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Successful CEE FINANCE DIRECTOR search – Budapest, Sept 2022

Our client is a multinational, market leader production company providing a wide range of industrial solutions to a variety of business segments, running one Shared Services Center in Budapest and four mid-sized manufacturing sites in the Central-Eastern European region. Wyser Hungary successfully assisted the company in finding a new CEE Finance Director, which was a newly created function in the organization with the key task of pulling together the financial processes of 4 CEE countries.  

Finding a new CEE Finance HUB Director

The main aim of the role was to standardize accounting and controlling procedures for Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, managing and developing local finance teams (7-8 FTEs in each country) and overseeing budgeting, forecasting, management reporting and consolidation areas for the whole region. It was also crucial that the CEE Finance Director had to be able to act as an efficient “Change Manager” and “Business Partner”: driving their team through a massive organizational transformation and building trusted relationships with local and regional key decision makers to ensure necessary support in the transition/centralization process. 

Headhunting / search methods

Wyser Hungary created and presented a detailed hiring strategy to the European CFO and the local Managing Director, which included a discussion about potential companies to headhunt. As the result of the hiring/headhunting strategy discussion, Wyser and the company agreed on the ideal search direction: Finance Director candidates coming from large, sophisticated multinational organisations where they successfully drove complex, sensitive finance related transformation projects with multi-country scope / focus, leading and developing finance organisations of 30+ FTEs while acting as “cultural change ambassador”. Proven business partnering and high-level stakeholder management skills also had to be identified, as the new CEE Finance Director had to be able to liaise with c-suite stakeholders in the region. 

In terms of the process timeline, Wyser set a 14-days frame for candidate generation, which was successfully kept and 6 stand-out candidate profiles were presented on the 13th day. The company conducted 4 interviews: all 6 Wyser candidates were invited to the first round, out of which 4 candidates were taken further to the second round, 3 to the third round, and then only the top 2 candidates made it to the last (4th) interview. Between the 3rd and the 4th rounds, Wyser conducted an in-depth personality testing (Thomas HPTI – High Potential Trait Indicator) and presented the results to the Client, deepening the selection process with this extra information-dimension. One of the two top candidates was offered two days after the final round, and the offer was successfully accepted the next morning.

Successful Placement

As a result of Wyser’s deep market research and thorough headhunting campaign, the company was confidently able to make a decision and hire a motivated, experienced CEE Finance Director candidate within the 12 weeks timeframe that was set for the whole selection process.