VP of Sales Scorecard
This hiring scorecard has been designed to help you map out your requirements for your key VP of Sales hire. Avoid costly hiring mistakes and make the right hire first time!
What is the role of a Chief Data Officer?
The Chief Data Officer (CDO) is a relatively new position compared to other C-level roles, with the first CDO being hired by Capital One in 2002. It was also initially a data governance-focused position.
However, driven by the increased importance of data to organisations across all industries, it has quickly gained importance over the past 5 years and the CDO has become more of a strategic and business growth oriented position.
A Chief Data Officer is responsible for building and overseeing a company’s data strategy, as well as the utilisation of data to drive business growth.
Other responsibilities include advising on and monitoring data for the purposes of governance, using data to drive digital transformation innovation and overseeing data analytics/reporting.
What qualifications are required to be a Chief Data Officer?
Similarly to most C-level positions in science and technology, the qualifications required to be a CDO vary based on the industry and size of the organisation; however, a typical path to becoming a Chief Data Officer would be obtaining a Bachelors degree in IT, data science or business, coupled with significant experience building and leading data teams (ideally both data scientists and analysts).
More recently, and especially in the financial services industry, academic requirements for CDOs have become more stringent with Masters or PhD-level candidates being preferred. Prime examples of organisations which look for this minimum educational background include hedge funds, family offices and insurance/InsurTech companies.
When is the right time to hire a CDO?
Chief Data Officers should often not be hired until a company has reached scale up stage, usually at least Series C. This is because the responsibilities of a CDO would initially be handled by the CTO of a company, before being passed onto a Head of Data or even Data Scientist (for smaller organisations).
Ultimately the goal of an organisation in hiring a CDO is that they have taken a strategic decision to be proactive when it comes to data management, and using that information to directly influence business growth strategies.
Experian’s data quality sophistication curve below explains this quite clearly where early stage organisations may take a more reactive approach when it comes to data (i.e. data cleansing) until around Series A, where they hire Data Analysts or Scientists to start to execute on a proactive data strategy.
In the next stage of a company’s growth, they may either choose to promote one of their data leaders internally or hire a CDO externally.
What Salary and Benefits Should I offer a Chief Data Officer?
The salary and compensation on offer will vary depending on your company size and stage of growth.
As previously mentioned, CDOs are often hired after Series B/C when companies start to take a more proactive approach to data, therefore, the salaries on offer may be out of reach for some early stage startups, unless hiring a Head of Data looking for a seat in the C-suite.
In terms of benefits, most companies have a bonus scheme in place linked to the function’s performance (in terms of meeting product release dates) or company performance. This is typically between 10-25% of the candidate’s base salary. Moreover, most fast-growing companies will also offer equity as part of their package.
| Growth Stage | Basic Salary |
|---|---|
| Seed-Series A | £100 – 120k |
| Series B | £120 – £150k |
| Series C | £150 – £200k |
| Series D | £200 – £250k |
| Public | £250k + |
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