Compliance Job Market: One Person’s Tale

I had a phone call the other day with my friend the Job Applicant. This person is looking for a senior-level compliance officer position, and having a rough go of it lately. Their experiences are telling about the compliance job market today, so with the Job Applicant’s permission, I am sharing them here. 

First, let me say that the Job Applicant is a strong candidate. Many of you would know this person by name. They (I’m masking the gender here) have worked at multiple large organizations in senior compliance roles, and spoken on webinars about how compliance functions should run. Their resume boasts an impressive range of skills. This person would be a plausible CCO for any large business.

Tale No. 1. Job Applicant actually had been hired as an interim CCO at a large healthcare concern when the full-time CCO had resigned suddenly after only a few months on the job. Job Applicant wanted to be hired as the permanent successor, and recruiters at the company seemed favorable. “We love you for this,” they said. 

Then nothing happened. The recruiting process stalled. After a few months grinding away as the de facto CCO, Job Applicant woke up one day to find the chief executive officer sacked. The general counsel, to whom Job Applicant had been reporting, subsequently resigned. Several days later, federal authorities filed a fraud lawsuit against the company — which nobody had ever mentioned to Job Applicant. They soon left the company too.

Tale No. 2. Now looking for work again, Job Applicant interviewed with a professional services firm that had an open CCO role. They interviewed numerous times with the firm, and again recruiters promised, “We love you for this.” Then, radio silence. 

After one or two follow-ups from Job Applicant, the firm confessed it was “going in a different direction.” Then came news that the general counsel had resigned amid allegations of professional misconduct. The CCO job is now on hold while the firm gets a new general counsel on board.

Tale No. 3. While interviewing with the professional services firm, Job Applicant was also talking with a consumer products business for another CCO role. After several rounds of interviews, Job Applicant was one of three finalists — and then the general counsel, who had been running the interviews, stepped down after only about 18 months on the job. So again, the CCO role is on hold while the company resolves its general counsel mess. 

I have confirmed the veracity of all three tales; Job Applicant is telling the truth. So what lessons can the rest of us glean from their experiences? 

Compliance vs. Legal, Yet Again

Clearly one lesson is that the relationship between compliance officer and general counsel is as fraught as ever. 

For example, we can all say until we’re blue in the face that the ethics and compliance shouldn’t report into legal; and that it should be a function separate and apart from legal, where the chief compliance officer reports directly to the CEO. I’ve made that argument countless times myself. 

The plain truth, however, is that (1) many companies still do have compliance report into legal; and (2) even at companies with the wisdom to keep the two functions separate, legal still needs to participate in the CCO hiring process. A CCO candidate is always going to be at the mercy of who the general counsel is and what that person wants the compliance function to do. 

My fear is that this fraught relationship gums up the career path of compliance professionals and turns them off from the profession. For example, several years back I knew a compliance officer who quit her very stable job at a very stable company, to be chief compliance officer at another company — and reported to the general counsel. Nine months later that GC was replaced, and the new GC promptly decided to integrate the legal and compliance functions. The compliance officer lost her job, thanks to a general counsel who sent a gale force wind into her career path. 

I understand that all career moves involve risk, and that companies do merge, restructure, and downsize all the time. But so long as the larger corporate world keeps vacillating on whether the compliance function is or isn’t part of the legal function, that’s an extra level of instability that can spook plenty of promising compliance officers onto different career paths. 

It’s a sad fact of the profession. If you have ideas on how to change it, I’d be eager to hear them at [email protected]. 

Compliance Officers Sidelined

I also keep coming back to Job Applicant’s first tale, about the company that had them serving as an interim CCO and interviewed them for the permanent job, while senior management was under investigation for fraud. 

How does that happen? Well, it happens when senior management isn’t truly interested in a culture of ethics and compliance, but does want a compliance program as nice window dressing. So everyone goes through the motions of running a program and interviewing CCOs, all while not really caring whether that program actually works.

Unfortunately, that still happens all too often in the corporate world too.

Perhaps we might even connect our two lessons here. That is, when a company does structure the compliance function as something separate from legal, that’s a sign that senior management takes a culture of ethics and compliance seriously. Such leaders are probably less likely to tolerate misconduct in the organization or engage in it themselves. That’s the company you want to work for.

I still have high hopes that my friend the Job Applicant will find a CCO job eventually. They certainly have had a run of bad luck, and that can’t last forever. 

But their experiences do offer a window into the travails — mercurial, frustrating, disappointing, and sometimes even astonishing — that compliance officer candidates must endure. I hope those don’t last forever either.