How a consumer electronics leader staffed a complete finance operations team: 30 specialists in 3 months

The Mandate

Our client's European shared services centre needed to build out its finance operations capability across three towers at once — Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and General Ledger — with thirty specialists required inside three months.

The Challenge: Speed Without Compromising Accounting Quality

Finance operations recruitment is frequently underestimated. Because the roles are numerous and the titles familiar, they are often treated as a volume exercise. They are not.

The processes are genuinely different. Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and General Ledger demand different competencies, different temperaments and different experience. A strong AP specialist is not automatically a strong GL accountant; General Ledger in particular requires accounting judgement rather than process execution, and the two are not interchangeable. Recruiting all three in parallel means running three distinct searches, not one.

The market is competitive and well-informed. Bucharest's shared services sector is one of the largest in Europe, which means experienced AP, AR and GL professionals have options, know their market value, and move frequently. Attracting them requires a real proposition, not simply an opening.

Quality failures in finance surface slowly and expensively. A weak hire in a customer-facing role is visible in days. A weak hire in General Ledger may not be visible until a month-end close goes wrong. The cost of lowering the bar to hit a deadline is paid later, with interest.

Three months is tight for thirty specialised hires — roughly ten placements per month, sustained, across three distinct process disciplines.

Our Approach

Three parallel tracks, one programme. AP, AR and GL were run as separate searches with distinct criteria and distinct candidate pools, managed under a single delivery plan so that overall pace never depended on the slowest tower.

Process-specific assessment. Candidates were evaluated against the actual demands of their tower: transactional accuracy and volume handling for AP, collections judgement and customer interaction for AR, and accounting competence, reconciliation depth and close-cycle experience for GL.

Pipeline density over sequential search. At this pace there is no time to recover from a declined offer by restarting a search. We maintained parallel qualified candidates per role so that a single drop-out never cost weeks.

A clear, honest employer story. In a market where finance professionals receive constant approaches, the pitch had to be specific: a globally recognised brand, defined process ownership, and a genuine career path within a large international organisation.

The Delivery

30 finance operations specialists closed in 3 months, across Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and General Ledger.

All three towers staffed in parallel, allowing the finance function to become operational as a complete unit rather than tower by tower.

Quality maintained under compression — the accounting bar for General Ledger roles was not relaxed to protect the timeline.

The Long View

Our client remains one of the world's largest and most recognisable technology and consumer electronics groups, and its European business services operations continue to form part of a Romanian shared services sector that has become one of the most significant in Europe — built on exactly the finance, technology and multilingual capability that mandates like this one supply.

Key Takeaways

• Finance operations is not a volume exercise. AP, AR and GL are three different disciplines requiring three different assessments.
• General Ledger deserves particular rigour. It demands accounting judgement, and mistakes surface at close, not at interview.
• Pace comes from pipeline density. Ten placements a month is only sustainable when every role has parallel qualified candidates behind it.
• Parallel towers get a function live faster. Staffing all three streams together lets a finance operation start as a whole, rather than waiting to be assembled in sequence.