Last updated: September 27, 2026
By Devin Hornick, Co-Founder and Partner, KORE1
A CFO job description should name the decisions the CFO owns, what reports to them, who they answer to (the board, an audit committee, a lender, a sponsor), and the whole pay structure, bonus and equity included. Most CFO postings describe a controller’s job under a bigger title. Controllers apply. The CFOs you wanted keep scrolling.
Eleven of fourteen.
That was the count on a CFO posting a founder-owned building products distributor in Spokane sent us last spring. Fourteen bullets under “Responsibilities,” and eleven of them described work their controller was already doing, competently, every month. Oversee accounts payable and receivable. Prepare monthly financial statements. Maintain internal controls. Coordinate the annual audit. The posting had been up for five weeks and pulled in a little over two hundred applicants. Senior accountants, mostly. A handful of controllers who wanted the title bump. Not one person who had ever sat in a CFO chair. Zero.
The owner’s read was that CFOs are scarce. They are, a bit. But the posting was also telling every experienced CFO who glanced at it that the company didn’t know what it wanted from one. Good ones notice that fast. They’ve been hired into the wrong version of this job before, or watched a friend get hired into it, and they read a posting the way an auditor reads a footnote.
Full disclosure before going further. KORE1 is paid by the employer when a finance leader we introduced gets hired, so I have a stake in this. Nothing below requires hiring us, though. Plenty of CEOs fix their own postings with it. When they would rather hand the whole thing off, our CFO staffing and search team starts every engagement with this same rewrite, and the broader accounting and finance staffing desk handles the controller and FP&A seats that end up reporting to whoever gets hired.
What a CFO Job Description Is Actually For
A CFO job description is the written mandate for a company’s top finance executive, covering the decisions the role owns, the functions reporting into it, the governance it answers to, and the full pay structure. For an executive seat, it’s less a recruiting ad than the agreement the CEO and board settle before anyone is approached.
That second sentence is the part people skip. Many CFO searches never get posted publicly at all, and the ones that do rarely find a sitting CFO through the job board. It happens. Not often. Sitting CFOs don’t apply to things. They get called. So who reads the document?
Three audiences, roughly. The CEO and the board read it first, and if they read it and disagree about what the job is, better to find out now than in round three. The candidate reads it second, usually after a recruiter’s first call. Hard. They’re doing diligence on whether the mandate is real. The applicant pool reads it last, and that pool is where the controller-heavy bullets do their damage, because it fills up with exactly the people those bullets describe.
Write it for the second reader. The other two take care of themselves.
Run the Controller Test on Every Bullet
Here is the check we run before anything else. Go down the responsibilities list and strike every bullet your controller, your AP manager, or your FP&A lead already owns or should own. Whatever survives is the CFO job. If almost nothing survives, you may be hiring a controller, and controller staffing is a faster, cheaper search with a much deeper bench. No shame in it. A fair number of the CFO conversations we have end right there.
When plenty survives, rewrite the survivors so they describe a decision rather than an activity. Six of the most common offenders below, with the version we would put in their place.
| Bullet in most CFO postings | Who usually owns it | What the CFO version says |
|---|---|---|
| Oversee accounts payable, receivable, and payroll | Controller, AP and payroll leads | Set the working capital targets (collection days, payment terms, inventory turns) and hold the controller to them |
| Prepare monthly financial statements | Controller | Present the monthly package to the CEO and board and explain the variances before anyone asks about them |
| Manage the annual budget process | FP&A manager | Build the operating plan with the CEO, defend it to the board or sponsor, and say which spending gets cut first if revenue misses |
| Ensure compliance with GAAP | Controller or chief accounting officer | Own the relationship with the audit firm and the audit committee, including the disagreements |
| Maintain banking relationships | Controller or treasury analyst | Negotiate the next credit facility and keep the company inside its covenants between now and then |
| Support M&A activity as needed | Nobody, which is the problem | Run diligence, the purchase agreement’s financial terms, and integration for the two or three acquisitions planned in the next 24 months |
Look at the right-hand column again. It names a counterparty (the board, the auditor, the bank) and it names a consequence. A CFO reading it can picture the job, and can also picture the meeting where it goes wrong, which is honestly the thing they are looking for.
The Spokane rewrite came out to seven bullets. Shorter than the original. The replacement posting drew fewer applicants and better ones, and the finalist they hired had been the number two finance person at a much larger distributor in Portland and wanted the top job somewhere smaller. She told us later the old posting would have made her pass. “It read like they wanted someone to close the books faster.”
Say What Reports to the CFO
This is the line that surprises new CFOs most often, and it’s the one postings leave out most often too.
At a public company or a large private one, the CFO runs finance and accounting, maybe treasury and tax and investor relations, and that’s the job. Below roughly $200 million in revenue the chart gets strange. IT reports to the CFO at a lot of mid-market companies because nobody else was going to take it. So does HR, sometimes. Legal, insurance, facilities, the company’s one procurement person, the ERP project that has been “about to go live” since the spring before last. I’ve seen a CFO job at a 180-person manufacturer that had nine direct reports, and three of them had nothing to do with money.
Fine, honestly. Many finance leaders want the bigger remit. But a candidate who learns in week two that the stalled Microsoft Dynamics 365 migration is now theirs, along with the two contractors running it, is going to wonder what else the posting didn’t say. We placed a CFO at a software company in Boise a couple of years ago who learned about the IT reporting line from the outgoing controller over lunch on her third day. She stayed, and did well. She also mentioned it every time we talked for the next year.
So spell out both directions of the reporting line. Down, list every function and headcount that rolls up. Up, say who the CFO reports to and whether there is a second line. For a PE-backed company that usually means the operating partner at the sponsor, who in practice often matters more than the CEO does. For a company with an audit committee, say the CFO meets with it and how often. For a company with a single lender and a heavy covenant package, say so, because an experienced CFO is going to ask to see the credit agreement before the second interview anyway.
The Public-Company Seat Comes With a Certification
If the company is public, or seriously planning to be, one duty belongs in the posting in plain words. Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act puts it on the principal financial officer personally. Every annual report. Every quarterly one. The CFO certifies that the report holds no untrue statement of a material fact, and that they evaluated the company’s internal controls in the 90 days before it went out. Their name goes on it. A CFO considering that seat has already thought about this more than anyone on your hiring panel has, and a posting that says “ensure accurate financial reporting” instead of naming the certification sounds like nobody in the building has been near one.
The other public-company detail is less obvious. It changes how you write the compensation section. Appoint a new principal financial officer and Item 5.02(c) of Form 8-K kicks in, so the appointment gets disclosed, generally within four business days. So does a brief description of any material plan, contract, or arrangement the company entered into with the new officer. The package goes public shortly after the hire regardless. Being cagey about it in the posting protects nothing.
Private company? Skip it. Pre-IPO, put it in as a forward-looking line (“will lead the company through its first SEC reporting cycle and certify its periodic reports”), since that is the part of the job the candidate is actually signing up for.
Pay Transparency Reaches the Executive Suite
Some CEOs assume state pay transparency laws are about hourly roles and entry-level salaried jobs. They aren’t. None of the four statutes below carves out executives, and two of them ask for more than a salary range.
| State | Who is covered | What the posting must show | Bonus and equity? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Colorado | Employers with one or more employees in Colorado | Pay rate or range, a general description of benefits and other compensation, and how and when to apply | Yes, described in general terms |
| Washington | Employers with 15 or more employees | Salary range or wage scale, with a general description of all benefits and other compensation | Yes, described in general terms |
| California | Employers with 15 or more employees | Pay scale, meaning the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay | Not required by the statute’s definition |
| New York | Employers with four or more employees | Minimum and maximum annual salary or hourly rate, and whether the job is commission-based | Not required |
For most roles the “other compensation” wording is a footnote. For a CFO it can be most of the money. Our CFO salary guide has private and mid-market CFO base pay running from $250,000 to $450,000 this year, and the total climbing to somewhere between $400,000 and $900,000 when the bonus and equity get added in. Post only the base in Colorado or Washington and you’ve arguably described less than half the package, which is both a compliance question and a bad pitch.
Colorado’s own numbers show how fast the norm moved. The state’s labor department reports that under 25% of Colorado job postings disclosed pay in late 2020 and over 80% did by late 2023. Candidates in every state now expect the number. A CFO who sees “competitive compensation” doesn’t think you’re being discreet. They think you haven’t decided.
Back to Spokane for a second. Their first draft of the rewrite listed base only, and their employment lawyer flagged it before it went up. The fixed version said, in one sentence, that the role carried an annual cash bonus targeted as a percentage of base and a profits interest in the parent LLC vesting over four years. General terms, no dollar value on the equity, which is all the Washington wording asks for. It took ten minutes to write. Maybe less.
Not legal advice, obviously. Several more states and a handful of cities have their own versions, the details change, and remote postings can pull in states you didn’t expect. Run the final posting past employment counsel.
CPA Preferred Is Usually the Right Call
“CPA required” on a CFO posting cuts the pool more than most CEOs realize. Some of the best CFOs I know never sat for the exam. Not one section of it. They came up through FP&A, or corporate development, or a bank’s acquisition finance desk, or ran finance for a plant before anyone let them near a board. A PE-backed company that mostly needs someone to handle the capital structure and the exit learns close to nothing from the license.
So when should you require it? Heavy technical accounting plus SEC reporting, with no strong chief accounting officer underneath. That’s about it. Everywhere else, write “CPA preferred” and let the rest of the posting filter.
Same logic applies to industry experience. Say which industry knowledge actually matters (revenue recognition on multi-year software contracts, say, or inventory costing across three plants) rather than demanding ten years in your exact sector. The CFO hiring guide goes deeper on scoping the mandate itself, and it’s worth reading before you fill in the template below.
CFO Job Description Template
Fill in the square brackets. The parenthetical notes are for you, so delete them before the posting goes live. If your CEO and board can’t agree on how to fill a blank, that disagreement is the most useful thing this template will surface. Settle it first. Hiring a data chief in the same cycle? Our Chief Data Officer posting template follows the same structure.
Job Title
[Chief Financial Officer / Chief Financial Officer and Head of Operations / CFO, (division name)] (Use the real title. If the seat is truly a vice president of finance with a CFO title bolted on, sitting CFOs will spot it, and a VP of Finance search may be the more honest one.)
About the Company
[Company] is a [founder-owned / PE-backed / venture-backed / publicly traded] [industry] company with about $[revenue] in annual revenue and [N] employees, headquartered in [city]. [One sentence on what changed and why this seat is open now: a sponsor acquisition, a refinancing, an acquisition program, a planned sale, a retirement.]
Reporting Line
- Reports to [the CEO], with [regular sessions with the audit committee / a standing line to the operating partner at (sponsor) / quarterly board presentations]
- Works directly with [our senior lender, (bank name) / outside auditors (firm) / our tax advisors]
What Reports to You
- Controller and accounting team of [N], including [AP, AR, payroll]
- [FP&A manager and analyst / no FP&A function yet, and building one is part of the job]
- [IT, (headcount) / HR, (headcount) / legal and insurance / facilities / none of these] (List every non-finance function honestly. This line changes more candidates’ minds than any other.)
Decisions That Are Yours
- The operating plan and forecast, built with the CEO and presented to [the board / the sponsor]
- Capital structure and the [credit facility renewal due in (quarter, year) / next equity raise / dividend policy]
- Working capital targets and the cash forecast the company runs on
- Which systems finance runs on, including [NetSuite / Sage Intacct / Microsoft Dynamics 365 / SAP S/4HANA] and [the planning tool]
- Hiring and structure of the finance team
What the First Year Looks Like
- [A specific, dated outcome: close the (acquisition) and integrate its books by (month) / refinance the term loan before its (year) maturity / complete the first audit under (firm) / prepare for a sale process in (year)]
- [A second outcome, such as cutting the close from (N) business days to (N), or replacing spreadsheet forecasting with (tool)]
- [Public or pre-IPO only: certify the company’s periodic reports under Sarbanes-Oxley Section 302 and lead the internal control program]
What You Bring
- [N]+ years in finance leadership, including time as [CFO / the senior finance officer of a business or division] at a company of roughly [revenue range]
- Direct experience with [the specific event that defines this job: a sponsor exit, a lender workout, an acquisition program, an IPO readiness project]
- Comfort presenting to [a board / a PE sponsor / lenders] and defending a number in the room
- [Industry knowledge that actually matters, stated specifically, such as revenue recognition under ASC 606 for multi-year contracts]
Nice to Have
- CPA (Change to required only if the seat carries heavy technical accounting without a CAO below it.)
- [Experience with (ERP) implementations / multi-entity consolidation / international entities in (countries)]
Compensation and Location
Base salary of $[low] to $[high]. Annual bonus targeted at [N]% of base, tied to [EBITDA / revenue / company and individual goals]. [Equity: stock options / restricted stock units / a profits interest in (holding company) / phantom equity], vesting over [N] years, [with acceleration on a sale / no acceleration]. Benefits include [health, dental, and vision / 401(k) with (N)% match / (N) days of paid time off]. Based [on site in (city) / hybrid from our (city) office, (N) days in person / remote within (states)]. (Colorado and Washington require the bonus and equity description, not just the base range. Put it in regardless of where you post. Senior candidates read a missing equity line as a small or unsettled one.)
What CEOs Ask Us Before the CFO Posting Goes Up
How long should a CFO job description actually run?
Roughly 700 to 1,000 words is plenty for a CFO job description, which is enough to cover the mandate, the reporting line, the first-year outcomes, and the full pay structure without padding.
Length isn’t really the issue. Generic length is. A tight posting where every line is specific to your company beats a long one full of duties any CFO in America could have written.
CFO or VP of Finance, which title should we post?
Post “CFO” only if the person will own capital structure, lender and board relationships, and the operating plan, and will report to the CEO rather than to another finance executive.
If the job is mostly running accounting and FP&A for a founder who still makes the money decisions, it’s a VP of Finance seat, and posting it as CFO attracts people who will leave once they figure that out. Usually around month eight.
Do we legally have to put a salary range on a CFO posting?
In Colorado, Washington, California, and New York, generally yes, and executive seats get no special exemption, though the employer-size thresholds and required details differ by state.
Colorado and Washington also want a general description of bonus and other compensation, which for a CFO covers a lot of the package. Several other states and cities have similar rules, and remote postings complicate things further. Employment counsel should look at the final version.
Our equity grant is small. Should the posting mention it at all?
Mention it, because a missing equity line reads to senior finance candidates as either no equity or an undecided plan, and in Colorado and Washington a general description is required anyway.
Skip the percentage. “Stock options vesting over four years” is a complete sentence. Candidates will ask for the fully diluted number later, and that conversation goes better when the posting didn’t dodge the topic.
What range should actually go on the posting?
Base pay of $250,000 to $450,000 fits most private and mid-market CFO seats in 2026, per KORE1’s CFO salary guide, and bonus plus equity usually lifts the total to between $400,000 and $900,000.
Your own range should be narrower than that and tied to revenue, ownership, and complexity. Check your number against the salary benchmark assistant before it goes to the board. And ignore the federal figure people sometimes pull. BLS data shows a $166,570 median for all financial managers in May 2025, but that bucket is full of controllers and treasurers, which is why it sits so far under CFO pay.
Who should write the first draft, the CEO or HR?
The CEO, because only the CEO can say which decisions the CFO will actually own, while HR shapes the format, the compliance language, and the benefits section afterward.
HR-first drafts are where the controller bullets come from. Not HR’s fault. They start from the last finance posting on file, and the last finance posting on file was usually for a controller.
Strike the Controller Bullets, Then Post
If you only do one thing from this piece, do the strike-through. Print the posting. Cross out every line your controller already owns. Look at what’s left. That remainder is what a CFO is weighing when they decide whether to take your call.
We’ve been recruiting finance leaders since 2005. Ninety-two percent of the people we place clear their first anniversary with the company that hired them. A lot of that comes from this unglamorous step at the start, getting the mandate onto paper before a single candidate hears about the role. When you’re ready, our CFO recruiters can run the search as a direct hire placement, or cover the gap with an interim CFO if the chair is already empty. Once finalists are in the room, the CFO interview questions post picks up where this one ends. Or talk to a recruiter and send over the draft. We’ll run the controller test on it for free.
