Attention to Talent: Payroll

Attention to detail underpins any accounting and finance function. But it is attention to talent that has to be the core skill of any hiring manager, and payroll is one of the clearest places where that discipline gets skipped.

The system trap

At some point over the last decade, the specific payroll system a candidate has used became more important than their IQ and EQ in far too many hiring decisions. The tools are undeniably getting bigger, better and more sophisticated, and yes, prior exposure means one less thing to train. But a system is still just a tool. The right person with the right background in payroll can learn a new platform as effectively as anyone else, given a reasonable runway. Everyone had to learn their first system at some point.

Hiring purely on system experience has a real cost. Plenty of payroll teams have brought in someone who looked perfect on paper because of the platform they had used, only to find them unproductive, or worse, disruptive, once the novelty of the tool match wore off.

What actually predicts success

Payroll is a profession of high interaction, applying complex and often changing rules under real time pressure. It also has more entry pathways than most finance functions, which means strong teams are built from people with very different academic and professional backgrounds.

Assuming the payroll background itself checks out, the better question to assess is simple: does this person have the intelligence and the emotional intelligence required to succeed in this team, working with these stakeholders, under these conditions?

What to do differently

If a brief is built strictly around a specific system, whether that is SAP, Chris21, Kronos, ADP or Micropay, it is worth removing that filter and broadening the pipeline immediately. Focus instead on what actually works for the team, the wider business, and where the function needs to go next.

Part of being an effective manager, and a genuine source of satisfaction in the role, is watching people grow into a new system rather than simply inheriting one. Framed well, that learning curve is not a training cost. It is a genuine selling point to strong candidates who might otherwise not be interested in the role.