Plenty of ink has been spilled over the widening role of the CFO, but far less has been said about job descriptions themselves. As finance teams take on responsibility for enterprise-wide strategy and growing tech stacks, the standard job posting for a finance chief simply is not keeping pace, experts say. It’s exacerbating an already existing shortage on the financial talent bench.
Katie Birkelo, president of Aspire Professional Talent Solutions, has been working in finance and accounting staffing for over two decades, and she said she’s begun to notice several things that “remain misaligned and poorly defined” between what appears on job descriptions and what companies are actually looking for in a finance leader.
With companies of all stripes continuing to weigh how and if they’ll adopt artificial intelligence tools, finance leaders are finding themselves fielding questions that they may not have had to consider in the past. How much should an organization spend on AI tokens, for example? And which departments and employees should get access to the latest tools?
“Not only is the CFO going to be responsible for the finance function and the accounting function, but they're also going to be working at this intersection between IT, AI risk and governance,” Birkelo said in an interview.
The ‘new-age’ CFO
A casual glance at the headlines reveals the predicament facing finance chiefs on the AI front. Consulting firm Accenture, for instance, reportedly told employees it will only fund $29 per month per employee for AI use, according to tech news site 404 Media. Any amount exceeding that would need to be billed to a specific project. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs has cut access to Anthropic’s Claude tool to most employees except engineers.
Such decisions, undoubtedly, have to involve finance teams at some level.
“There are so many different intersections meeting at the seat of the CFO that the general job description misses,” Birkelo said. “The things that are missed are both the technical pieces that become so critical for the new-age CFO, if you will, and the intangible pieces that companies are begging for.”
As Nick Araco Jr., CFO and founder of the CFO Alliance, puts it: Many finance chiefs are finding themselves “doing a job that has very little in common with the one they interviewed for.”
Speaking with a group of CFO Alliance members in Florida recently, Araco said he heard a new vocabulary in terms of what makes an ideal finance chief today. He heard words like “approachable,” “agile” and “builder.” They’re terms that might once have been considered “nice-to-have,” he said, but now they’re a mandate.
Araco said that finance chiefs are being asked to own AI rollouts, the larger tech stack and an organization’s operations. CFOs are also expected to serve as a strategic partner to their CEO, he noted.
If CFO job descriptions today are falling short, what might an ideal posting look like? For starters, Birkelo said, it must include clear descriptions of all the departments and initiatives a candidate would oversee, including anything related to artificial intelligence. In Birkelo’s view, pretty much all finance chiefs understand they’ll have to have some level of understanding of AI in the face of growing talent shortages. “AI is not going to replace human capital because the human capital is no longer there,” she said.
Birkelo added that a good job description should also clearly lay out what success in the position looks like at 30, 60 and 90 days, she advised.
“That’s actually what a CFO wants to better understand when they apply for the job,” not by the time they’re interviewing for it, Birkelo said.
Finally, an ideal job description would include “details about the organization’s structure and vision,” she added. Birkelo conceded that it may “sound a little bit backwards, but you are writing a description that is going to sell your organization and this job on paper.”
