In his early days with the company, the 46-year-old Castaneda says, he sometimes found finance employees by tapping into his own Rolodex -- including some former colleagues from his days at propane-grill gas "cylinder exchange" company Blue Rhino, like Primo based in North Carolina. At Blue Rhino, Castaneda worked as CFO with CEO and founder Billy Prim, who later moved on from Blue Rhino to start Primo Water in 2004. (Castaneda also had helped Prim take Blue Rhino public in 2005.)

But these days, Primo's finance recruiting effort in Winston-Salem is getting a hand from finance staffing firm Accounting Principals. The skills Castaneda needs -- varying from finance job to finance job, of course -- usually have been developed on the job, rather than in schools. "We're looking for people that can communicate well," he says. "That sometimes can be difficult with accounting. It's not just verbal; it's interpersonal communications. For one thing, we're communicating with our partners."

Concentrating on such "soft skills" in finance is an increasing part of the recruiter's job, says Kathy Gans, a Denver-based Accounting Principals senior vice president. "Usually, I see these skills through experience, not education," she says, because many universities still haven't learned how to train for these "real world" corporate needs. She says some of the best candidates she sees have distinguished themselves through volunteering for task forces at their prior companies, and getting involved with things like integration of new software systems.

Gans describes the job of outsourcing in that specialty recruitment field as "helping the leaders in the accounting and finance department to build their own teams" -- in a wide range of forms, and "all the way up to controller and CFO." CFO candidates, she says, increasingly need to have cross-disciplinary skills that give them broader company understanding. "To me," says Gans, "the CFO is no different from a CEO or a COO; the CFO has to have the same skill set as any executive and leader" at the highest level.

'Eight Values'