What the Market Says About Your Next Hire

Welcome to the Harper May newsletter, a fortnightly snapshot of the UK senior finance hiring market, written by the people who do the placements.

No fluff, no filler. Just what we're seeing, what it means, and roles worth knowing about.

Live medians from the Finance Pay Index, our crowdsourced UK salary benchmark. Add your own numbers at financepayindex.com to unlock the full breakdown.

From our latest salary survey of senior finance professionals, figures shown are the cohort average.

Most PE-backed businesses between £50m and £150m revenue reach the same inflection point: the finance leader who built the function isn't the finance leader who can manage investor reporting, model exit scenarios, and hold their own in a boardroom with institutional capital. The gap is obvious in hindsight but easy to miss mid-cycle, and the cost of a mis-hire at CFO level in a PE hold period is measured in months of lost momentum, not just recruitment fees.

We recently completed a CFO placement for a £90m PE-backed business navigating exactly this. The mandate required someone who could professionalise investor reporting, lead the finance function through a growth phase, and position the business credibly for exit. The case study walks through how we scoped the brief, where the search focused, and what the first twelve months looked like after appointment.

If you're running a portfolio business or sitting on a board where the CFO question is live, or about to be, this is worth ten minutes. Read the full piece →

Most of the research a finance leader does is not deep, it is fast: what is this company, how big is that market, what has changed in a sector since last quarter. The slow part is trusting the answer.

Perplexity answers those questions in seconds and shows you where each claim came from, so you can check the source rather than take the model's word for it. For diligence prep, a board question, or sizing a new market, it is a faster first pass than a search engine and more trustworthy than a chatbot that will not cite anything.

The habit worth building: before any meeting where you will be asked about a company or market you do not know cold, spend five minutes with it and follow the sources. You walk in better briefed, and you catch the occasional confident answer the citations do not actually support.

We're working on 8 live vacancies across London, refreshed daily.

We're booking pipeline-planning calls for Q3 and Q4 mandates now, whether you're scoping a CFO succession, replacing an FD mid-hold, or trying to understand what the market will bear for a niche FP&A brief. Reply to this email or reach out to [email protected]. No pitch deck, just a conversation.