If you’re building out your FP&A team and can’t find talent with direct FP&A experience, which finance function would you evaluate first for potential hires?
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Some of my best non-traditional hires in FP&A were operations analysts. I'd look for the people helping supply chain planning in manufacturing and logistics. I've found strong analytical skills with the skills to tightly tie models to the real world.
In my experience, accounting can be a good pipeline but I find sometimes accountants struggle to deal with imperfect information and ambiguity.
If I can’t find talent with direct FP&A experience, I’m looking for someone with accounting experience, or with experience in any kind of non-financial modeling. Looking for folks with degrees/academic backgrounds in economics, math/stats, public policy, business, accounting – or something related.
Assuming I have accounting/financial statement reporting and we are looking for more strategic level FP&A, I'm looking at my client facing finance teams who will have insights on the KPIs we should be tracking for better decision making. Will also look to our IT team for people with skills in pulling data from multiple internal systems (e.g., ERP, Salesforce, etc.) as that team would be the keeper of a dash-boarding platform (e.g., PowerBI, Tableau).
Accounting or possibly Treasury?
If I can’t find talent with direct FP&A experience, I’m looking for someone with accounting experience, or with experience in any kind of non-financial modeling. Looking for folks with degrees/academic backgrounds in economics, math/stats, public policy, business, accounting – or something related.