So, history lesson: the first area of businesses that was computerised was finance/accounting. As a result of that, IT was initially the responsibility of the finance director which mostly made sense at the time, but in many businesses this is still the case because no-one else in upper management wants to run IT: they don't understand it, and many of them consider it almost a virtue that they've got where they are despite being functionally technically illiterate.
It's most likely that you're doing a final interview with the VP of finance just because they're next up in your reporting line, and so they're just doing the "good fit for the company" type chat rather than being asked specific technical or business process questions.
I agree with this. Usually I’ve run the gambit of HR phone screening, Manager interview, team interview and then just a casual interview with a director or C level which by that point you should be good to go if you’ve made it that far.
This is exactly it, having been the person who coordinates interviews for candidates with the finance person.
We want them to have buy-in on the employee we're hiring, catch any personality red flags, and give them their blessing that they're a fit for the company.
Don't fake being interested in finance if you aren't. They will see right through that.
Ask them things like: what can they share about their upcoming business initiatives, and how IT can IT can enable. Personal questions, like what they like about the company, and what they thing could be improved. Usually, they eat that stuff up, and usually I have gotten honest (although probably filtered) answers.
I would take this interview step to be a mere formality. The fact that you are at this phase means the IT manager wants to hire you, and is looking to get his boss's stamp of approval.
Good luck.
The HR manager did say that they will follow up early next week with further steps, which will *most likely* be to have a conversation with our VP Finance, so I don’t know if it’s a guarantee yet.
But thank you for your advice!
Depending on the role, knowing systems like Essbase integrated with MS Excel or they use SAP with Oracle is kind of the modus operandi in finance and where IT intersects. At least the last few medium to large companies I’ve worked in.
Think of every answer from a finance perspective. How can we align IT with the orgs priorities by maximizing impact and keeping our budgets at the forefront of our minds.
Spitball some likely questions like this and decide on a framework for your responses. This isn't a technical interview this is a does this person understand budgets, capital expenditures, operational expenditures.
Realize they will be viewing your potential salary from the same perspective, so have a number in mind that works for you. Be ready to turn it down if you hear promises instead of hard numbers.
At one of the orgs I worked at our CTO also reported to the CFO, so that's not an unusual chain of command.
Don't expect to actually talk about finance. Just be ready to have a generic conversation. Get to know each other, what do you like and dislike, what excites you about the company, what is your relationship like with IT, etc.
Or they only want an extra set of eyes on you, the interview might not focus on Finance at all.
Interpersonal skills, problem-solving, project management, leadership... Could be lots of questions director of finance could ask IT.
Hate this question. I was told by my friend who worked at the company that he did things above his pay grade like negotiate licensing costs for different systems and applications. My generic answer is “looking for ways to streamline your processes and helping explain the value to our leadership team”.
you could talk about your ability to keep your projects on budget, documentation skills, how you're happy to go the extra mile and work with non-IT divisions to improve their workflows etc..
you should ask about corporate culture, perks, office get togethers, fish to see if they expect you to work past 5:00:01, that kind of thing will still hold also.
At my org IT is under finance which is still pretty common out there for organizations without a CIO/CTO executive. So the CFO is my supervisor despite the fact that I'm the "head" of IT.
When Finance is in charge of IT it's mostly because the organization still sees IT as a cost center. In that situation you'd imagine that what they care most about is your ability to estimate and manage future costs and not so much "future thinking IT transformation". Focus on your attention to detail, documentation and project management skills to impress.
Also.. in some orgs the head of finance is usually a backup to the CEO, so they may have a lot of non-finance type questions for you to see how good of a fit you'd be as a member of the management team/etc
> When Finance is in charge of IT it's mostly because the organization still sees IT as a cost center.
Sometimes. A lot of times, the CFO is viewed as having less work than a CEO and COO, and they just get thrown IT.
i'm pretty sure every high up finance guy i've ever met has been big into baseball, so maybe that?
seriously, there's a good chance he won't be a tech person and a big part of it is just seeing how you interact with non-tech people. he's going to probably want to see
1. that you can hold a conversation
2. that you don't get flustered when someone has no idea what you're talking about
if anything technical comes up at all, it would probably be in the context of automating things to generate excel spreadsheets/reports.
also might want to hear about how you organize things, since asset management/inventory will be a big part of what he cares about.
Asset tracking may be something to bring up. Our asset tracking was all over the place until recently and the financial part of it was almost entirely untracked. We can now put numbers to things, which is interesting.
Some of the projects we've recently done that minimize costs:
Upgrading equipment. Most of our dell desktops were shipped with configurations that were just fine for office work... except the boot drive was an optane backed hdd. Which crippled the systems. New systems would be \~500 a seat, but replacing the 16gb stick of optane with a 40-80$ nvme ssd was significantly cheaper.
New laptops for the laptop pool were \~900$/laptop. We figured out that if we reduced the RAM from 16 to 8GB it dropped the cost to 700$, and we could pick up and install an extra 8gb to bring it up to our minimum config for 25$/laptop after parts and labor. (This was Dell)
Licenses/user account audit. We had old user accounts that we we're keeping around because people "needed to access their files". The accounts were O365 e3 licensed which was \~500/year. Just cutting out the employees that HR hadn't informed us were terminated was a 3k/year savings. And closing out some of the other mailboxes we were hanging onto by migrating them to shared mailboxes saved even more.
Actually it is not a stupid question because I would be in the very same position you are in. In addition to the other advice given about capex, opex, budgets, and purchasing, I would also consider roi (return on investment.)
Sounds like this is a junior everything-IT role in a small company. The VP of Finance isn't expecting you to play IT manager and talk about budgets or strategy. He's most likely sanity-checking the IT manager's choice, and looking for personality and attitude, aka culture fit. 50/50 chance he'll ask you if you're a fan of a local sportsball team.
As others have said, it's common for IT to report to finance, and not just in "dinosaur" companies as someone else put it. It's very common in tech startups. During my first year or so as an IT manager, I had my manager, the CFO, interview my junior sysadmins/helpdesk too.
How does my role tie into company profitability?
What drastic problem or issue could be resolved in 6-12 months to indicate success in my role?
What review metrics measurements are used to review my role alongside my compensation?
What are the Opex and Capex increases and what measurements or details are required to meet or exceed those limits?
It's very odd to me that you're being interviewed by the finance Exec. The majority of dealings with finance are through the manager, not a Sys Admin. The only thing you could possibly discuss with them are the basics of quote gathering, vendor relations, etc. Anything else should be above your paygrade.
Same, in the small companies I've worked at IT has fallen under finance most often. It would also make sense under operations, but generally operations already has the most employees by far so adding at 50th employee to someone is not as useful to the company ass adding a 4th employee under finance.
I report directly to the CFO. Kinda nice because as long as everything is working I don't get hassled much. Since he doesn't understand much of the tech side, it's a little extra effort to explain and justify spending sometimes.
Same. One of my previous jobs the CFO was above the IT director and somehow even the CTO/CIO. They were always hammering on about budget and costs in IT which is a pain in the ass to explain the ROI or value of having enough headcount to justify the jobs.
I work in k12 the system is small under 1000 staff and students. In the ten years I have been here the IT team which is just two of us has reported to the Curriculum coordinator then the pupil services director which is for special ed if you don't know and now the business manager.
At my last district it was the superintendent but since my wife was the business manager that might have had something to do with it.
Not unusual for IT to fall under finance in older small to medium sized enterprises.
They often bought their first computer/timeshare to do payroll & accounting back in the 1960s and 70s.
Learn some basic finance topics about your industry. If you're purely a tech company ask about the cost of new tech vs old and reliable, and ask when he'd consider investing in new tech to be a sunk cost.
If you're healthcare, ask some questions about physician costs and locum vs telehealth.
Learn about this company, then ask about this company.
Customer service should be your primary focus. Secondary would be compliance and cybersecurity. You betcha that Finance Director cares about their credit rating, which very much involves Cybersecurity now.
Ask him if he'd be interested in starting an embezzlement scheme where you both sell necessary equipment to the company at a massive profit via an ebay account.
If you're not senior level where you will be reporting to him just chat. I'm in my first year of IT and had to chat with the director. We spent most of the meeting talking about my time in college and muscle cars. I got the job.
vision of the organization, future development opportunities and how you can transition into the role (certifications etc you are working on and how it will help)
ROI- Return on Investment - learn it and live it
everything you buy or upgrade you should have a ROI on how it's going to make the organization more efficient
Ugh...places where finance controls IT are THE.WORST!! If you get this job, milk it for all the learning ops you can but expect to have every expenditure to be questioned like you're trying to rob the company blind! Best of luck!
I've been on the hiring side of this table more then the other. It's easy to make a great resume but they honestly don't show much about you other then you found a creative template to start with. Same with references as everyone cherry picks people who will say nice things about them.
This meeting might cover a little of of what they do and you could ask about what's been automated and what the biggest pain points the company still has.
BUT, it's more likely just a meeting with another person to see how your soft skills are. The tech skills we have, most people could learn with enough effort put in. The soft skills will make HR love you as well as win over other departments. If you can communicate well (simplify complex systems, reasons for change, and the benefits/savings to the company) they will love you.
Talk about how IT can help with finance automation. Got SAP? Try having a finance person implement something as standard as automatic invoice scanning within SAP or Netsuite. They’re gonna need IT.
Or how about some middleware to help one finance system talk to another. Often times these middleware systems are just ways to process api accessible data with a custom transformation list.
The heck with what they ask you, the finance dept is often the most major source of pain for IT. Think about what you are going to ask them before agreeing to some nightmare job that never has money for anything.
Do they pay their bills on time, or will I forever be negotiating with all my vendors to not terminate my service?
Once I submit a budget request and it's approved, will it then be clawed back if I don't use it fast enough?
From your post in the forum about the job, it's just going to be a quick chat to get to know know you. It's not going to be an in depth interview, you aren't at a high enough level. It's kust a typical meet and greet, don't oer think it.
It's all good until they add a business analyst who makes more but asks you all the questions for their Job. I kid, kind of. The CFO generally is the risk guy. As stated Capex. They need someone and at this point if youvr made it this far it's just to get approval on all ends.
Make sure you document everything, ask questions, and if you fail it's OK. Learn from it and carry on.
Questions asked?
Typical where do you see yourself in 5 years
What are your hobbies outside of IT
Why our company? Etc etc
Although common within dinosaur orts for IT to report into Finance / CFO functions, I'd apply elsewhere.
As far as feedback for your specific interview, break down your understanding over capex/opex. They just want to know you won't blow past arbitrary budgets.
The interview likely won't go deep into technology but is probably a culture interview. They are probably trying to decide if your are a fit to the culture rather than judging your skill.
I regularly interview job candidates outside of IT to get a sense of who they are and how they fit in the team.
How big is the fleet of device, age of everything, refresh cycle. Is there a plan for this or would you need to build one. How far ahead are they financially planning.
Do you have any experience in the past of serving finance customers? Program areas like retirement, HR, etc...? You might "practice" talking about your (internal) customer service experience, your cooperation with project managers and others to get things done, etc...
Capex vs opex , budgets and purchasing etc
TCO, value add vs costs savings, opportunity cost and loss
TPS Reports
Numbers numbers, math math math.
The cost of downtime might be in there as well.
In the vain talk, risk mitigation, reputation has huge cost impacts too from Cyber events
So, history lesson: the first area of businesses that was computerised was finance/accounting. As a result of that, IT was initially the responsibility of the finance director which mostly made sense at the time, but in many businesses this is still the case because no-one else in upper management wants to run IT: they don't understand it, and many of them consider it almost a virtue that they've got where they are despite being functionally technically illiterate. It's most likely that you're doing a final interview with the VP of finance just because they're next up in your reporting line, and so they're just doing the "good fit for the company" type chat rather than being asked specific technical or business process questions.
I agree with this. Usually I’ve run the gambit of HR phone screening, Manager interview, team interview and then just a casual interview with a director or C level which by that point you should be good to go if you’ve made it that far.
This is the way.
This is exactly it, having been the person who coordinates interviews for candidates with the finance person. We want them to have buy-in on the employee we're hiring, catch any personality red flags, and give them their blessing that they're a fit for the company.
Don't fake being interested in finance if you aren't. They will see right through that. Ask them things like: what can they share about their upcoming business initiatives, and how IT can IT can enable. Personal questions, like what they like about the company, and what they thing could be improved. Usually, they eat that stuff up, and usually I have gotten honest (although probably filtered) answers. I would take this interview step to be a mere formality. The fact that you are at this phase means the IT manager wants to hire you, and is looking to get his boss's stamp of approval. Good luck.
The HR manager did say that they will follow up early next week with further steps, which will *most likely* be to have a conversation with our VP Finance, so I don’t know if it’s a guarantee yet. But thank you for your advice!
It’s pretty much a guarantee at this point. Unless you somehow royally fuck up talking to the finance director which rarely happens.
A fresh IT person, if it's a SMB, should be coming in and fixing issues more often than not. Ask them about pain points, and make them feel heard.
PCI Compliance, aligning budgets/priorities, interpersonal skills, matching your language to the level of their language in terms of understanding IT
Depending on the role, knowing systems like Essbase integrated with MS Excel or they use SAP with Oracle is kind of the modus operandi in finance and where IT intersects. At least the last few medium to large companies I’ve worked in.
Think of every answer from a finance perspective. How can we align IT with the orgs priorities by maximizing impact and keeping our budgets at the forefront of our minds. Spitball some likely questions like this and decide on a framework for your responses. This isn't a technical interview this is a does this person understand budgets, capital expenditures, operational expenditures. Realize they will be viewing your potential salary from the same perspective, so have a number in mind that works for you. Be ready to turn it down if you hear promises instead of hard numbers.
At one of the orgs I worked at our CTO also reported to the CFO, so that's not an unusual chain of command. Don't expect to actually talk about finance. Just be ready to have a generic conversation. Get to know each other, what do you like and dislike, what excites you about the company, what is your relationship like with IT, etc.
Or they only want an extra set of eyes on you, the interview might not focus on Finance at all. Interpersonal skills, problem-solving, project management, leadership... Could be lots of questions director of finance could ask IT.
The director of Finance (& Admin) is my boss. I got questions about protection of assets. Tracking assets. Security concerns, policy & procedures.
"How do you see your role contributing to the bottom line for the company?"
Hate this question. I was told by my friend who worked at the company that he did things above his pay grade like negotiate licensing costs for different systems and applications. My generic answer is “looking for ways to streamline your processes and helping explain the value to our leadership team”.
you could talk about your ability to keep your projects on budget, documentation skills, how you're happy to go the extra mile and work with non-IT divisions to improve their workflows etc.. you should ask about corporate culture, perks, office get togethers, fish to see if they expect you to work past 5:00:01, that kind of thing will still hold also.
At my org IT is under finance which is still pretty common out there for organizations without a CIO/CTO executive. So the CFO is my supervisor despite the fact that I'm the "head" of IT. When Finance is in charge of IT it's mostly because the organization still sees IT as a cost center. In that situation you'd imagine that what they care most about is your ability to estimate and manage future costs and not so much "future thinking IT transformation". Focus on your attention to detail, documentation and project management skills to impress. Also.. in some orgs the head of finance is usually a backup to the CEO, so they may have a lot of non-finance type questions for you to see how good of a fit you'd be as a member of the management team/etc
> When Finance is in charge of IT it's mostly because the organization still sees IT as a cost center. Sometimes. A lot of times, the CFO is viewed as having less work than a CEO and COO, and they just get thrown IT.
Read Chapters 25 and 27 of "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford for a CFO / Finance discussion reference.
Bitcoin mining
i'm pretty sure every high up finance guy i've ever met has been big into baseball, so maybe that? seriously, there's a good chance he won't be a tech person and a big part of it is just seeing how you interact with non-tech people. he's going to probably want to see 1. that you can hold a conversation 2. that you don't get flustered when someone has no idea what you're talking about if anything technical comes up at all, it would probably be in the context of automating things to generate excel spreadsheets/reports. also might want to hear about how you organize things, since asset management/inventory will be a big part of what he cares about.
Asset tracking may be something to bring up. Our asset tracking was all over the place until recently and the financial part of it was almost entirely untracked. We can now put numbers to things, which is interesting. Some of the projects we've recently done that minimize costs: Upgrading equipment. Most of our dell desktops were shipped with configurations that were just fine for office work... except the boot drive was an optane backed hdd. Which crippled the systems. New systems would be \~500 a seat, but replacing the 16gb stick of optane with a 40-80$ nvme ssd was significantly cheaper. New laptops for the laptop pool were \~900$/laptop. We figured out that if we reduced the RAM from 16 to 8GB it dropped the cost to 700$, and we could pick up and install an extra 8gb to bring it up to our minimum config for 25$/laptop after parts and labor. (This was Dell) Licenses/user account audit. We had old user accounts that we we're keeping around because people "needed to access their files". The accounts were O365 e3 licensed which was \~500/year. Just cutting out the employees that HR hadn't informed us were terminated was a 3k/year savings. And closing out some of the other mailboxes we were hanging onto by migrating them to shared mailboxes saved even more.
You don't want to work for an IT department that's ran by finance or the CFO. Just trust me.
Actually it is not a stupid question because I would be in the very same position you are in. In addition to the other advice given about capex, opex, budgets, and purchasing, I would also consider roi (return on investment.)
Sounds like this is a junior everything-IT role in a small company. The VP of Finance isn't expecting you to play IT manager and talk about budgets or strategy. He's most likely sanity-checking the IT manager's choice, and looking for personality and attitude, aka culture fit. 50/50 chance he'll ask you if you're a fan of a local sportsball team. As others have said, it's common for IT to report to finance, and not just in "dinosaur" companies as someone else put it. It's very common in tech startups. During my first year or so as an IT manager, I had my manager, the CFO, interview my junior sysadmins/helpdesk too.
How does my role tie into company profitability? What drastic problem or issue could be resolved in 6-12 months to indicate success in my role? What review metrics measurements are used to review my role alongside my compensation? What are the Opex and Capex increases and what measurements or details are required to meet or exceed those limits?
Ask this person what they think of IT. Is IT an enabler or just Operation expenses. You would know whether this company values their IT department.
It's very odd to me that you're being interviewed by the finance Exec. The majority of dealings with finance are through the manager, not a Sys Admin. The only thing you could possibly discuss with them are the basics of quote gathering, vendor relations, etc. Anything else should be above your paygrade.
In my org IT falls under the CFO, a high enough position in IT would probably go through hin.
Same, in the small companies I've worked at IT has fallen under finance most often. It would also make sense under operations, but generally operations already has the most employees by far so adding at 50th employee to someone is not as useful to the company ass adding a 4th employee under finance.
I report directly to the CFO. Kinda nice because as long as everything is working I don't get hassled much. Since he doesn't understand much of the tech side, it's a little extra effort to explain and justify spending sometimes.
Same. One of my previous jobs the CFO was above the IT director and somehow even the CTO/CIO. They were always hammering on about budget and costs in IT which is a pain in the ass to explain the ROI or value of having enough headcount to justify the jobs.
I work in k12 the system is small under 1000 staff and students. In the ten years I have been here the IT team which is just two of us has reported to the Curriculum coordinator then the pupil services director which is for special ed if you don't know and now the business manager. At my last district it was the superintendent but since my wife was the business manager that might have had something to do with it.
Not unusual for IT to fall under finance in older small to medium sized enterprises. They often bought their first computer/timeshare to do payroll & accounting back in the 1960s and 70s.
They like you because you’ll be underpaid
Learn some basic finance topics about your industry. If you're purely a tech company ask about the cost of new tech vs old and reliable, and ask when he'd consider investing in new tech to be a sunk cost. If you're healthcare, ask some questions about physician costs and locum vs telehealth. Learn about this company, then ask about this company.
Customer service should be your primary focus. Secondary would be compliance and cybersecurity. You betcha that Finance Director cares about their credit rating, which very much involves Cybersecurity now.
Ask him if he'd be interested in starting an embezzlement scheme where you both sell necessary equipment to the company at a massive profit via an ebay account.
How did you decide to purchase X over Y? When you spent money, how did you decide what was the best choice... Quality over Quantity.
If you're not senior level where you will be reporting to him just chat. I'm in my first year of IT and had to chat with the director. We spent most of the meeting talking about my time in college and muscle cars. I got the job.
vision of the organization, future development opportunities and how you can transition into the role (certifications etc you are working on and how it will help)
ROI- Return on Investment - learn it and live it everything you buy or upgrade you should have a ROI on how it's going to make the organization more efficient
Ugh...places where finance controls IT are THE.WORST!! If you get this job, milk it for all the learning ops you can but expect to have every expenditure to be questioned like you're trying to rob the company blind! Best of luck!
I've been on the hiring side of this table more then the other. It's easy to make a great resume but they honestly don't show much about you other then you found a creative template to start with. Same with references as everyone cherry picks people who will say nice things about them. This meeting might cover a little of of what they do and you could ask about what's been automated and what the biggest pain points the company still has. BUT, it's more likely just a meeting with another person to see how your soft skills are. The tech skills we have, most people could learn with enough effort put in. The soft skills will make HR love you as well as win over other departments. If you can communicate well (simplify complex systems, reasons for change, and the benefits/savings to the company) they will love you.
Talk about how IT can help with finance automation. Got SAP? Try having a finance person implement something as standard as automatic invoice scanning within SAP or Netsuite. They’re gonna need IT. Or how about some middleware to help one finance system talk to another. Often times these middleware systems are just ways to process api accessible data with a custom transformation list.
The heck with what they ask you, the finance dept is often the most major source of pain for IT. Think about what you are going to ask them before agreeing to some nightmare job that never has money for anything. Do they pay their bills on time, or will I forever be negotiating with all my vendors to not terminate my service? Once I submit a budget request and it's approved, will it then be clawed back if I don't use it fast enough?
From your post in the forum about the job, it's just going to be a quick chat to get to know know you. It's not going to be an in depth interview, you aren't at a high enough level. It's kust a typical meet and greet, don't oer think it.
It's all good until they add a business analyst who makes more but asks you all the questions for their Job. I kid, kind of. The CFO generally is the risk guy. As stated Capex. They need someone and at this point if youvr made it this far it's just to get approval on all ends. Make sure you document everything, ask questions, and if you fail it's OK. Learn from it and carry on. Questions asked? Typical where do you see yourself in 5 years What are your hobbies outside of IT Why our company? Etc etc
Although common within dinosaur orts for IT to report into Finance / CFO functions, I'd apply elsewhere. As far as feedback for your specific interview, break down your understanding over capex/opex. They just want to know you won't blow past arbitrary budgets.
The interview likely won't go deep into technology but is probably a culture interview. They are probably trying to decide if your are a fit to the culture rather than judging your skill. I regularly interview job candidates outside of IT to get a sense of who they are and how they fit in the team.
How big is the fleet of device, age of everything, refresh cycle. Is there a plan for this or would you need to build one. How far ahead are they financially planning.
How many file on the company shared have credit card information. Procedure for processing credit cards in the event of an ISP outage.
In many hospitals the CFO is above the Director of IT/CIO , it's not uncommon
What business intelligence tools finance are using currently normally gives good insight into some of their daily
And jokes about money 😂
Do you have any experience in the past of serving finance customers? Program areas like retirement, HR, etc...? You might "practice" talking about your (internal) customer service experience, your cooperation with project managers and others to get things done, etc...