Finance Managers play a critical role in a company’s financial performance. They are generally responsible for planning, organizing, and managing financial operations and processes across finance and accounting departments. They do so by developing strategies and reporting systems, managing performance of relevant teams/departments, and organizing financial audits or analyses as necessary. Finance Managers also provide advice and guidance to senior management on ways to improve profitability and/or identify business opportunities for expansions, mergers, and acquisitions for long-term business success.
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Critical Thinking
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Financial Reporting
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Forecasting
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Budgeting
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Team Management
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Organizational Influence
Effective Finance Manager interviews
While it might seem difficult to figure out whether a candidate will succeed as a Finance Manager in your company, a well-developed set of interview questions that tap into the core skills required to perform in a Finance Manager role will go a long way in helping you decide.
But where do you start? How do you develop a set of great interview questions?
The best interview questions come directly from a job analysis. A job analysis is an evidence-based method that focuses on assessing key features of a particular role. These features describe both the job itself (i.e., tasks, responsibilities, and performance objectives), and the characteristics required of someone to perform successfully in the job (e.g., knowledge, skills, and abilities). A job analysis forms the basis of many HR practices such as compensation, performance management, and - you guessed it - how to interview and hire candidates.
At Hireguide, we’ve done the job analysis work for you. We’ve used the method to identify a core set of skills associated with the Finance Manager role, and we’ve developed and validated a list of behavioral and situational questions with answer guides that tap directly into those core skills. And that’s not all. We’ve compiled these questions and created a Finance Manager Interview Template for you that integrates other interviewing best practices. Skills-based interviews will not only help you make higher quality and evidence-based hiring decisions, but research also shows they enhance fairness and reduce bias in your hiring process.
Example interview questions to ask
Question 1
If senior leadership asked you to help them understand whether their business was financially solvent, what information would you need, and how would you calculate how much financial runway they have?
Answer Tips
- Understands the relationship between financial reporting and financial solvency
- Highlights specific indicators that could help reflect financial solvency
- Discusses assumptions and other factors that could impact financial solvency
- Considers how the result will affect day-to-day business operations
Question 2
Improving a budget plan is essential for grasping opportunities in a volatile economic environment. Considering that pretext, what approach and practices would you employ to run a more flexible budgeting plan?
Answer Tips
- Acknowledges challenges of budgeting in volatile financial periods
- Understands interdependencies between moving parts (e.g. revenue/cost forecast)
- Highlights ideas to create more flexibility ahead of an uncertain year
- Discusses early warning signals to recognize when the business veers off budget
- Discusses the importance of tracking information for budgeted versus actual KPIs
