It always really intrigued me every time I was in the market looking for a new role or that had people approaching me when I was happily settled in a role. Doing compliance is by nature a challenging role. So much depend on people and culture and less on technical and subject matter expertise as there are so much grey areas to deal with.
I am going to attempt to untangle the challenges that come with the journey of becoming a new compliance officer for a new firm, especially small the medium size organisations where the compliance officer may be in a more stand alone position for the firm on the compliance front. Nowadays looking for a new role is usually based on making yourself known and available to recruiters considering the salary ranges that a compliance officer would attract, the roles tend to be placed with a recruiter to do the leg work on behalf of the company. So here you are, a qualified and fairly experienced compliance professional who is a subject matter expert but then have to somehow communicate their expertise to someone who is not on the same line of business.
How can you show off and stand out in comparison to other candidates that they speak to? Here is your chance to rely more on your personality, your gravitas and agile attitude to work and your business sense that will make you more attractive than what you know about ‘soft opt in’ right of GDPR.
Even if you are to go through the in house HR department to commence the process of screening and recruitment, sometimes you may feel like none of this is really serving any meaningful purpose until you meet the key decision makers of a business. The recruiters look at you as a valuable commodity, but time over time I have found myself in very challenging conversations with a recruiter, specially the less experienced ones when they cold call you and want to encourage you to apply for a certain role, when you know for sure the area of regulations the firm in question operate in is outside of the scope of your core strength and expertise.
Lets assume, you now have found the right role with the right job description that matches your past experiences and expertise. You have had positive feedback on your CV and you are invited for an interview. Some companies make the mistake of interviewing a candidate involving HR and senior management in the same meeting. I had a scenario couple of years ago where the head of HR was in the London office with me and the senior manager was on camera with us from another jurisdiction. The head of HR, naturally being in the room with me, took over majority of the question times and I spent a lot of the hour answering her, then the person on camera who was keen to know more of my professional expertise feeded back that as he did not get through everything he wanted to, he can not progress with the application.
For this sort of role like any other technical and professional role, firms can make the naïve mistake of getting you in front of someone who does not know much about compliance and what would be the unique selling point of you compare to other candidates they are recruiting. The candidate may never get the chance to shine their qualities and attributes before they are eliminated from the process. My recommendation would be to get HR involved with the process after the technical interviews have successfully been passed and if a firm is going through a recruiter, whilst it can be very useful to get someone external to screen loads of CVs for you, at the end of the day both the employer and the candidate really can make thoughtful decisions by sitting in front of each other and talk. If both parties choose authenticity and integrity in these early on conversations, very soon they both will know if this is the right match for them or not.
At the end of the day, time always show if people are good match for each other or not, as a candidate, specially in the line of compliance work, it is even more imperative to get this right. If the culture of the firm you get hired to, despite the size of remuneration, does not matches your idea of compliance and doing the right thing by choice then the relationship would either completely fail very quickly or that over time it will be become too difficult to cope with and grow within.