Picture a typical VP Finance job posting. Strong communicator. Strategic partner to the CEO. Experience with forecasting, reporting and building a team. It goes up on LinkedIn, the applications come in, and someone screens them.
That process will produce a hire. It will rarely produce the best one.
The finance leader who would actually drive performance in that seat never saw the posting. They are running a finance function somewhere else, doing it well, and not reading job boards. Nothing about a posting is built to reach them.
Internal recruiting was built for inbound
This isn't a knock on internal talent teams. They are good at what they were built to do: manage job boards, run the applicant tracking system, work referrals and move a high volume of inbound candidates through a process.
That is inbound recruiting. It works well when the right person is already looking.
At the VP Finance and CFO level, the right person usually isn't. The leaders you most want to hire are employed, respected and busy. They are not refreshing a careers page. If they move, it will be because someone they trust brought them an opportunity worth a real conversation.
Reaching those people is a different discipline. It runs on timing, credibility, and the ability to start an actual conversation with someone who has every reason to ignore you. It takes months to build and seconds to lose.
The bulk-message problem
The common answer to passive candidates is volume. Send a lot of InMails. Send a lot of emails. Use a template, swap in a first name, and hope something lands.
Think about it from the other side. A strong CFO or VP Finance is exactly the person who gets those messages constantly. Each one looks like the last. Most of them get skimmed and deleted, and the good opportunities get deleted right along with the generic ones.
The message isn't the problem. The channel is. When everyone reaches out the same way, nobody stands out, and the person you most want to talk to has learned to tune all of it out.
We build a list, then we pick up the phone
Every search we run starts with a targeted list. We don't start from who happens to be on the market or who responded to an ad. We start from the role: the industry, the size and stage of the business, the ownership structure, the kind of problems this finance leader will need to solve. Then we identify the people who have actually done that work.
Then we call them.
Our first outreach is a phone call, not a message. The phone has become a lost art in recruiting, and that is exactly why it works. Top finance leaders get plenty of InMails and emails and very few calls. A call from someone who understands the role and has done the homework is a different experience. It is a conversation, not a notification.
A call also lets us do what a message can't. We can hear how someone thinks about their current role, what would make a move worth it, and what wouldn't. We can answer real questions in real time. And when the timing isn't right, we can say so honestly and stay in touch, which matters when the right moment comes a year later.
Who the phone call finds
Across hundreds of searches, the phone call has found our best candidates. They are the ones who weren't looking. They weren't applying to jobs, weren't browsing LinkedIn and weren't talking to several recruiters at once.
Those are often the people who end up in the final round, and they are the people a job posting would never have reached. When a hiring team meets a candidate who was happily employed until a phone call made them curious, the conversation is different. They are evaluating the opportunity as carefully as you are evaluating them, and that is a good sign.
Then they see the role for themselves
A phone call opens the door. The next step has to keep the conversation going.
That is where the Position Package comes in. Before the first interview, candidates can see the hiring manager and the role on video. They hear directly from the person they would work with about the business, the priorities and what the job really looks like.
For a passive candidate, that matters. They are being asked to consider leaving a role where they are doing well. Seeing and hearing the hiring manager makes the opportunity concrete and lets them decide with real information instead of a list of bullet points. When they show up to that first interview, they already know why they are there.
The question to ask
If a senior finance seat is open or about to be, it is worth asking your internal team one simple question:
Who can we actually reach?
The answer usually explains the hire.