For newly hired CFOs, building a sturdy talent framework may take seven pillars

Introduction

Even as “quiet quitting” has evolved into “quiet hiring,”¹ finance executives have remained vociferous when sharing their ongoing recruiting and retention challenges in the tight labor market of the last two years.

Their concern comes through clearly in Deloitte’s quarterly North American CFO Signals™ survey. From broadening recruitment pools to retaining existing employees, talent has ranked as a top concern among CFOs since Deloitte’s Q3 2020 CFO Signals survey, when hiring expectations began to rise as companies started planning for the pandemic to ease.² By the Q1 2022 CFO Signals survey, talent/labor shortages claimed their place among respondents’ most worrisome risks. In Q4 2022, CFO Signals respondents most frequently cited retention as their most worrisome internal risk.³

And that was before the unemployment rate officially dropped to 3.4%.⁴ CFO turnover has also remained brisk. One study of SEC filings found that 21% of CFOs had left their jobs in 2021, representing a five-year high, with the average CFO tenure at about 3.5 years.⁵

It’s hardly a surprise, then, that nearly every incoming finance chief who goes through Deloitte’s CFO Transition Lab™ lists talent as their top priority. Newly hired CFOs often bring fresh ideas about ways to boost the performance and profile of their inherited finance departments. Success, however, generally depends on the quality of an organization’s talent, as well as employees’ commitment to the company and to their new leader. The good news here? Transitions are an excellent time to frame and initiate a talent agenda. To staffers, a clearly defined plan around talent is a sign that an incoming CFO intends to support their development and growth. 

In our experience, roughly a handful of components—which we have dubbed the seven pillars—typically underpin an effective talent framework. In this edition of CFO Insights, we look at how incoming chief financial officers can build a motivated and skilled finance team by focusing on these seven pillars—and what they will likely need from human resources (HR) to make it happen.⁶ 

Endnotes

¹ “How the U.S. labor market went from ‘quiet quitting’ to ‘quiet hiring,’” CNBC.com, Feb. 6. 2023.

² CFO Signals™: Q3 2020, US CFO Program, Deloitte LLP.

³ CFO Signals™: 4Q 2022, US CFO Program, Deloitte LLP.

⁴ “The employment situation—January 2023,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, Feb. 3, 2023.

⁵ “CFOs and the C-Suite: Staying Power, Pay and Pain Points,” Datarails, 2022.

⁶ For more details see: Ajit Kambil, The Leadership Accelerator: The Playbook for Transitioning into Your New Executive Role (McGraw Hill; January 2023), from which this article is adapted

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