DES Recruitment Fills CIO Post for Eurasia Group

January 12, 2017 – Executive search firm DES Recruitment has placed Ida Wainschel Cools as chief information officer of Eurasia Group. She becomes the first woman to hold the position as the organization continues to innovate and expand service offerings around geopolitical risk research and consulting. John Hodge, DES managing partner, led the assignment.

As a key member of the executive committee overseeing strategic business management, Ms. Cools will create, drive and manage Eurasia Group’s digital platform as it relates to the company brand and the organization’s desire to be best-in-class in the way in which it engages customers and the market with insightful, innovative and automated products and services.

Eurasia Group was seeking an executive with a background as both a leader and hands-on practitioner delivering technology solutions to drive its business initiatives.

Mr. Hodge noted that the interview team was focused on finding an executive with experience in IT operations, IT strategy development & execution, product development & management, “and an understanding of the business of political risk analysis.”


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Building Partnerships

Ms. Cools brings a wealth of experience to Eurasia Group, having most recently spent over 10 years with Dun & Bradstreet. She has led the conception and design of new products and offerings and marketed and managed worldwide launches for those products.

“Building partnerships with internationally respected and sought-after firms like Eurasia Group is meaningful to us,” said Mr. Hodge. “To be able to influence and add value to a company as they bring forward new products and services and to help them find the top technology talent to make this happen is what we do.”

Eurasia Group is the world’s largest political risk consultancy. Founded in 1998 by Ian Bremmer, it has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Stamford, London, Tokyo, São Paulo, and San Francisco, and has more than 150 full time employees. The company employs a network of 500 experts in 90 countries in Asia, Latin America, Europe and Eurasia, and the Middle East and Africa.

CIOs In Demand

CIO hiring and recruiting information technology teams are both on the rise. Nearly a quarter (22 percent) of U.S. CIOs plan to expand their IT teams, according to a Robert Half Technology ‘IT Hiring Forecast Trend Report.’ It represents a three point rise from the beginning of last year and an eight percentage point jump from one year ago.

“Today’s CIO needs to innovate, build and secure. Having the ability to ‘see around the corner’ is the hard-to-find differentiation,” said Mr. Hodge. “We have seen a significant demand for CIOs because the need to deliver analytics in real time, driving new products out to the market and creating secure environments that limit enterprise risk has accelerated.”

Organizations are getting the green light on more technology projects, prompting them to make strategic hires, said John Reed, senior executive director of Robert Half Technology. “However, technology leaders continue to struggle to find highly skilled talent in a market with low unemployment. They seek IT professionals with specialized skills, especially in the areas of cloud computing, data analytics, mobile strategies and cybersecurity.”

CIO Recruitment Experts

For the past 15 years, DES Recruitment has identified and attracted senior level executives for clients nationwide. Mr. Hodge has over 20 years of experience in management consulting, business development and executive search for a broad range of clients within the technology, life sciences, manufacturing and financial services markets. The firm’s clients range from leading enterprise software firms to big four professional services companies, global agro-chemical organizations and venture capital-backed technology startups.

Just recently, the firm found a new CIO for Genex Services, a chief technology officer for Telerx, and a chief information security officer for Constellation Brands.

Contributed by Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor, Hunt Scanlon Media

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