How a retained finance executive search actually runs

Why the search looks nothing like a job ad

The senior finance market is smaller than it looks, and the good people in it are settled. Nationally there are only a few hundred people who have built and scaled a finance function from scratch in an Australian startup and would happily do it again, and the best of them are not browsing job boards. They get approached directly, through networks and people who know the market. Most of the strongest placements in executive finance come out of the passive or dormant candidate market, not active applicants.^[1] So if you post the role and wait, you are fishing in the shallow end while the people you want stay invisible.

There is also a shift in candidate behaviour that makes the advert even weaker. Finance leaders no longer jump at the first approach. Eight in ten now pause to reassess before making a move rather than reacting to a call, so landing them is about relationship and timing, not a well-written ad.^[2] A mapped search is built for exactly that: reaching people who are not looking, at the moment they are open to the right thing.

What "retained and mapped" actually means

Retained means you engage the search properly rather than paying only on placement, which buys you a mapped market instead of whoever happens to reply. Depending on the role, a proper market map covers roughly 50 to 200 relevant candidates, from which a shortlist of four to six is met, assessed and presented.^[3] The value is not the shortlist alone, it is knowing you saw the market, so you are choosing from the field rather than settling for the responders.

The reach behind the map matters more than any process diagram. A search is only as good as the network it draws on. In finance specifically, a personal network of 28,000-plus accounting and finance professionals across Australia, generating over two million views a year, is what turns a role brief into a warm, mapped shortlist rather than a cold outreach campaign.^[4] That reach is the difference between knowing the market and searching it from scratch each time.

The benchmarks to hold a search to

A good search is measurable, and you should ask for the numbers before you sign. On the finance searches I run, the shortlist lands in about five working days from the brief meeting, and the average from brief to a signed contract is around fifteen working days.^[5] When the reach and trust are already there, it moves fast: I once posted a CFO role at 1pm on a Friday and had a shortlist of five immediately available, top-tier candidates met and sent within six business hours by Monday morning.^[6] That does not come from a job board. It comes from a network that already knows who is open.

Speed is only half of it. The number that actually tells you a search worked is retention: the placements I make hold at an 85% two-year retention rate, which is the real test of whether the match was right rather than just fast.^[7] A cheap, quick hire that leaves in a year means running the search twice and paying for it twice. For a full CFO search run properly, a realistic timeline from first conversation to an accepted offer is ten to fourteen weeks, and that is the honest number to plan against.^[8]

What to ask before you brief a search

The brief is where searches are won or lost, so treat the first meeting as the assessment. Ask what the market map will actually cover, how many candidates they expect to reach, and what their reach is in your specific segment, because generalist executive search and finance-native search are not the same thing. Ask for the benchmarks above in writing: time to shortlist, time to signed, and two-year retention. If a firm cannot give you those numbers, they are not measuring their own work.

Ask how the fee is structured too, because a good search partner will work with your reality. Fee timing can be spaced to match funding, with options like deferred payments in line with a raise, staggered fees tied to onboarding milestones, or fixed pricing for budget certainty.^[9] The point is that the structure should flex to your cash position, not force you to hire on someone else's payment schedule.

Before you brief, it helps to know the market range for the role. I set out the 2026 salary bands by role and stage here.

Retained versus contingent, honestly

Contingent recruitment, where you pay only on placement, is fine for roles with deep active markets. Senior finance is not that market. When the people you want are passive and the cost of the wrong hire is a year of runway, paying to have the market properly mapped is the cheaper option, not the expensive one. It is why the sector is moving this way: the direction of travel is towards retained search becoming the default engagement model for senior finance roles rather than the exception.^[10] For a first CFO or a first finance hire, where you cannot afford to run the search twice, retained is almost always the right call.

Common questions