Ask the Expert: Derek Marani, Finance and Accounting

In this edition of ‘Ask the Expert,’ Derek Marani, Senior Consultant for Addison Group’s Finance and Accounting Direct Hire practice in Boston, shared some of his insights on popular workforce trends and interviewing tips. We spoke with Derek to hear his thoughts on how open roles are affecting companies and how candidates can stand out in interviews.

How are open roles affecting companies?

There are two main effects we’re seeing. One is that long vacancies can present financial risks for companies and the second is that it can lead to burnout.

Over the years, we’ve found vacancies cause issues such as material weaknesses and significant deficiencies in critical functions. Most notably, we saw this with Advanced Auto Parts, where they cited a lack of adequate accounting personnel and turnover in key accounting positions as contributing factors to the material weaknesses in 2023.

Additionally, Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) lacking the bandwidth to forecast new business initiatives or provide detailed insights can lead to missed opportunities. Unfortunately, sometimes the full effect of these vacancies won’t be seen until months later.

The other issue with long vacancies is the demand it puts on your existing team. It can cause your current employees to work longer hours to pick up the slack associated with this vacant position, and they may look for a new job if that vacancy leads to burnout.

My advice for companies looking to secure talent in these open roles is to take an active role in the hiring process. One of the worst things you can do as a hiring manager is to leave your internal talent team to run the whole hiring process themselves. Whether you’re working with a staffing company like Addison Group or your internal talent team, you should be closely aligned on the candidate profile, process, compensation, and marketing of this role. Even though we’re seeing a higher supply of talent in the job market right now, the highest caliber candidates are still expecting to see what type of unique perks your organization can offer them.

Sometimes finding these high-caliber candidates can be challenging, especially due to the shortage of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) in the market, which is where talent solutions companies can help. Although it may seem like an additional cost, it should be viewed as an investment designed to mitigate the risks outlined above. For example, hiring a top-notch Tax Director for your company can help bring value by enhancing the bottom line as well as preventing issues like audit fines and penalties. In fact, we recently met with a Global Head of Tax who was able to save his company nearly $20MM by identifying unaccounted tax deductions within one of their international sites.

How can candidates stand out in interviews?

I believe much of the traditional job-search advice still applies: always do your research, prepare thoroughly, and put your best foot forward. From my perspective, I would say one of the biggest things you can do to stand out in an interview is to be enthusiastic about the position you’re interviewing for and the specific problems you can help organizations solve. Sometimes we hear from clients that although the candidate was a great technical fit for the position, they came across as ambivalent in the interview. This lack of enthusiasm can leave hiring managers unsure if they should move an otherwise qualified candidate forward in the interview process.

There is both an art and science to interviewing. If I were to frame an interview more scientifically, I would break it down into three steps.

1. Consider that anytime there’s a job opening, there’s a business challenge or series of challenges that an organization is looking to solve. You need to research and think through these potential challenges facing the organization. Ask yourself, ‘What are some of the issues an organization like this may have, and what can I do to solve them?’
2. In the interview, directly find out from the company what challenges they’re facing. You can do this by asking thoughtful questions about the business and uncovering as much as you can about these issues and what they’ve done or would like to do to address them.
3. Position yourself as the one to solve those challenges – this is your sales pitch. Your ability to uncover and understand the challenges in steps one and two will directly impact your ability to be successful in step three. You’ll do that by presenting relevant, specific examples from your background to elicit the confidence from the interviewer that you’re the one who can solve their problems.

An equally important component of interviewing is the art of storytelling. To achieve this, it can help to use the Situation, Task, Action, and Result (STAR) method to organize your examples. Make sure to give specific details about the challenges you’ve faced. Paint a vivid picture of the situation, some of the emotions you and the team were experiencing, how you were able to rectify that situation, and how you made an impact not only on the team, but across the company.

Finally, at the end of the interview, candidates should ask the interviewer something along the lines of, ‘If I get the position and we’re in a one-on-one meeting reviewing the previous year’s accomplishments, and everything worked out the way you hoped, what would that look like?’

I believe this question can help the interviewer visualize you in the position and ensure you align with the hiring manager on the expectations and goals for that role. Ultimately, asking a strong question like this can help differentiate you from other candidates.

What general trends have you seen this year?

The first half of 2025 continued the challenging hiring market that we’ve experienced for the past few years. With an uncertain economic climate, many companies have been indecisive when it comes to hiring as they weigh cost-constraints against the risk of bad hires. Consequently, they’re willing to lengthen their interview process and spend extra time comparing and contrasting candidates to land on the right one.

Perhaps the biggest trend we’ve seen is the monopolization of interest and attention toward candidates with audit backgrounds and CPAs, while candidates without these have faced prolonged challenges in their job search.

Additionally, we’ve seen an ongoing trend of clients seeking F&A candidates with strong systems experience as they look to automate and modernize their data warehouses and ERPs. I believe that over the next three to five years or less, candidates in accounting and finance are going to have to be dual, if not, triple threats when it comes to F&A knowledge, systems experience, and AI mastery to be successful. In fact, we’ve already started to see this in tech hubs such as San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston.

On an encouraging note, the passing of the tax bill appears to have given businesses a bit more clarity. However, until interest rates come down further and deal volumes ramp up more, we may need to remain modest in our expectations of a job market rebound.

Need to hire finance and accounting talent for your team?

Need qualified finance and accounting candidates to add to your team? Addison Group can help. For more than 20 years, we’ve focused on quality, not quotas. As a leading nationwide staffing and executive search employment agency, we provide qualified finance and accounting talent to help move your business forward. Let’s talk about how we can help fill your open positions.