Hiring is back. The numbers are smaller, the bar is higher, and the job descriptions we see in the market are almost all wrong. They read like 2022 with a haircut. The companies actually landing the candidates they want have done something more interesting: they've rewritten the role.
The 2022 ops/finance hire
The 2022 hire was a specialist with a clean pedigree. FP&A out of a name-brand SaaS company. Ops out of a consulting firm. The pitch was "scale the function." The function was usually one Notion doc deep.
That hire is over. Not because the people were bad — many were excellent — but because the work isn't there anymore. The function has been built. What's needed now is different.
The 2026 hire
The shape of the role that's working in 2026:
- Generalist with one deep tool. Not "Excel and SQL." One tool — usually a planning system or a data warehouse — that they can configure, query, and break. Tool depth is non-negotiable; everything else is teachable.
- Comfortable with agents. Not as a buzzword. They've used an agent to draft a board memo, caught it being wrong, and rewritten it. The interview question we use is "tell me about the worst output you got from an agent and what you did about it." If they don't have an answer, they haven't really used one.
- Owns the artifact, not the process. The 2022 hire optimized processes. The 2026 hire produces one or two recurring artifacts — the monthly close memo, the weekly forecast, the quarterly board read. Process is a means; the artifact is the deliverable.
- Comp-aware. They know what they're worth, they've benchmarked it, and they're not pretending money is a footnote. In 2026 this is a feature, not a flag.
What the new JD looks like
Three changes from the 2022 template:
- Remove the team-size language. "Build and lead a team of 4–6" reads as desperate now. The right candidate doesn't want a team yet — they want to ship.
- Add the artifact. "You will own the weekly cash-and-pipeline brief that goes to the CEO every Monday by 9am." Specific, dated, visible.
- Replace 'manage' with 'decide.' Every responsibility that begins with manage should be re-read. Half of them can be deleted; the other half are real decisions in disguise.
The interview that actually works
We've stopped recommending case studies. The signal is too noisy and the candidate has practiced. The interview we recommend is two hours:
- Hour 1 — open a real artifact (anonymized) and ask the candidate to critique it
- Hour 2 — ask them to rebuild one piece of it live, with whatever tools they want
You will learn more in those two hours than from any case. You will also accidentally screen for the trait that matters most in 2026: candidates who can think with their hands.
The new bar isn't higher experience. It's higher exposure to the actual work.
The hire is out there. The job description is the thing that has to change first.
