96 Days Open, and a First Search That Should've Told Us Something
This week we looked at a real job posting for a Fund Accounting & Operations Manager. It's at a small, boutique investment firm. The posting's been live for 96 days.
We ran a first search based on what the posting asked for. We got back 47 candidates. Quick note: that's not 47 people who applied. That's just what our first search turned up.
And here's the thing — when a first search comes back under 100 candidates, that's not proof the market is thin. It's a sign the search needs work. We've learned to treat it that way every time.
Splitting the "Or" Into Its Own Candidate Pools
Buried in the qualifications was this line: 4-8 years in fund accounting, fund operations, or fund audit. On paper, that reads like three separate backgrounds. It's not quite that clean. The "fund operations" path isn't a standalone operations manager, it's a fund accounting manager who also knows operations. So two of those three listed paths are really the same base profile: someone who's done fund accounting.
We ran the two paths that actually stand on their own:
Fund accounting, supervisor or manager level, 4-8 years: 14 candidates
Fund audit at a public accounting firm, manager level, 4-8 years: 228 candidates
We didn't run the third path separately. It's not a new pool, it's mostly the same people already sitting in the first one. Didn't matter. 14 plus 228 is already 242 real candidates. The market was never small. Our first search just wasn't built to find them.
What's Actually Hard to Train for This Role, and What Isn't
Here's the part that matters more than any candidate count.
Fund accounting that holds up under an audit takes years to learn: partnership accounting, incentive allocations, knowing what an auditor's going to flag before they flag it.
You can't teach that in a few weeks.
Firm operations is different. Learning this firm's systems, its broker relationships, how its administrator likes things done — that's real, but it's just context. A good fund accountant picks it up fast.
The posting didn't separate those two things. It asked for deep, years-of-experience knowledge of fund accounting in the same breath as basic, weeks-of-experience knowledge of the firm's own systems, like they were equally hard to find. That's what made this role look harder to fill than it actually is.
The Math Behind Our 200-Candidate Rule
We use 200 qualified candidates as our rough line for calling a search reliably fillable. Not because we need 200 interviews. Because of what happens between "qualified" and "signed."
Some candidates never write back. Some are happy where they are. Some get a counteroffer the second they hand in their notice. Some take a different job while you're still interviewing them. None of that means anything's broken. It's just what happens to any real candidate pool over time. A pool of 3 or 5 can still close, but only if you get lucky.
242 candidates, from the two paths that actually stand apart, already clears our bar.
This One Doesn't Need Us
Here's the honest part, even though it works against us: this role doesn't strictly need a third party recruiter. It needs a job ad that asks for the right thing. Name the real bar, fund accounting that survives an audit, and be upfront that firm operations is something the new hire will learn on the job. Described that way, a job board can close this role in a few weeks on its own.
We can do it in under a week. Not because we have some secret pool of candidates. Because the sourcing work behind these numbers is already done.
Not every stalled search looks like this one. Some really are short on candidates. Some need a wider net across cities. This one just needed the ad to stop asking for something nobody needs to already know. The hard part is figuring out which kind of problem you actually have, and that's easy to get wrong when you're the one who wrote the posting.
TL;DR
A job posting for a Fund Accounting & Operations Manager sat open for 96 days.
Our first search only turned up 47 candidates. That's not proof the market's thin — under 100 on a first pass just means the search needs work.
Once we split the qualifications into the paths that actually stand apart, we found 242 real candidates.
The posting's real problem: it treated a skill that takes years (fund accounting that survives an audit) the same as a skill that takes weeks (learning one firm's systems).
Written properly, this role doesn't need a recruiter. A good job ad closes it in a few weeks. We'd do it in under a week.
Until Next Week
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Every week, we take an accounting or finance role that's been open for 90+ days, deconstruct the search, and rebuild it until there's a realistic path to making a hire—without sacrificing the capabilities that matter most.
Before You Launch Your Next AnF Search (Or Keep Struggling With The Current One)
If you're hiring now—or expect to be in the future—send us the job description.
We'll tell you:
• Whether the candidate pool actually exists
• What's limiting the search
• What a realistic path to a hire looks like
If it makes sense to work together, we'll run the search on a contingency basis.
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