A Tier-1 Ontario bank needed to stand up a risk, compliance and legal function ahead of a regulatory deadline, running three concurrent retained searches at once — Head of Risk, Deputy General Counsel and Director of Compliance — with no internal recruiting bandwidth to run them in parallel.
Each of the three roles required a different specialist background, and the bank could not afford a search that treated them as interchangeable finance hires. It had tried a national staffing portal for a similar build the year before and received volume without the licensing or regulatory fit it actually needed.
Rivago assigned one partner as the single point of contact across all three searches, with dedicated finance and legal practice specialists doing the sourcing for each. All three briefs were calibrated in a single joint intake session with the bank's CRO, so the scorecards stayed consistent even though the roles didn't.
Direct outreach — not postings — generated the entire pipeline across all three searches. References were checked two levels deep on every finalist, not just the most recent manager.
Once the three anchor hires were in place, the engagement expanded into a broader build-out: eleven additional placements across the function over the following months, each search run against a brief the new leadership team helped write.
“They didn't just fill three seats — they helped us figure out the shape of the team we actually needed, then built it with us one hire at a time.”
All three anchor roles were filled inside the 60-day cycle, ahead of the bank's regulatory deadline, and the full 14-person build-out has a zero-replacement record to date. The bank has since returned to Rivago for two additional confidential searches at the VP level.
Send the brief and a partner in the right practice comes back with a written plan within one business day.