Sourcing A Data Protection Officer for Financial Services

Opportunity

We have been retained as the preferred search partner for data, cyber security and governance leadership roles by this international consumer and business financial services group for over 5 years. This type of relationship greatly enhances our ability to deliver our services as we get an improved level of insight into the organisation – its business objectives, structure, culture and most importantly the members of the senior leadership team. This mandate was for a new Data Protection Officer for the EMEA operations following a data breach.

Approach

We worked with the client to ensure that the person specification was clearly aligned to the businesses short and longer-term needs and that there was a clear understanding of the prevailing supply, demand and remuneration conditions in the market. It was agreed that a senior data protection professional was needed with a UK and European multi-jurisdictional reputation and a strong background in information security and project. Following agreement of a list of target clients we undertook to manage a recruitment process whereby we would conduct the search and then undertake the first round of interviews covering aspirations, CV discovery and agreed competency questions with weekly update calls as a minimum to keep the client informed of progress.

Outcome

Due to the highly competitive nature of the market and to mitigate the risks this level of competition posed to a successful outcome, we decided to utilise a rolling approach whereby we commenced work on a second shortlist as soon as the first had been passed over to the client. On this basis we successfully delivered two separate shortlists which gave the client enough candidates to work with to successfully appoint a high calibre and profile DPO with the required technical background to enhance the client’s data protection security and resilience within 2 months of commencing the search.