A finance director called me last month with a shortlist of one.

Not because the role was niche, or the salary stingy. He'd had a financial controller drop out of a process in week three, a second candidate accept a counter-offer from their own employer, and a third who simply stopped replying.

By the time we spoke he'd started to wonder if it was something about his business. It wasn't. It's the market underneath him, and almost nobody's looking at the right part of it.

Everyone's talking about the wrong accountant shortage

Most of what gets written about the qualified accountant shortage focuses on trainees and audit intake, the entry-level pipeline that feeds the big firms. The trainee-level story is real enough, as far as it goes. But it isn't the one that decides whether you can hire a decent financial controller or finance director this year.

A Financial Reporting Council report published in 2025 breaks the numbers down by professional body rather than treating "accountancy" as one blob. Fadime Sahin of the University of Portsmouth walked through it in detail for LSE Business Review in August.

Across the seven main bodies, student numbers fell from around 166,000 in 2014 to 155,000 by 2024. Call it a 7 per cent drop. Unpleasant. Not catastrophic on its own.

Now for the part that actually matters for anyone hiring at finance director or CFO level. CIMA, the qualification that feeds management accounting, FP&A and commercial finance, saw its own numbers fall by roughly a third over the same decade. From around 54,700 students in 2014 to about 37,200 in 2024, according to the FRC figures Sahin cites.

ICAEW went the other way and grew by something like 76 per cent across the same window, on the same FRC breakdown. So the averaged 7 per cent figure everyone quotes is hiding a much sharper story underneath it.

And that hidden story happens to matter most to exactly the kind of client Coburg Banks works with.

Why does the CIMA number matter more than the headline figure?

Because ICAEW's growth masks CIMA's collapse in every top-line stat you'll see reported. A financial controller who can build a forecast, sit in a board meeting and challenge a sales director on their numbers usually comes up through the CIMA route, or moves into it early.

Shrink that specific pipeline by a third over a decade. But the effect doesn't show up straight away. It shows up years later, right when businesses like yours are trying to hire one.

Clients tell us constantly that the shortage doesn't feel like a general shortage of accountants. It feels narrower and more specific than that. Plenty of part-qualified candidates are still out there.

Far fewer are the commercially sharp, board-ready financial controllers who've actually done the job before, more than once, under pressure.

The pipeline problem shows up years after it starts

Someone who started, or didn't start, a CIMA qualification back in 2014 would be roughly ten years into their career by now. Ten years is about when a properly strong candidate is ready for finance director or head of finance.

So a dip in students a decade ago is landing on hiring managers right now as a thinner shortlist than they expected. Nobody planned it that way. It's simply how a decade-long pipeline works, and it's exactly why this problem doesn't fix itself in six months, whatever a job board's search volume happens to suggest.

Sahin's piece also touches on something we're seeing from a different angle. Younger finance professionals are more entrepreneurial than the generation before them, and more drawn to hybrid or flexible working.

Good candidates aren't just scarcer now. They're pickier about how and where they work too, which quietly changes what a competitive offer needs to look like. A rigid five-days-in-the-office finance director role, advertised the way it might have been in 2016, will simply get fewer applications from the strongest people in that shrunk pool.

What should a growing business actually do differently?

Widen the net past a straight ICAEW-or-nothing filter, for a start. A strong part-qualified or CIMA-trained candidate with real commercial experience is often a better fit for a finance director role than someone with a purely technical, audit-trained background.

Look at the job spec itself, too. Ask whether every requirement on it is actually necessary or just habit copied from the last advert.

A spec that insists on ACA specifically, five years post-qualification and full-time office presence is filtering out a lot of exactly the people this data says are hardest to find.

Or stop running the search like it's 2018 more generally. Structuring for flexibility and moving fast once you find someone strong both matter more than they used to.

A generalist recruiter treats a financial controller vacancy the same way they'd treat any office hire. Post it, screen the CVs, send over whoever looks closest on paper. That approach worked reasonably well when the CIMA pipeline was fuller.

It doesn't work now. And the maths behind it has changed in ways most generalist agencies haven't noticed.

A specialist finance recruiter isn't simply working from a bigger database. They know which part of a shrinking pool is worth calling first, and which line in your job spec is quietly filtering out exactly the candidates a shrunk CIMA pipeline still produces.

What does this mean if you're hiring a financial controller or FD this year?

Budget more time than last time, even if last time was only two or three years ago. Be realistic about where the strongest candidates actually sit, qualification-wise, rather than defaulting to habit. And work with people who track this specific pipeline for a living, rather than treating a senior finance hire as a generic vacancy to fill.

We wrote more on getting the sequencing right in a piece on making your first finance leadership hire before you actually need one, which covers a lot of the same ground from the other direction.

None of this makes the search hopeless.

But the old approach, wait for CVs to land and hope the market sorts itself out, is betting against a pipeline that's been narrowing for a decade. Our finance recruitment team spends most days inside exactly this pool of financial controllers, finance directors and interim CFOs.

Send us the brief when you're ready. We'll usually be able to tell you within a conversation whether your shortlist expectations match what's actually out there right now, rather than what a generic job ad template assumes.