A CPA designation tells you a candidate cleared a high technical bar. It doesn’t tell you whether they’ll be any good in your finance function. Both Gibran and I are CPAs, and when we run a Finance search here in Ontario, we screen for the designation the way you’d expect. Then we spend most of the interview on everything the designation doesn’t cover — because that’s where good hires and great ones separate.
Here’s what we’re actually looking for, and what we’d tell you to look for when you’re the one across the table.
The CPA Is the Floor, Not the Finish Line in Toronto Finance Hiring
The designation matters. It means someone put in the hours, understands the technical framework, and can be trusted with the reporting. But it’s a baseline, not a ranking. Two candidates can both have the letters and be a world apart in what they’d bring to your team.
That gap matters more right now than it did five years ago. The finance talent pipeline in Toronto has thinned out. A Senior Financial Analyst search that would have produced a strong shortlist in a week or two a few years ago now takes longer and turns up fewer people. Fewer graduates are heading into public accounting, and the ones who trained there aren’t staying as long. So when a genuinely good candidate does surface, knowing how to read them — past the resume and past the designation — is the whole game.
What We Read in the First Ten Minutes
Some of this is technical and some of it isn’t. Honestly, a good chunk of a finance interview is EQ. You can sit with someone for ten minutes and get a strong read — how they think, how they carry themselves, whether they can hold a conversation with a hiring manager who isn’t a finance person. A controller who can’t explain a variance to a VP of sales in plain language will struggle in a mid-sized business where finance sits close to everyone.
We look for the person who’s curious about the business, not just the numbers. The finance people who work out best, in the searches we run across Ontario, want to know how the product moves, why the sales team is frustrated, where the margin actually comes from. The designation doesn’t test for that. A conversation does.
Can They Business-Partner, or Just Report?
This is the question that separates a good Toronto finance hire from a great one. Plenty of finance professionals can close the month and produce a clean set of statements. Far fewer can sit at the table and make the business better.
We see the same pattern in a lot of finance functions: the team is good at looking backward — reporting, reconciliations, the monthly cycle — and thin on looking forward. There’s no real forecasting, no planning, no analytics feeding decisions three, six, twelve months out. And the sales team quietly resents finance because finance is the gatekeeper that says no without adding much else.
The hire who fixes that is worth a multiple of the one who doesn’t. When we screen for it, we’re listening for whether a candidate has actually partnered across a business — worked with sales on compensation and commission plans, sat in a production facility and understood how inventory ties up cash, supported operations rather than policing it. That’s the FP&A profile that changes how the rest of the company sees the finance team.
This is the gap we see most often, and it’s widening. As more of the technical work gets automated and standardized, the thing that separates finance hires isn’t whether they can produce the report — it’s whether they can partner with the business off the back of it. That’s the side the CPA exam doesn’t test.
Testing Technical Depth Below the Designation
Because we’ve done the roles, we can go a layer deeper than a resume screen and tell whether the depth is real. We’ll ask a candidate to walk us through their budgeting process — was it all Excel, who did they build it with, how did they handle the back-and-forth with the operating teams? We’ll dig into P&L exposure, systems, how they handled a reporting cycle under pressure.
You learn a lot in that conversation. A strong candidate gets more specific as you push. A weaker one gives you a clean, high-level answer and then can’t add depth when you ask a follow-up — and that tells you what you need to know. HR teams in Ontario are often excellent at the front of the funnel and at assessing culture fit. What they’re usually not set up to do is press on the technical answer and tell whether it holds up. That’s the part we’re built for, because we’ve sat in those chairs ourselves.
Why the Bar Is Higher for Finance Hiring in Ontario Right Now
Two things are pushing on this market at once. The pipeline is thinner, so there are fewer strong candidates to choose from. And the demographic shift is real — a wave of senior finance leaders is approaching retirement, and a handful of good people we know have left Canada for the U.S. over the past year, citing compensation and opportunity. That combination means the cost of a mis-hire is higher than it used to be. When you replace a wrong hire, you’re not just eating the direct cost — you’re going back into a shallower pool to do it.
So the temptation to hire on the designation alone, because the letters feel like a safe bet, is exactly the wrong instinct right now. The letters get someone in the room. What they do once they’re in the business is a separate question — and it’s the one worth spending your interview on.
Making a Finance Hire in Toronto in 2026?
When we run a Finance search in the Toronto market, the letters are where we start, not where we stop. Because both of us are CPAs who’ve sat in these roles, we can press on the technical depth and read the business-partner instinct in the same conversation — the parts the designation can’t vouch for. If you’re hiring a finance leader and want that kind of read on a shortlist, get in touch.
Ian O’Reilly is President of The STORY Group, a boutique recruitment firm based in Oakville, Ontario specializing in Finance, Supply Chain, and Procurement search across Toronto and Ontario. Ian is a CPA, CMA with 12+ years in executive search.