Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Finance and Accounting Recruiting Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Finance and Accounting Recruiting Manager is responsible for leading full-cycle talent acquisition for finance, accounting, treasury, tax, FP&A, and controllership roles. This role partners with finance leadership to design and deliver strategic sourcing, candidate assessment, and hiring programs that scale finance capability, improve time-to-hire and quality-of-hire, and build diverse talent pipelines across mid- to senior-level finance and accounting positions. The manager drives employer branding for finance functions, manages recruitment vendors and RPO partners, leverages ATS/HRIS and people data to inform workforce planning, and coaches hiring managers on interview and selection best practices.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Recruiter — Finance & Accounting
Talent Acquisition Specialist with finance hiring focus
HR Business Partner or HR Generalist with recruiting responsibility

Advancement To:

Director of Talent Acquisition — Finance & Accounting
Head of Talent Acquisition / Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition
Talent Partner or People Leader for Finance Functions

Lateral Moves:

Compensation & Benefits Manager (specializing in finance comp)
People Operations / HRBP supporting finance organizations

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead end-to-end recruiting for finance and accounting roles (staff accountants, financial analysts, controllers, tax managers, payroll leads, FP&A directors, treasury analysts, and CFO-level searches), owning requisition intake, role design, sourcing strategy, candidate assessment and offer negotiation to consistently deliver high-quality hires.
Partner with finance leaders and HR business partners to forecast hiring needs, develop workforce plans, and translate business priorities into hiring roadmaps that align talent supply with budget and growth cycles.
Develop and execute strategic sourcing plans using a mix of direct sourcing, executive search, campus recruiting, employee referrals, and contingent workforce strategies to build and maintain a proactive pipeline of passive and active finance candidates.
Manage the full interview lifecycle: design interviewer scorecards, train hiring managers on behavioral and technical interviewing, coordinate cross-functional interview panels, and ensure consistent and objective evaluation of candidates.
Own the candidate experience for finance hiring, from first touch to onboarding handoff, proactively communicating timelines, feedback and next steps while maintaining a professional, respectful employer brand that drives candidate acceptance rates.
Drive metrics-driven recruiting by tracking and reporting recruiting KPIs (time-to-fill, time-to-offer, quality-of-hire, source-of-hire, diversity metrics, and cost-per-hire), using data to identify bottlenecks and implement continuous improvement initiatives.
Lead complex and confidential executive-level finance searches, including compensation benchmarking, stakeholder alignment, confidential outreach, and managing external executive search firms when required.
Manage recruitment vendors and RPO partners: negotiate SLAs, monitor performance against KPIs, control spend, and ensure vendor sourcing aligns with diversity and compliance objectives.
Design and execute targeted diversity recruiting initiatives for underrepresented groups within finance and accounting, partnering with employee resource groups, diversity job boards, and community organizations to broaden the talent funnel.
Collaborate with Compensation & Benefits and Finance to design competitive offers, approve salary ranges, and advise on market trends to close top finance talent while managing budget constraints and internal equity.
Implement and optimize ATS workflows and tagging for finance roles (e.g., Greenhouse, iCIMS, Workday), maintain clean candidate data, and partner with HRIS to ensure seamless hiring-to-onboarding handoffs.
Conduct candidate assessments and coordinate technical tests, case studies, financial modeling assessments or sample work to evaluate candidate competency for specialized finance roles.
Coach hiring managers on talent market realities, interview calibration, unconscious bias mitigation, and offer strategy to reduce negotiation friction and accelerate hiring decisions.
Build and maintain strong relationships with universities, professional associations (e.g., AICPA, CFA Institute), and finance-specific communities to create pipelines for early-career and mid-career finance talent.
Lead employer branding for finance functions by creating role marketing collateral, finance-specific content for careers pages, and social recruiting campaigns highlighting finance team culture and career paths.
Ensure compliance with employment laws, background checks, immigration and visa processes relevant to finance hires, partnering with legal and global mobility teams to manage cross-border hiring.
Design onboarding transition plans that include role-specific ramp milestones, first-90-day success plans, and coordination with finance operations to accelerate time-to-productivity.
Implement and maintain talent pools for hard-to-fill finance specialties (tax accounting, revenue recognition, revenue cycle, SEC reporting), enabling rapid redeployment into openings and reducing sourcing lead time.
Run continuous improvement projects to streamline hiring workflows for finance roles (e.g., structured interview guides, scorecard templates, automated scheduling) to reduce administrative burden on hiring managers.
Conduct salary benchmarking and market intelligence research for finance functions to inform requisition level setting and compensation bands using external market data and internal pay equity analysis.
Serve as an internal consultant during reorganizations or M&A activities to assess talent gaps, create retention strategies for critical finance roles, and plan for rapid integration hiring needs.
Facilitate post-hire evaluation and quality-of-hire reviews with hiring managers to capture lessons learned, improve candidate profiles, and refine sourcing channels based on performance outcomes.
Manage budget and headcount for the finance talent acquisition function, including recruiting technology subscriptions, job board spend, and relationships with contingent staffing partners.
Lead, mentor and develop a small team of finance recruiters, providing coaching, performance management, training on technical finance role competencies, and career development planning for the recruiting team.
Champion process standardization across global finance hiring processes, ensuring consistency in job families, leveling, interview standards and documentation to enable scalable hiring practices.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc analytics requests by preparing recruiting dashboards and insights for finance leadership and HR partners.
Contribute to employer branding initiatives and finance-specific career site content to attract specialized accounting and finance talent.
Assist in cross-functional projects such as HRIS implementations, recruiting automation rollouts, and recruitment marketing campaigns that impact finance recruiting workflows.
Collaborate with Learning & Development to design onboarding and early development programs tailored for finance hires, accelerating competency attainment.
Participate in workforce planning sessions and strategic talent reviews to identify critical roles, succession plans, and retention risks within finance.
Maintain a candidate relationship management program for alumni and passive finance candidates to enable rapid rehiring and referrals.
Support audit and compliance activities by providing recruiting documentation, candidate selection rationales, and EEO/OFCCP records for finance hiring audits.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Deep expertise with Applicant Tracking Systems and HRIS platforms commonly used for finance hiring (e.g., Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Workday) including ATS configuration, reporting and integrations.
Advanced sourcing skills using LinkedIn Recruiter, boolean search, X-ray search, GitHub/Stack Overflow equivalents for financial modeling communities and niche finance job boards.
Strong proficiency in recruiting analytics and reporting: building dashboards, calculating time-to-fill/time-to-offer, cost-per-hire, source effectiveness and quality-of-hire metrics using Excel, Looker, Tableau or Power BI.
Experience conducting and designing technical assessments for finance roles (accounting case studies, financial modeling tests, Excel-based practical exercises).
Solid knowledge of finance and accounting role families, job leveling, compensation structures, and typical skill/experience requirements across FP&A, controllership, tax, treasury and SEC reporting.
Familiarity with employment law, background checks, immigration processes, and compliance requirements relevant to finance talent across multiple jurisdictions.
Experience managing vendor relationships (RPOs, executive search firms, assessment providers) and negotiating commercial terms and SLAs.
Competence with recruitment marketing tools, job ad optimization, and employer branding techniques for finance talent attraction.
Ability to create and maintain candidate scorecards, competency frameworks, and interview guides aligned to finance-specific competencies.
Experience with offer structuring and compensation benchmarking tools (e.g., Payscale, Radford, Mercer, Willis Towers Watson).

Soft Skills

Exceptional stakeholder management and influencing skills to align hiring managers and finance leaders on candidate selection and offer decisions.
Strong business acumen and the ability to translate finance team needs into pragmatic recruiting strategies.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills for clear candidate outreach, offer negotiation, and cross-functional collaboration.
High level of confidentiality, integrity and professionalism in handling sensitive finance candidate and compensation information.
Coaching and mentoring skills to develop recruiter capability and to train hiring managers on interviewing best practices.
Strong organization, prioritization and project management skills to manage multiple concurrent searches and hiring cycles.
Problem solving and creativity for sourcing passive and niche finance talent in competitive markets.
Resilience and adaptability to operate in fast-paced, changing business environments including hiring freezes, reorganizations and M&A.
Cultural sensitivity and commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in recruiting processes and candidate evaluation.
Negotiation skills to close offers in line with budget, candidate expectations and internal equity.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, Finance, Accounting, Psychology, or related field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree (MBA, M.S. in Human Resources or related), or professional HR certifications (SHRM-CP/SHRM-SCP, PHR/SPHR).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Human Resources Management
Finance or Accounting
Business Administration
Organizational Psychology

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

5–10+ years of progressive talent acquisition experience, with at least 3–5 years focused on recruiting finance and accounting roles. Experience managing teams or leading complex searches preferred.

Preferred:

7+ years total recruiting experience with demonstrated success filling mid-to-senior finance roles and/or managing finance recruiting programs for a large organization or professional services firm.
Proven track record working with executive search firms or running confidential senior finance searches and managing cross-border hiring and compliance.