Why hiring faster is quietly damaging your finance team
Speed has become a badge of honour in recruitment
Shortlists in days.
Interviews in a week.
Offers by Friday.
In some parts of a business that makes sense. In finance, it is often doing more harm than good.
Finance roles are rarely simple. They sit across risk, decision making, compliance, strategy and performance. The wrong hire does not just slow things down, it distorts how decisions get made across the entire business.
Yet many companies are now treating finance hiring like a race.
The pressure to move quickly
Most rushed finance hires do not come from carelessness. They come from pressure.
A project needs resource.
The team is overstretched.
Someone has left unexpectedly.
The business is growing faster than anticipated.
So the instruction becomes: get someone in, quickly.
The problem is that hiring quickly and hiring well are not the same thing.
What rushed finance hiring actually produces
When businesses rush finance hiring, a few predictable things happen.
They default to what feels safe.
Familiar CVs. Familiar backgrounds. Similar profiles to what they have hired before.
They prioritise availability over suitability.
Who can start soon rather than who will truly add value.
They assess experience more than thinking.
Where someone has been rather than how they approach problems.
The result is rarely a disaster hire. It is something worse.
It is a hire that is fine.
And in finance, fine is expensive.
Why this matters more now than ever
As automation and AI reshape finance, the nature of finance roles is changing.
Less time spent on processing.
More time spent interpreting.
Challenging.
Influencing.
Deciding.
These are not skills you can reliably assess in a rushed process.
You cannot properly evaluate judgement, influence or commercial instinct in two interviews and a reference check.
Yet that is exactly what many businesses are trying to do.
The hidden cost of “good enough”
A “good enough” finance hire does not usually fail loudly.
They do their job.
They keep things running.
They do not cause problems.
But they rarely:
- Improve decision making
- Challenge weak thinking
- Elevate the function
- Push the business forward
And over time, that is far more damaging than a visible failure.
Because the business never quite gets what it could from finance.
What strong finance leaders do differently
The best finance leaders I work with are not slow, but they are deliberate.
They spend more time upfront defining what success in the role actually looks like. Not just what the person will do, but what they need to change or improve.
They are clear about the problems this hire must solve, not just the tasks they must perform.
They test how people think, not just what they know.
And they accept that taking slightly longer now saves a lot of time later.
A better question to ask
Instead of asking:
How quickly can we fill this role?
The better question is:
Who will this person become inside our business?
Because in finance, the cost of getting it wrong rarely shows up immediately.
It shows up in slower decisions, weaker challenge, missed opportunities and frustrated stakeholders.
Hiring faster might look efficient on paper.
In reality, it often builds finance teams that move slower where it really matters.
