Eye on Privacy August Shows Slow Full-Time Hiring Speed, Abundant Contractor Opportunities

On August’s Eye on Privacy webinar, TRU Staffing Partners’ Founder and CEO Jared Coseglia was joined by guest host Robin Andruss, Chief Privacy Officer of Skyflow.

Coseglia noted that the topics in the slide above would be discussed on this month’s webinar and that he expected the hiring pace in the privacy industry to increase dramatically in the coming months. He reminded listeners that these monthly metrics help provide the privacy community with statistical as well as anecdotal intelligence on what’s happening in the job market and how the job market is behaving.

Coseglia: TRU has a busy roster of events coming up in the next month. If you want to meet with TRU Staffing Partners, be sure to attend one or more of the events noted in the slide below, or click here to see all of TRU’s upcoming events.

Now, we’ll look into the trends that TRU recruiters have been experiencing in the privacy job market. The first point of note is that the CPO job area has remained quiet – as it has for the past two years.

Robin, are you seeing a lot of movement out there? Or does your experience mesh what we are seeing in terms the amount of movement for CPO roles?

Andruss: I would agree with you on this. I think some of this lack of movement is that companies are just starting to realize what privacy jobs they need to create to accomplish their goals. Maybe a CISO has taken over the chief privacy role and responsibilities and they may need to realign that. As organizations start to see privacy become a more critical area, they will start assigning more budget to privacy and expanding the roles.

Coseglia: Agreed. One of the other trends we are noticing is that FTE roles are heavily advertised but filled less frequently.

That is relative to the number of contract roles we are seeing not advertised but regularly filled. There is a bit of dissonance between the two types currently. We’ve added up and down arrows to the chart above so people can see the changes. As you can see, the number of contractor roles has increased. We see full-time jobs out there but people aren’t taking them, they are being re-posted or re-advertised because hiring managers take a really long time to decide on a candidate. However you take a risk of losing a terrific candidate if you are overly diligent and wait too long to hire. This incredibly slow speed was the slowest I have ever seen in my career. Robin, I’m interested in your perspective on this.

Andruss: Between 2020 and 2022, there was a lot of hiring that happened very quickly. Then, in the privacy industry, there were a lot of layoffs. It takes a lot to hire the right privacy team and bring in all the right people. It’s smart that people are taking their time and using contractors to augment staff and get the work done in compliance. It’s good to think about hiring a person who can stay long term.

Coseglia: Robin, you were a hiring manager during the “Great Resignation” years. How do you approach hiring now as opposed to back then?

Andruss: I’ve always believed in hiring people I really want to work with, providing them with an interesting role, good compensation – I spend time finding the right fit for my needs and not rushing to make these important decisions. When you are hiring a lot of people at one time and you’re trying to ramp up quickly, you don’t always take into account all the right considerations.

Coseglia: Have you hired contractors and converted them to direct hires? What would you say are the things you are looking for to make that decision with a contractor?

Andruss: I have. It’s hard to hire a person with no experience in privacy while you are trying to fly the plane. The nice thing about working with contractors is that they are plug and play. There are a lot of experienced contractors now in 2024. The consideration for hiring them is the job to be done. It’s great when I can have someone come in with transferable skills and roll out whatever is needed. Converting them is a matter of working with them on their performance, making sure they are learning the subject matter, and determining how they fit into the organization. Then it’s nice because you have worked with a person instead of just interviewing them for a couple of hours.

Coseglia: We’re seeing a trend with contractors – they are increasingly desirable for currently open full-time roles. In June and July, we saw more of our contractors get converted to full-time positions than net-new hires. So the road to full-time employment in privacy may be straightest through a contract than by applying to jobs online.

We’ve mentioned this before but the next trend is that FTE speed of hire has reached its slowest pace of the year. These numbers shown below are the slowest the market has behaved in terms hiring managers making decisions all year long. Everyone seems to have taken the summer off.

And fully remote work in privacy is now 90% contract. That means that only 10% of the FTE direct hire jobs are 100% remote. The rest have some hybrid component. So unlike other industries, the data privacy community have more jobs nested in corporate America, where there is a need to be in an office at least one day a week. Not fully in an office, but a little more like pre-pandemic attendance.

Andruss: It is a little surprising that you said most of the privacy jobs are in corporations and not in consulting or law firms. It seems that there are a lot of privacy consulting firms out there.

Coseglia: It’s about a 75% corporate to 25% consulting firm/software/law firm ratio. Part of that has occurred in the last 24 months where consulting firms have spent less to get talent.

The last key trend is a change in candidate job-seeking motivation: innovation/buy-in (particularly around AI) has moved up to the No. 2 slot after burnout. Employment was at No. 2 but has dropped down.

Andruss: The pace of different privacy regulations is not slowing down. You really need to prioritize all the things coming at you. You really need to think about mitigating the privacy risks, dealing with AI, covering all the components of your job, it’s a lot to handle.

One of the other things we track is offer acceptance likelihood. This means that in a multiple offer situation, TRU recruiters track which job a candidate takes.

The statistic for accepting a first offer went up in privacy: if you are the first offer, you are more likely to get an acceptance from your candidate. This is really high and we don’t usually see numbers like this. It goes to show you that we are in the midst of a job drought. There just aren’t enough jobs to support the number of candidates looking. Are you seeing the same thing, Robin?

Andruss: I think your assumption is correct. It may be that candidates go down the path with one opportunity and feel passionate about it and want to see it through. During the Great Resignation, I’m sure this was completely reversed as candidates sought the best role and the best offer.

Coseglia: We have another data point to share: Remote/Hybrid vs. In Office, based on offers accepted. The dark blue bars show fully remote opportunities. These fully remote roles have increased and they are mostly contract roles.

All of today’s data points demonstrate the desirability of contract work in the current data privacy community climate. If you are more motivated by remote work opportunities, a faster speed of hire, want to work toward getting hired directly from a contract role, and seek great benefits from an organization like TRU Staffing Partners, you should look into contracting. Reach out to TRU Staffing Partners’ recruiters to learn more today.