Why Financial Communications Is the Hardest Hire You’ll Make in 2026 

A senior financial communications search now takes longer than almost any other comms hire we run. Boards want someone who can handle media relations, write clearly about complex products, navigate regulatory sensitivities and hold their own in a crisis. They want them senior enough to advise the board, but hands-on enough to turn around a press line at 7am. 

Sound familiar? 

We’ve worked on dozens of these briefs. And we’ll say it plainly: financial communications is one of the most technically demanding and genuinely rare skill sets in the communications market right now. Here’s why — and how to approach it if you’re building one of these briefs yourself. 

The Triple Threat: What Makes Financial Communications Hiring So Difficult

What makes financial communications uniquely difficult isn’t any single requirement, but the combination of non-negotiable ones. 

The first is financial literacy. Your hire needs to understand what they’re communicating about. Not just the headlines, but the mechanics behind them. What does a basis point change actually mean? How does a fund restructure affect retail investors differently from institutional ones? Without genuine financial fluency, even a polished communicator will get caught out — by a journalist, a regulator, or an executive who loses patience fast. 

The second is media and stakeholder judgment. This goes well beyond knowing which journalists cover what. It is the instinct to know when not to comment, how to manage a story that is building quietly before it breaks loudly, and how to brief a CEO who has never spoken to the FT before. That judgment takes years to develop and cannot be taught in an induction week. AI cannot replicate it either — this remains a deeply human discipline. 

The third is regulatory awareness, and it matters as much as the first two. In financial services, a misplaced word is not just a PR problem. It can be a compliance one. Your hire needs to understand the FCA’s expectations around financial promotions, what can and cannot be said around results periods, and when legal needs to be in the room. This is a constraint that communications professionals in other sectors simply do not face. 

Finding someone who does all three well — and who also fits your culture and seniority requirements — is a genuinely small pool. 

How the Financial Communications Market Has Tightened in 2026

Several forces have converged to make this harder than it was even two or three years ago.

Demand has increased. Public and political scrutiny of financial institutions has intensified, with continued questioning of how banks, asset managers and insurers communicate with their customers, regulators and the wider public. Boards that once treated communications as a support function now want it at the table. Senior roles have been created that did not exist five years ago.

Supply has not kept up. The pipeline of people entering financial communications from either direction — financial professionals learning to communicate, or communicators developing genuine financial fluency — is slow. It takes time to develop this profile, and there is no shortcut.

Retention has also become harder. The professionals who do have this skill set know their market value. Counter-offers are common. Notice periods are long. And unlike some sectors, poaching from competitors is complicated by confidentiality obligations and non-competes.

The Common Mistakes in Financial Communications Recruitment

• Writing a brief that lists everything. When every requirement is essential, nothing is. The best briefs we see are clear about the three or four things that are genuinely non-negotiable, and honest about what can be developed on the job.
• Benchmarking against the wrong market. Financial communications sits at the intersection of financial services and communications — both of which command above-market salaries. Benchmarking purely against a comms salary survey, or purely against a financial services one, will almost always produce a number that does not align with market expectations.
• Moving too slowly. This is the killer. Strong candidates at this level are typically in conversation with more than one organisation. A process that takes three months from brief to offer will lose people. The firms that consistently make the best hires run tight, decisive processes — two or three stages, clear timelines, and a decision-maker involved from the start.
• Overlooking non-obvious backgrounds. We have placed candidates whose CVs did not look like the brief but whose skills matched it exactly. One recent senior placement had spent four years in investor relations, two in journalism, and held an economics degree. The traditional comms route is rarely the only route to a great financial communications leader.

What Good Looks Like in a Financial Communications Hire 

If you are building a brief right now, here are the three things we would anchor on. 

• Genuine financial fluency — not just “comfortable with numbers” but able to read a set of results, understand a product structure, and spot a narrative risk before it becomes one.
• Crisis-tested judgment — have they actually been in the room when something went wrong? Can they describe, specifically, what they did and what they would do differently?
• Stakeholder credibility, or gravitas — do they communicate in a way that earns trust quickly with senior executives, legal teams and external journalists? This is harder to assess on a CV and easier to see in a conversation. 

A Final Thought 

Financial communications hiring is hard because it should be hard. The people who do this well are protecting something with real consequences — the reputation and licence to operate of institutions that millions of people interact with every day. 

Getting the hire right takes time, precision and access to a network that most internal talent teams do not have. That is not a criticism. It is the reality of a small, specialist market. 

If you are working on a senior financial communications hire, Allyson Kurian leads Hanson Search’s financial communications recruitment practice. Get in touch at allysonk@hansonsearch.com for a confidential conversation.