It’s all about the people.
This guide is for hiring managers and business leaders running a senior finance search in Sydney, whether that is a CFO, a Finance Director, a Group Financial Controller or an FP&A leader. Senior finance hiring in Sydney right now is competitive on both sides, strong candidates have options and are often being courted by more than one business at a time, and businesses that run a slow or generic process lose them to whoever moves faster and communicates better.
Below is what the roles actually cover, what the market looks like right now, what good hiring managers do differently, and a short checklist to run before you start.
Senior finance recruitment spans more than the CFO seat.
Each has its own market, salary band, and candidate pool, and treating them as interchangeable in a search brief is one of the more common reasons a senior finance search underperforms. If you are unsure which of these you actually need at CFO level, Doc breaks that down in more depth.
Senior finance talent in Sydney is in genuine demand, and it has been for some time. Strong CFOs, Finance Directors and FP&A leaders are rarely sitting on the market for long, and the exceptional ones are often being approached by more than one business at once. That has pushed salaries up across most bands, and it means a slow internal approval process or a vague job brief costs businesses real candidates, not just time.
The practical effect for hiring managers: you need to move with intent once you find a strong candidate, have your budget genuinely approved before you start interviewing, and be ready to sell the role and the business as much as you are assessing the candidate.
None of this is complicated, but it is where most searches quietly go wrong. One delayed interview or one vague answer about the role's actual scope is often enough for a strong candidate to lose interest.
Internal talent acquisition teams are well placed to run high-volume or lower-seniority finance hiring, where the process is more standardised, and the candidate pool is wider. For senior finance roles, particularly CFO and Finance Director level, a specialist recruiter typically has a real advantage, existing relationships with passive candidates, current market intelligence on salary and package, and the ability to represent the opportunity to people who are not actively job hunting.
A generalist recruitment agency sits in between, useful for mid-level finance hiring, less reliably strong at the top of the market where the candidate pool is smaller and more relationship dependent.
Running through this list before the brief goes out catches most of the problems that otherwise surface halfway through a search.
How long does a senior finance search take in Sydney right now?
Most genuine CFO or Finance Director searches run 8-16 weeks from brief to start date, longer if the successful candidate is serving a notice period. See Doc for the full stage by stage breakdown.
Is the market currently candidate short at senior finance level?
Strong candidates at CFO, Finance Director and senior FP&A level are consistently in demand, and the best ones typically have more than one option. That does not mean every search is difficult, but it does mean generic, slow processes lose good people.
Should smaller businesses expect to compete on salary with larger ones?
Not always. A well-run smaller business can attract strong senior finance talent with genuine autonomy, interesting scope and a faster path to broader responsibility, but the salary conversation still needs to be realistic for the level.
What is the biggest single thing hiring managers get wrong? Moving too slowly once they have found someone strong, and assuming a good candidate will simply wait through a drawn-out internal process.
We are a Sydney-based senior finance recruitment firm, working across CFO, Finance Director, Group Financial Controller and FP&A searches for ASX-listed, PE-backed and high-growth businesses. We have spent over 20 years placing senior finance leaders across Australia, and we built this guide because too many hiring managers are handed generic advice that does not reflect how the senior end of this market actually works.
If you are planning a senior finance search, or one is not going the way you expected, get in touch with one of our directors, Richard Holmes on 0403 513 720 or Mitchell Parsons on 0413 830 776. We are happy to talk through a brief even before you have decided how you want to run the search.
