When you are the only finance person in the interview, you carry the whole technical assessment yourself, so build your process around evidence rather than rapport. The best way to test a Head of Finance solo is to make them walk you through real work, real numbers, and real decisions they owned, then watch how they think when you push.
This is a common spot to be in. HR can screen for culture, and a board member might sit in for gravitas, but nobody else in that room can tell whether the candidate can actually run the layer below you. That job falls to you.
Here is how to do it well without a second finance voice to lean on.
What are you actually hiring this person to do?
Start by writing down the gap, not the job title. A Head of Finance covering month end, controls and a small transactional team is a different hire from one leading FP&A, board packs and commercial partnering.
Be honest about what you want to hand over. If the point of the hire is to free up your week, name the tasks you are trying to stop doing. Those tasks become your interview.
If you cannot describe what changes about your own diary after they start, you are not ready to interview yet.
How do you test technical depth without a second finance interviewer?
Use their own experience as the exam. Ask them to talk you through a set of accounts or a board pack they built, then follow the thread.
Good prompts:
- Walk me through last month end. What broke, and what did you do about it.
- Show me how you moved from actuals to a forecast. What assumptions did you own.
- Where were the judgement calls in your last audit, and how did you land them.
You are not checking whether they know the definition of accruals. You are checking whether they have carried real responsibility and can explain it plainly.
Watch for candidates who only speak in outputs. "We delivered the pack" tells you nothing. "I rebuilt the revenue bridge because the old one hid churn" tells you everything.
What is the single best exercise to set?
Give them a messy input and ask for a view. A rough trial balance with obvious errors, or a two page P&L with a margin that moved, and ten minutes to tell you what they see.
Strong candidates spot the anomalies, ask what sits behind a line, and separate what they know from what they would need to check. Weak candidates either accept the numbers at face value or drown you in caveats without a conclusion.
This exercise scales down the whole role. Reviewing work, questioning it, and forming a view is most of what a Head of Finance does every day.
How do you assess whether they can lead your team?
The layer below you is the point. A Head of Finance who is brilliant technically but cannot develop a Financial Accountant or hold a transactional team to a deadline will simply move the bottleneck onto you.
Ask them to tell you about someone they promoted, and someone they managed out. Listen for whether they take responsibility for both.
Then ask how they would run their first month end with your existing team, sight unseen. You want a plan that starts with listening, not a candidate who arrives assuming everything is broken.
How do you spot the gap between fluent and capable?
Senior finance candidates interview well. That is the trap when you are alone in the room.
Slow the conversation down and go one layer deeper than feels polite. When they give you an answer, ask why, then ask why again. Fluent people repeat the headline. Capable people can keep going because they lived it.
Ask what they got wrong recently. Anyone at this level who claims a clean record is either junior in mindset or not being straight with you.
Should you bring anyone else into the process at all?
Yes, for the parts you cannot cover. Let a peer from operations or sales meet them to test partnering and communication. Let someone from your team spend twenty minutes with them, because how a candidate treats the people they would manage is revealing.
You still own the technical verdict. Everyone else is adding colour, not making the call.
If you want a shortlist that is already filtered for this level before it reaches your diary, that is the work we do at Harper May, and you can see the kind of roles we handle on our jobs page.
Common questions
How many interview stages do I need for a Head of Finance?
Two to three is usually right. A first conversation on experience and fit, a technical or case stage where you go deep, and a short final meeting with a wider stakeholder. More than that and strong candidates start to drop out.
Can I hire a Head of Finance who is stronger than me in one area?
Yes, and often you should. If they are sharper on systems or FP&A than you are, that is capacity gained, not a threat. Just make sure you can still challenge their judgement where it counts.
What is the biggest mistake solo interviewers make?
Hiring on rapport. Warmth is not competence. Set the same evidence based test for the candidate you like as for the one you do not.
