When a multi-site non-profit needed to backfill its Chief Financial Officer seat, the search itself moved quickly. The first qualified candidate reached the client inside three weeks.
The seat stayed open for nearly four months.
That gap is worth looking at, because it’s a pattern we see often in executive hiring and it rarely gets counted when organizations plan their timelines.
The Situation
A multi-site non-profit human services organization came to Fusion Recruiters needing to replace its CFO. The role reported into the executive team and carried financial oversight across every location the organization operates.
It was structured as a remote position with roughly 50% travel, which meant the person hired would need to be present across sites regularly while running a finance function from a distance.
Search Details
Role: Chief Financial Officer
Function: Finance
Service line: Retained Executive Search
Structure: Remote with approximately 50% travel
Search type: Backfill
The Challenge
The requirements were specific enough that each one narrowed the field, and together they narrowed it sharply.
The organization needed executive-level finance leadership with experience across both non-profit and for-profit healthcare, since the financial model draws on both. Revenue cycle knowledge specific to Medicaid was a hard requirement rather than a preference. And the travel expectation ruled out a portion of the candidates who otherwise fit.
Finance executives with that combination exist. They aren’t browsing job boards, and there aren’t many of them within reach of any single search.
The Approach: How We Structured This Nonprofit CFO Search
Rather than searching by title alone, our team built the target list around where this particular blend of experience actually develops.
That meant targeted outreach inside both non-profit and for-profit healthcare organizations, and into non-profits of comparable size where the financial complexity would be similar even if the sector language differed. Candidates who had worked only in one funding model were unlikely to bring the revenue cycle depth the role required.
The Results
- Time to first submittal: 17 days
- Placed candidate submitted 49 days into the search
- Candidates interviewed by the client: 8
- Time to fill: 115 days
The first and last numbers tell different stories, and the gap between them is the point.
Qualified candidates were in front of the client within three weeks. The interview process that followed involved multiple rounds, several of which required travel to meet stakeholders across locations. For an executive seat at a multi-site organization, that level of vetting is reasonable. It also added weeks that had nothing to do with whether the right person was available.
The Placed Candidate
The finance executive who took the role brought more than twenty years leading large-scale financial operations, including restructuring multi-million-dollar debt portfolios and driving operational turnarounds across senior living and healthcare.
Their background covered ERP implementation, cash flow optimization, and merger and acquisition integration, positioning them to handle both day-to-day financial oversight and the structural work the organization had ahead of it.
The Takeaway
Sourcing speed and hiring speed are two different clocks, and most organizations only plan for the first one.
If your search timeline assumes the process starts when candidates arrive, the weeks spent scheduling, traveling, and aligning after that point become invisible. They’re still costing you. Our Cost of an Unfilled Position Worksheet walks through the four places that cost accumulates while a seat sits open.
Hiring a Finance Leader With a Narrow Profile?
Searches like this one come down to knowing where a specific combination of experience develops, and building outreach around that rather than the job title.
