CMA has been placing finance professionals across the region for over 46 years.