This year when Ford Motor Co. went outside the company for the first time in 70 years to hire a CFO earlier this year, he came with an impressive pedigree — a resume that included top jobs at Amazon Inc. and Snap Inc. He also came with a pedigreed sidekick: a chief furry officer.

Wander past Tim Stone's glass-walled office on the 12th floor of Ford's world headquarters in Dearborn on any given day and lying at his feet is his lively, 7-year-old Australian shepherd, Finley, who has his own name badge and sly "CFO" title bestowed by his owner.

No, Ford hasn't gone to the dogs, but one has breached the executive suite.

"He's got a very clear job description, which is: Spirits high and stress low," Stone explained to a group of Bloomberg editors recently in New York. "And he kills it every day!"

Finley is more than just a good boy. He is the C-suite mascot for a pilot program offered to 1,300 office employees at Ford allowing them to bring their dogs to work. It's part of a larger effort by the automaker to attract hard-to-get tech talent to the Motor City. Other worker-friendly initiatives include a less hierarchical campus redesign and restoring and converting the abandoned Michigan Central Station in Corktown, a rapidly gentrifying district west of downtown Detroit, into a modern office space.

Ford already has hired more than 3,000 workers with advanced computing skills, but it still needs hundreds more software engineers, data scientists, app developers, digital media specialists and more, Chief Talent Officer Julie Lodge-Jarrett wrote in a blog post Friday.

Seattle and Silicon Valley have long been veritable Fido fiefdoms, where tech giants and startups welcome workers' four-legged friends as a way to enhance work-life balance. Studies have shown that all-day access to man's best friend can reduce stress, improve productivity and possibly even curb employee turnover.

There's even a ranking of the most dog-friendly companies by a Seattle-based pet-service company, appropriately named Rover. The list is loaded with West Coast companies, while there are precious few Midwestern firms, and zero automakers.

Atop the list is Amazon, which has 7,000 registered dogs, giving it a human-to-hound ratio of 7-to-1. On its Seattle campus, the online retail giant offers doggy day care, grooming and canine lunch options at Just Food for Dogs and Puddles Barkery.