Last updated: October 7, 2026
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1
A financial analyst job description should name the analyst profile, whose decisions the analysis feeds, whether the hire builds a model or maintains one, where the numbers live, and a base range, roughly $90,000 to $115,000 mid-level.
Almost no posting names even three of those. They list duties that describe all four analyst profiles at once, and the applicant pool arrives looking exactly like the posting. General.
I have spent most of fifteen years reading finance postings on our financial analyst staffing desk. The call usually comes in week five. The hiring manager has a stack of resumes, every one of them technically qualified, and not one of them right.
Here is the version of that call I think about most. A specialty food distributor outside Boise, Idaho. Around $140 million in revenue, 11 people in finance, and a VP who needed someone to own the monthly operating review for three business units. Her posting asked for “financial modeling, budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, and ad hoc reporting.” All five are real things the job involved.
It drew 96 applicants in six weeks. Forty had done bank credit analysis. A dozen came out of public accounting and wanted out. Nine were equity research associates. Every single one of them could build a model, and not one of them had ever sat across a table from a plant manager and defended a forecast they had built themselves against someone who knew the business better than they did.
That was the job. The posting never said so.
We changed one paragraph. It now said the analyst would present a three-business-unit forecast to the leadership team every month, own the variance commentary, and have read access to NetSuite plus their own queries against the warehouse. Over the next five weeks, thirty-one people applied. Three had done exactly that. The hire came from a regional beverage distributor at $108,000.
Fewer applicants. Better ones. The work never changed.
Four Analyst Profiles Wear the Same Title
Our desk fills four distinct financial analyst roles, and they are not interchangeable. FP&A analysts. Corporate finance analysts. BI and reporting analysts. Senior financial analysts. We staff all four from the same FP&A staffing desk. A posting that does not pick one gets applicants from all four, which sounds like a wide funnel and is actually a sorting problem you have moved onto yourself.
The useful question is not “what will this person do.” It is “what does this person produce every month, and who reads it.” Answer that one honestly and most of the posting writes itself, because the deliverable determines the tool list, the tool list determines the screening questions, and the audience determines how much of the job is standing up in a room defending a number somebody does not like.
| Profile | What They Produce | Who Reads It | The Line Your Posting Needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| FP&A analyst | Budget, rolling forecast, monthly variance package | Business unit leaders, CFO | Which units, how many, and the forecast cycle |
| Corporate finance analyst | Deal models, capital requests, board material | CFO, board, lenders | Transaction type and whether anything is live now |
| BI and reporting analyst | Dashboards, recurring reporting, data definitions | Operators, department heads | The BI tool and whether they write SQL |
| Senior financial analyst | All of the above, plus the recommendation | Executive team | What they decide without asking permission |
Pick one. Put it in the title. “Financial Analyst, FP&A” does more sorting work in four extra characters than a whole paragraph of duties will manage, because the people who have done that specific job search for that specific phrase and the people who have not will keep scrolling.
Whose Decisions Does the Analysis Feed
This is the line that separates a posting candidates can picture from one they cannot, and it is almost always missing. Analysis has an audience. Name it.
Not “partner with stakeholders across the organization.” That sentence has appeared in roughly every finance posting written since 2011 and it tells a candidate nothing at all about who they will have to convince, how often, or what happens when the number they bring is the one nobody in the room wanted to hear. Say one of these instead. The analyst presents at the monthly operating review. Or, the analyst builds the deck the CFO takes to the board four times a year. Or, the analyst sits in the Tuesday pricing meeting and is the person who says whether the discount clears.
Those are three different jobs. They attract three different people.
A strong analyst reads that line and knows whether the work is defensible or decorative. The ones who have done it before can tell the difference instantly, the ones who want to do it next will tell you so in the first ten minutes of a screen, and between those two groups you have most of the shortlist you were hoping the duties list would produce.
There is a second thing the audience line does, and it is less obvious. It tells the candidate how much of the job is spoken. An analyst who presents monthly to operators needs to argue and absorb pushback. An analyst who hands a file to a controller does not. We have watched good hires fail on exactly that mismatch.
Build the Model or Inherit It
Two jobs. Same title, same pay, wildly different candidate.
Building means there is no forecast today, or the one that exists is a workbook somebody’s predecessor left behind with hardcoded rows. The analyst designs the thing. Maintaining means a model exists, probably in a planning tool, and the job is to run it on a cycle, keep the drivers current, and improve it at the margin.
Builders are rarer and get bored maintaining. If the seat really needs someone to own the whole function rather than the model, that is a finance manager, not an analyst. Maintainers are often better at the discipline of a monthly close cycle, and they are plentiful. Neither is better. They are just not the same hire, and the posting is the only place you get to say which one you want before somebody has already accepted an offer for a job they pictured differently than you did.
Worcester, Massachusetts. A medical device contract manufacturer, about 300 employees. They posted a senior financial analyst role twice. First posting, generic duties, and they hired a genuine builder out of a private-equity-backed portfolio company who rebuilt their entire forecast in Vena inside four months, did it well, and then handed in her notice in month fourteen because the only job left was running the thing she had just finished building.
Second posting said, “This model exists. You will own it, run it monthly, and improve it. We are not asking you to rebuild it.” That hire is in year three.
Say which one. It costs a sentence.
Where the Numbers Live, and Whether They Get Their Own Access
Every finance posting lists tools. Most list too many, and almost all of them skip the thing that actually predicts whether the analyst will be effective in month two.
Does this person query the data themselves, or do they wait for a file?
It sounds like a plumbing detail. It is not. An analyst with read access to the ERP and their own connection to the warehouse can answer a question from the CFO in twenty minutes, while the one who has to email a request to IT and wait for a spreadsheet on Thursday will give the same answer four days later and get asked why it took so long.
Experienced analysts know this. They ask about it on the first call. A posting that answers it in advance pulls better applicants than one that does not.
Name the system of record. NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Dynamics 365, Workday. Then name the planning layer if you have one: Anaplan, Workday Adaptive Planning, Pigment, Vena, or a set of Excel workbooks, which is a perfectly honest answer and still worth saying out loud. Then the BI layer, Power BI or Tableau, and whether SQL against Snowflake or an equivalent is part of the week.
Three tools, tied to what the analyst produces. Four if the BI role genuinely needs both a dashboard tool and SQL. A list of nine says the role has not been scoped, and strong candidates read it that way.
Excel is assumed. Writing “advanced Excel required” screens nobody out and uses a line you could have spent on something real.
Credentials Map to the Profile, and Three of the Four Are Optional
The reflex is to require a CFA. Resist it unless the work is genuinely investment analysis or the board expects it.
A CFA signals securities analysis and portfolio work. It is a serious credential, earned over years, and it maps badly onto a corporate FP&A seat where the daily skill is not valuation technique but knowing the business well enough to look at a number the system produced and recognize immediately that it cannot possibly be right. A CPA signals technical accounting, which matters for a corporate finance analyst working near the close and matters much less for a BI analyst. The seats where it does carry weight get their own documents, our controller job description template and the CFO job description template. The FMVA is a modeling course. It tells you somebody put in the hours, which is not nothing for a career changer and is not a qualification either.
A CPA license is a different signal again. Then there is the FP&A credential, and the arithmetic here is worth knowing before you put it in a posting. The Association for Financial Professionals runs the FPAC, the certification built specifically for corporate FP&A, with two exams and an experience requirement. In all of 2025, AFP welcomed 178 new FPAC holders worldwide, across 56 countries.
178. Globally. In a year.
Require it and you have written a posting for a pool that can fit in a mid-size conference room. Mention it as a plus and you signal that the company takes FP&A seriously as a craft, which is free and works. We have placed exactly one FPAC holder. She was excellent, and she was not excellent because of the letters.
The qualification that actually predicts success is narrower and duller than any of the four credentials. It is the number of close and forecast cycles this person has personally run, on a business that resembles yours in model and size, with somebody senior reading the output and pushing back on it.
Print the Range, and Know What Massachusetts Now Expects
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook puts the median annual wage for financial and investment analysts at $102,740 as of May 2025, with the bottom tenth under $63,720 and the top tenth above $180,860. That spread is the whole problem with national numbers. It covers a 24-year-old in a reporting seat and a sell-side analyst in Manhattan.
Our own accounting and finance staffing desk numbers are narrower because they are one market. Mid-level FP&A analysts in Orange County and Los Angeles are billing around $45 to $65 an hour on contract, or $90K to $115K direct hire. Senior FP&A and corporate finance roles run higher, particularly for CFA holders and candidates coming out of investment banking. If you want to pressure-test a band before it goes in the posting, our salary benchmark assistant will give you a starting point.
| Anchor | Figure | What It Covers |
|---|---|---|
| BLS median, May 2025 | $102,740 | Financial and investment analysts, national, all levels |
| BLS 10th to 90th percentile | $63,720 to $180,860 | Entry reporting seats through sell-side research |
| KORE1 desk, mid-level FP&A contract | $45 to $65 per hour | Orange County and Los Angeles, loaded bill rate |
| KORE1 desk, mid-level FP&A direct hire | $90K to $115K | Orange County and Los Angeles base salary |
Whether you print the range is increasingly not your call. Massachusetts is the newest example, and the detail that catches employers is the headcount test. Under the Commonwealth’s Wage Transparency Act, in effect since October 29, 2025, any employer with 25 or more employees in Massachusetts has to state in the posting the annual salary or hourly range it actually expects to pay for that job at that moment, and the Attorney General’s office enforces it. Bonus and commission do not have to be disclosed.
Twenty-five, not fifty. A remote employee whose primary workplace is Massachusetts counts toward it, which catches out-of-state companies that never thought of themselves as Massachusetts employers at all. California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Washington all have their own versions, each with a different headcount trigger and a different list of what else the posting has to carry, which is why the advice we give every client is shorter than the compliance map. Print the range everywhere and stop tracking it.
It also saves a phone call. The alternative is spending the first one finding out you are $25,000 apart.
Financial Analyst Job Description Template
Copy it, fill in the brackets, delete what does not apply. Bracketed notes marked “Internal” are for the hiring team and should not be published.
Job Title
[Financial Analyst, FP&A] or [Senior Financial Analyst, Corporate Finance] or [Financial Analyst, Reporting and Analytics]. Internal: if the title has to stay plain “Financial Analyst,” the profile goes in the first sentence instead.
The Company and the Decisions You Support
[Company] is a [size and type of business] with [revenue or headcount]. You will support [which business units, functions, or P&Ls], and your analysis goes to [the specific audience: the monthly operating review, the CFO’s board package, the pricing committee]. You present [how often].
What You Will Own
[The one or two recurring things, for example the rolling 12-month forecast for three business units and the monthly variance package.] [Pick one: This model does not exist yet and you will build it. / This model exists and you will own, run, and improve it.] Internal: if you cannot pick, the role is not scoped.
Where the Numbers Come From
Our system of record is [NetSuite / SAP / Oracle / Dynamics 365 / Workday]. Planning lives in [Anaplan / Adaptive Planning / Pigment / Vena / Excel]. Reporting runs on [Power BI / Tableau]. You will have [read access to the ERP and your own queries against (warehouse) / data provided by the (team) on a (cadence)].
What You Bring
- [X or more] years in [FP&A / corporate finance / reporting], including [X] full budget cycles.
- Experience at [a business of comparable size, model, or complexity, stated plainly].
- [The one technical skill the deliverable requires, for example building a driver-based revenue forecast, or writing your own SQL.]
- [One more that genuinely predicts success here. Then stop.]
Not Required
[A CFA, a CPA, an FPAC, a planning tool you would happily train someone on, or a background in your particular industry. Say which of these you will teach. It widens the pool at no cost.]
Pay, Benefits, and Location
Base salary [range]. [Bonus target, if any.] [Benefits summary, including CPE or exam support.] [City, State], [on-site, hybrid with X days, or remote]. [Internal: print the range regardless of your state. If you have 25 or more employees in Massachusetts, you are required to.]
Objections From the Intake Call
Our analyst really does all four of those jobs. Now what?
Lead with whichever profile takes the most weeks in a year and give rough percentages for the rest. Candidates can handle a blended role. What they cannot handle is a posting that hides which part is the center of gravity.
If it splits closer to even, you may be looking at two part-time seats rather than one full one, and that is a far better thing to discover while you are still writing the posting than in month four, when the analyst you hired to build dashboards is quietly drowning in a forecast cycle nobody told them about.
Is it a problem to say the forecast is a mess?
It is an advantage. Builders are specifically hunting for that sentence, and the people it scares off were going to be unhappy anyway once they opened the workbook.
Be concrete about the mess. “Our forecast is a 40-tab workbook with hardcoded prior-year rows and no version control” is a recruiting line, not a confession. We have had candidates cite it as the reason they applied.
How many years should we ask for?
Count close cycles, not years. Three years at a company that forecasts quarterly is twelve cycles. Three years somewhere that reforecasts monthly is thirty-six, and the second person is further along.
Then set the number one notch below where you want to land. Every strong analyst we place has at least one hiring manager who nearly screened them out on a year count.
Should the posting mention the modeling exercise?
Sixty minutes is the number most candidates will accept without hesitating, so put it in writing. “A 60-minute case using a sample P&L, scheduled at your convenience” removes the main reason good candidates withdraw mid-process, which is an unexplained take-home that lands on a Friday.
The posting is not the place for the exercise itself. If you are still designing it, our financial analyst interview questions cover what the exercises should actually test.
Our comp band is below the BLS median. Do we print it anyway?
Print it. A range below a national median is a normal fact about geography, company size, and level, and candidates read the national figure with that in mind already.
What they do not forgive is finding out in week three, after two interviews and a modeling case, that the number was never going to work. If the band is genuinely tight, spend the space on what offsets it. Forecast ownership. Standing exposure to the leadership team. Exam support.
Those are real, and in a market where a mid-level analyst can usually find another ten thousand dollars somewhere, the thing that actually moves a strong candidate is being handed a deliverable they can point at in their next interview, three years from now, and say they owned it.
We need six months of coverage, not a permanent hire.
Only the top of the posting changes. Give the length, the reason it is a contract, the system environment, and whether it can convert. Experienced contract analysts sort on those four and read the duties afterward, if at all.
The profile, audience, build-or-maintain, and access lines all stay exactly as written. Still deciding which model fits? Our contract finance staffing and direct hire placement pages set out the mechanics of each, including the 20% to 25% direct-hire fee and our 17-day average time to fill on analyst searches.
Name the Decision, Then the Duties
A financial analyst is hired to make somebody else’s decision better. Everything worth putting in the posting follows from naming that decision, and almost nothing follows from another pass at the duties list, which is where most hiring managers spend their editing time.
So write the audience line first. Then the profile, the build-or-maintain call, and where the numbers live. The duties can go last, and candidates will skim them regardless.
Screening comes next, and it is a different problem. Our screening questions for financial analysts handle that half.
For the posting itself, send us the draft. Our accounting and finance desk will read it the way a candidate does and say which of the five lines is doing no work. Usually it is the audience, and fixing that one sentence changes who applies more than the other four combined.
Analyst searches are among the most frequent runs on that desk, across direct hire, contract, and contract-to-hire. Our one-year retention across those placements runs 92 percent, which for an analyst means surviving a full budget cycle and the reforecast that came after it.
