If you’re a senior finance professional seeking to advance into senior leadership, it’s critical that your presentations to the job market illustrate a broad business acumen, showcasing your insight and knowledge of your employer’s business model, strategy, market and competitors.
Research from one of the UK’s leading accountancy bodies, CIMA, suggests that a high-quality finance leader needs to show a wide-ranging competency framework that spans technical, business, leadership and people capabilities.
Any experienced senior finance recruiter worth their salt will tell you that senior finance candidates, particularly those who’ve begun their career in technical accounting or audit positions, frequently offer inadequate responses to interview questions that focus on ‘stakeholder management’ or ‘commercial acumen’.
As CIMA’s competency framework makes clear, a good candidate must demonstrate that they can use their business knowledge to transform data into insight, and should demonstrate an ability to support strategic decision-making, P&L performance and commercial objectives.
If you want to write a best practice CV or resume, you will need to illustrate that you’re capable of partnering with cross-functional stakeholders at all levels, providing a ‘business partnering’ approach that helps to educate, guide or challenge business decisions.
Stakeholder Engagement
Have you earned trust, built rapport, forged high-quality relationships with people in your workplace? Establishing productive, sustainable communication and collaboration is a critical skill. It’s an essential component of any good senior finance value proposition for the job market.
It is also key for a senior finance leader to be able to secure buy-in, navigate resistance and challenge assumptions where required. Think hard about how best to demonstrate these skills – it’s a great differentiator when your competition may have a more technical background, with fewer quality people-focused capability examples.
Change Management & Project Delivery
It’s usually a great idea to find ways of presenting yourself to potential employers as an agent of change. The hiring process is of course a change process in itself and will usually involve replacing an incumbent. There may be a team turnaround required or there may be a transformation programme in place. Plus, the ability to drive change shows a proactive candidate who is seeking to make improvements, as opposed to a passive clock-watcher who likes to keep things safe and familiar.
It’s crucial, then, to show a range of the change initiatives you have worked on, but to focus on a few highlights; choose the most complex, the biggest in scale or impace and the ones you were most proud of delivering. You don’t need to include every tiny BAU project but it’s good to indicate breadth, eg finance process engineering, cost reduction, redundancy programme, changes in operating model or technology systems.
Showcasing your understanding of project management and associated methodologies is another crucial finance leadership skill. A knowledge of PRINCE2 and Agile is useful, and they are excellent keywords to include on your CV or resume. Look to break these methodologies down into key skills, eg project scope, contract negotiation, time management, organisational design and communications.
Remember, employers want examples of skills, so they want more than a simple job description. A useful link for checking skills gaps is at CIMA’s CPD courses, and of course their competency framework.
Commercial Strategy
As finance professionals progress up the career ladder, it becomes increasingly crucial to show examples of guiding or supporting commercial strategy. Do you have examples of influencing changes in the way an employer does business, even if it’s just through data-driven decision support?
Any impact on strategy, operations or technology would be useful, as would a supporting role in a transformation programme. Or perhaps you helped to develop a vision, set of values, mission or team culture, then participated in its execution? If you’re at an earlier stage in your career, it would great to demonstrate how your reporting supported performance or leadership decision-making.
Audit, Risk & Compliance
This is a critical area, often overlooked by accountants wishing to move into more commercial positions. Demonstrating how your work has strengthened control , headed off risk, closed control gaps and tightened compliance to regulatory standards is essential. As is the ability to provide reliable, robust budget management. The rest of a cross-functional leadership team will be looking at you for reassurance in this area – think about whether they want to work with a senior finance leader who thinks that governance is beneath them.
If you’re a qualified accountant or other senior finance professional who needs help writing your CV or resume, why not try contacting an expert at devintill@gmail.com.
