There’s a conversation happening in boardrooms that nobody’s updating the org chart for yet.
A PE firm closes a deal and within 90 days, the CFO is in the room for every major hire — not just the Controller and the FP&A lead. The VP Operations search? CFO’s call. The HR Director? CFO’s signing off. The new IT lead? CFO wants to meet them first.
This isn’t a power grab. It’s a structural shift that’s been building for years, and if you’re still treating the CFO as a finance-only function, you’re already behind.
The data is unambiguous. According to Baker Tilly’s 2026 CFO Report, based on insights from 185 PE and VC-backed CFOs, over 87% of CFOs now manage functions beyond finance, from HR and legal to strategy and data.
Source: Baker Tilly, 2026 CFO Report (bakertilly.com)
That’s not a niche finding. That’s the new baseline.
At the smaller end of the market where most mid-market Canadian companies sit, the numbers are even more striking. In companies generating less than $100M in revenue, CFOs routinely oversee HR in 55% of cases and Operations in over a third of organizations.
The CFO isn’t occasionally involved in these hires. In most mid-market companies, they’re the decision-maker.
And the scope keeps expanding. A 2024 McKinsey study found that over 70% of CFOs now have direct responsibility for their company’s digital transformation initiatives — a stark evolution from a decade ago.
Technology leadership, once firmly in the CTO’s lane, is increasingly landing on the CFO’s desk too.
Private equity investors aren’t buying balance sheets. They’re buying execution capacity — the ability to move fast, scale intelligently, and hit milestones that justify the next valuation. The CFO, in this context, isn’t there to report on what happened. They’re there to shape what happens next.
That means the CFO who can only speak to the numbers is increasingly a liability. Investors want a sparring partner for the CEO — someone who can stress-test the go-to-market strategy, challenge the ops model, and tell the HR team what kind of talent infrastructure the business needs to triple in four years. The financial acumen is assumed. The operating range is what gets you in the room.
Today’s CFO in a PE-backed environment is part strategist, part operator, part deal-maker — and fully accountable for whether the investment thesis actually holds.
Here’s where most companies get caught flat-footed: they update their expectations of the CFO without updating who they ask to find the people around that CFO.
The ops leader, the HR director, the technology head — these aren’t just functional hires anymore. They’re people who need to operate inside the CFO’s orbit, speak the language of financial performance, and understand what it means to build a function that has to justify itself in terms of EBITDA contribution, not just headcount managed.
Finding someone who’s great at HR isn’t the same as finding someone who’s great at HR inside a finance-led, PE-backed business under pressure to perform. The context changes everything. The search should too.
There’s a whole segment of the recruiting market that still sorts candidates by function. Finance people go to finance recruiters. Ops people go to ops recruiters. HR people go to HR recruiters.
That model made sense when those functions operated in silos. It makes less sense when the CFO is running the org chart.
The companies getting the best outcomes from these hires are working with recruiters who understand the CFO’s mandate, not just the job description of the role being filled. They’re asking different questions, running different searches, and presenting candidates who can actually operate in the environment they’re walking into.
The CFO hired an ops leader last quarter. Next quarter it’ll be an HR director, or a technology lead, or a Chief of Staff who reports directly into the finance function.
The only question is whether your search process has caught up to the job.
At Clarity, we’ve spent years placing finance leaders across Canada’s mid-market. We’re now doing the same for the roles that report to them.
If you’re a CFO, or hiring alongside one, and you’re looking for an ops leader, HR director, or technology head who actually understands the environment they’re walking into, that’s exactly the search we’re built for.
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