I spend a lot of my week talking to CFOs, Financial Controllers, Finance Managers and FP&A leaders.
Some are hiring. Some are looking for their next role. Some are wondering whether they even want another full-time executive position. And lately, the conversations have moved well beyond jobs, salaries and career progression. We are talking about much bigger things.
The economy. Debt. AI. The next generation of accountants. And what happens when you have spent 25 or 30 years building a CFO career but don't want to retire.
Why is it so hard to land a senior finance role right now?
This comes up constantly. We are speaking to incredibly experienced finance leaders who tell us they have never found it this difficult to secure their next role. And there is some broader context around that.
When a senior finance opportunity does come up, the competition can be enormous. Senior finance roles now attract more applications than any other finance role we recruit for. And when employers have plenty of choice, the brief can become incredibly specific.
It is no longer enough to be a very good CFO or Financial Controller. They want the industry experience. The right systems. Similar company size. The right ownership structure. Transformation experience. Commercial capability. Board exposure.
We have spoken to some exceptional people who have found themselves on the market far longer than they ever expected. And that can be confronting when you have spent 20 or 30 years building a successful career. If you are currently navigating a senior finance search, our team works with CFOs and Financial Controllers across Western Sydney and can help.
There is a nervousness underneath these conversations
Finance people spend their careers looking around corners. So it is no surprise that a lot of conversations are about the economy, debt, inflation, interest rates and how much risk is sitting in the system, both here and globally.
Deloitte's latest Australian CFO Sentiment Report found net optimism about the Australian economy had fallen to a record low of -36% within its survey, while its measure of uncertainty had risen to 93%.
Only 26% of respondents thought it was a good time to take greater risk onto their balance sheets. Cost control was the most commonly cited response to uncertainty, nominated by 56% of CFOs.
Interestingly, CFOs were considerably more positive about their own organisations, with net optimism sitting at 50%. This isn't necessarily doom and gloom. It is caution. Watching costs, protecting cash, thinking harder about investment, and asking whether that vacant position needs replacing.
Then there is the fractional CFO
Some businesses still need CFO-level capability. They just don't necessarily need it five days a week. They want to bring someone in, get something moving, solve a problem, build the framework, help with a transaction or systems implementation, and then dial that cost back again.
In other words, they want to be able to turn senior capability on and off relatively quickly. We are hearing more of this from businesses. But we are also hearing it from CFOs, because for some experienced finance leaders, the model is equally attractive. They still want interesting work. They just don't necessarily want another big five-day-a-week corporate role.
"I am not ready to retire. I just don't want to do this anymore."
These are people with decades of commercial experience who aren't remotely ready to stop contributing. So what else might be possible? There is an extraordinary amount of knowledge sitting with this generation of finance leaders, and surely there is a very big space between another full-time CFO role and never opening Excel again.
But where is the next generation of accountants coming from?
This is probably the conversation that interests us most. Because some very recent research suggests we should be paying close attention to it.
Independent research by Oxford Economics Australia, commissioned by Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, projects that Australia could face a shortfall of 17,900 accounting, audit and finance professionals by 2035.
At the same time, the accounting workforce is projected to grow by more than 20%, to around 378,000 people. So we are going to need more accounting capability, not less.
Yet at exactly the same time, we are talking constantly about AI and automation taking over more transactional and process-driven finance work. And that creates an interesting question. What happens when some of the jobs people traditionally learnt on start disappearing or changing?
A lot of today's CFOs and Financial Controllers didn't start their careers doing strategy, transformation and presenting to boards. They started much closer to the transactions. Accounts payable. Accounts receivable. Reconciliations. Month-end. They learnt what happens when a supplier isn't paid, when a customer doesn't pay you, when the numbers simply don't make sense and somebody has to work out why.
The contradiction worth thinking about
Deloitte's CFO research found around nine in ten finance functions are already using AI , with automated invoice processing among the leading use cases.
But while we spend so much time asking "what work can AI take away?" perhaps we also need to ask: "what did people learn from doing that work, and how are we going to teach it differently?"
We can teach accounting theory. We can teach people how to use technology. But how can you genuinely understand the numbers if you have never had to deal with the messy reality sitting underneath them?
And if we are simultaneously asking finance functions to do more with less, with leaner teams and fewer layers, who is going to train and mentor the people coming through? That, to us, is the bigger question.
And then the conversation gets personal
This one has surprised us. We have had senior finance leaders talk about their children and what careers they should be encouraging them towards. University? Finance? Technology? A trade? Something completely different?
These are people who have built careers around forecasting, assessing risk, interpreting numbers, and making decisions about what might happen next. Yet some are looking at the world their children are entering and saying: "I don't know what to tell them."
That says a lot about the uncertainty running through all of these conversations right now.
Maybe the traditional finance career is changing.
At the beginning of a career, we are questioning how people will learn. In the middle, we are asking finance teams to achieve more with less. At the senior end, businesses are reconsidering whether all that capability needs to sit permanently on the payroll.
People looking for senior roles are discovering just how exact the fit needs to be. And towards the end of a career, experienced CFOs are looking for ways to keep contributing without signing up for another five years of the same thing.
After more than 20 years recruiting senior finance professionals, we have learnt to pay attention when the same conversations start coming up again and again. Individually, they might not mean much. Collectively, they tell us something about where finance leaders' heads are at right now.
And perhaps that is the conversation worth having.
For finance professionals
Whether you are looking for your next senior role, exploring fractional work, or simply want an honest conversation about the market, our team is here.
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