What to look for when hiring your next "expert"​ financial modeller. Are they the full stack?

Background

Is your hiring methodology keeping pace with the current demands in financial modelling skills?

What about influencing, communication, visualisation design and other "non technical" but creative free thinking skills.

How do you hire or even identify an expert?

Is asking them about their advanced Excel skills good enough?

How do you check the validity of their claims during or before an interview? 

Do you have a quick/digital assessment process? 

 One of the evolving trends in finance and accounting today is the need for finance transformation (people first digital later).

What exactly is finance transformation if you don't honestly transform all aspects of the finance team, including how you hire talent?

This is not just about technology but also the mindset.

What about the skills of the people that you bring into your organisation? 

Are you hiring for growth mindset and self awareness or simply adding to the pile of fixed minds.

So what do you do?

You are probably now wondering how to solve some of those questions above. 

You need to make sure that the right people with the right skills are hired.

But what are the right skills?

Firstly and most importantly is the way in which candidates communicate and explain themselves. 

You might want to consider the following questions:

• How well can they articulate complex problems simply, get them to explain one?

• Can they really decipher complexity and convert it into simple solutions?

• Do they know what is the difference between analytics and financial modelling?

• What does value mean in the context of accounting and finance to them? Hopefully they don't say producing a great report that is useful.

• How do they increase the value of a company?

• What might be the drivers of your company (where they are applying) in terms of how it might drive value for shareholders?

• Have they ever built a driver based rolling 3-way financial model and changed these drivers in a dynamic conversation with someone using just Excel?

• Can they build a sensitivity, scenario or simulation manager in Excel?

• Have they ever used PowerBI, PowerPivot and PowerQuery?

• What about beyond Excel and outside tools and coding languages do they know?

• What's the most complex problem they have faced and explain the problem and how they solved it?

All of these questions are trying to get them not to talk about Finance problems but real business problems and helping them to make better decisions. 

Start by putting them into deeper water on those business problems and ask how they solve them simply.

But all of this is a little useless if you don't know how to communicate and influence with the right mindset and self awareness.

Where can you find out more? 

If you want to know more about a talented full stack modeller (soft.skills and mindset) then come along and take a look at FSM.

If you are wanting to convert your current staff to high quality talent then perhaps direct them to FSM.

If you are in the market and want to get hired, perhaps you have struggled of late, perhaps this is a great way to differentiate yourself from others who are just good at Excel.

Being just good at Excel is simply not enough.