Finance teams should be ideally equipped to shoulder this increasingly important area, giving them relevance in today’s business environment that complements traditional finance activities of profit and loss (P&L) reporting, budgeting, forecasting and controls.
The finance organization that I lead at Gartner Inc. has centered on four broad characteristics or traits to help define and describe what we are looking for in new hires. We also use this when discussing development opportunities for our current team. These characteristics can be flexed up or down depending on the level of the role.
By no means are these the only traits to be looking for in potential candidates; but we have found them to provide an effective framework as we assess both internal and external talent.
Business Orientation: Ultimately, we are looking for business people who happen to have a strong functional expertise in finance or analytics. The ability to understand business is critical. You can generally test for this knowledge in the interview process by asking fairly simple questions about the businesses that the candidates have supported. If they can articulate the key levers or talk in depth about real business issues, you can probably get comfortable about their business orientation.
You would hope for people to be able to identify the “killer” metrics that drive performance or the key inputs into their business models. But ultimately, you want to be able to ensure that your team can view what is happening through both analytical and business lenses.
Intellectual Curiosity: Our most successful analysts (at all levels) have an appetite to dig further within the data to get to the right answers. They will generally not accept the first easy conclusion but will desire to go deeper and deeper analytically until they are satisfied with the conclusions or outputs from their analysis. This can manifest itself in the analytics as well as a desire to learn more about the business.
Our best analysts learn our product portfolio, go on sales calls, listen in on service calls and work at our events; they find ways to learn more about the business because they know they will be better at supporting the business armed with this knowledge. Candidates can be quizzed on analytical efforts they have been involved with.
Data Savvy: Most finance professionals are comfortable in spreadsheets. To be “data savvy,” candidates need to be much more. They need to be comfortable dealing with massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. They need to organize that data and then analyze it. They need to have complex modeling skills. They need to be able to structure problems so they yield the appropriate analytics. Ideally, they have also worked with other business intelligence tools beyond spreadsheets.
You might consider giving them a case study with a large data set and instructions and see how they handle the assignment.
Alternatively, you can question candidates on the analytical projects they have worked on to gain insight into the approaches, methods and practices they used with large sets of data.
Data Articulate: Lots of people in finance are strong with data. Finding those who are both strong with the data and capable of articulating and then presenting clearly what the data says is much harder. We have found that this skill is truly the one that separates good analytical minds from the great ones in finance.
We have described “data articulate” as being extremely comfortable in dealing with large amounts of data and then having the additional skill of being able to quickly emerge from the data to articulate findings, trends or even further required analytics at an executive level. This is another area where case studies can help to identify this skill in potential candidates.
Your finance team is evolving and becoming more analytical. The business you support requires greater analytics. Utilizing this framework may help you to identify and retain the caliber of financial talent you will need for the future. It has definitely helped our recruiting and talent development efforts as we have continuously and consistently upgraded our analytical capabilities.
Craig W. Safian ([email protected]) is group vice president, Global Finance, Strategy & Corporate Development, for Gartner. He is an FEI member who serves on the Committee on Finance and Technology (CFIT). Safain was recently named as the new CFO at Gartner.
This article first appeared in the July 2013 issue of Financial Executive magazine.