True's Privacy Transformation with Transcend

True, a leading recruitment platform, powers talent relationship management (TRM) for 500,000+ candidates and the search firms, enterprises, and VC/PE firms who use the, specializing in global recruitment for board members and executives.

Before Transcend, True faced tough operational challenges in managing candidate consent across their extensive database. Their distributed team relied on spreadsheets, emails, and individual hand-offs to identify where and how personal data was being collected and exchanged across teams, clients, and candidates. 

True also lacked a unified definition for when consent and how consent should be gathered during their data collection process. Combined, these factors created significant privacy compliance risk. 

With approximately 600 recruiters working internationally, the constant back-and-forth between candidates and recruiters demanded a different approach—one that streamlined the process end-to-end, while ensuring robust compliance. 

True’s recruiters are empowered to choose the tools they need to do their best work, but this freedom led to disparate technologies being used across teams and countries. 

This sprawling data ecosystem created a world where True’s Privacy, Security, and IT teams were forced to spend outsized time on vendor and security reviews, as well as data risk assessments. As True continued to grow, the manual workflows quickly snowballed. 

Compounding these operational challenges was the fact that compliance requirements, particularly the GDPR and evolving US privacy laws, require affirmative consent from candidates before sharing personal information with clients. Gathering this consent from a large candidate pool involved frequent email interactions, which made it difficult to maintain accurate records of consent across the True ecosystem. 

The True team knew they needed a better way to ask for and manage data collection preferences, so the search for a trusted privacy partner began. 

True first came to Transcend looking for ways to streamline consent management. They specifically wanted a vendor who could manage the complicated parameters of diverse tooling, a wide range of workflows, and different candidate lifecycle definitions by region. 

“We came to Transcend with, what in our minds were, complicated parameters unique to our global business. They not only assured us that their tool could be customized for these unique use cases, but that they had seen and dealt with similar complexities in other businesses” says Alex Johnatakis, Security and Privacy Engineer at True. 

“Between the tool’s extensibility, their team’s breadth of experience, and their speed (in the time it took other vendors to respond to our emails, Transcend completed scoping our implementation and was ready to deploy!), selecting Transcend was a no brainer.” 

True’s Privacy, Security, and IT teams were able to unleash immediate benefits after deploying Transcend Consent Management: streamlining their consent workflows, offering a customized brand experience, and implementing the solution quickly, despite complex business requirements. 

Streamlined Processes: By leveraging the Transcend API to bulk upload large quantities of candidate data requests (including all associated metadata), True was able to significantly simplify their consent request process. Compared to their manual workflow alternatives, True was able to save approximately 60 hours per week across all functional practices and regions by implementing in Transcend. 

Customized Branded Experience: From True’s Privacy Center and consent interface, to candidate email communications, every end-user touchpoint was easily customized to fit True’s overall look and feel. These branded surfaces enabled True to offer an embedded privacy portal to their 100,000 candidates, and deliver a delightful data rights fulfillment experience to over eight thousand candidates. Plus, it was a nice cross-functional win with their Marketing counterparts!

Ease of Implementation: Transcend's ability to integrate with diverse tools and accommodate different geographical requirements helped the True team deploy Transcend Consent Management quickly and seamlessly, despite intricate business requirements. Providing white-glove support, Transcend’s customer success team helped True’s Privacy, Security, and IT teams implement the full platform, train the broader team, and customize functionality to meet business needs. 

With Transcend Consent Management, True was able to operationalize their data collection processes, ensuring job candidates gave consent before any personal data was shared with clients. This began with standardizing process stages across a candidate’s lifecycle, mapping those stages to their database schema, and defining them in the Transcend platform. The True team began this implementation in their EU markets, following GDPR requirements, and have since enabled consent management across their US audiences as well. Since configuring different regional experiences is quick and straightforward in Transcend, they were able to rapidly launch unique experiences per region. Now, True is collecting and honoring consent preferences for both candidates and site visitors across their global base.

While True initially turned to Transcend for help with immediate consent management challenges, they have since adopted the full Transcend platform, helped to:

• Uncover disparate tools and assess vendor risk using Transcend Silo Discovery 

• Launch a branded Privacy Center that allows True’s candidates to self-serve data rights

• Automatically fulfill data access, deletion, and opt-out requests with Transcend DSR Automation

• Map DSR attributes to the Transcend API using Transcend Developer Tools to—enabling the team to upload data subject requests in parallel and gracefully resolve any errors found

Like most businesses, True grapples with a shifting regulation landscape and demanding business requirements. The flexibility of Transcend's platform, which offers the ability to accommodate different workflows, definitions, and edge cases, was a crucial factor in True's decision to select Transcend.

“As our business evolves, we know we regularly need to reassess or tweak privacy and governance workflows.” Johnatakis said, “Answering the question, “How would we do that in Transcend?” has always been the easy part of that equation.”

By adopting Transcend, True alleviated significant operational burdens, especially around the complex workflows needed to manage candidate consent across their global business. Transcend’s flexibility and customization empowers the teams at True manage regulatory risk and meet compliance requirements in a way that powers efficiency and scalability now, and into the future. 

"Modern companies are constantly faced with the reality that privacy is just one of many business imperatives that needs resourcing. It’s critical that Privacy, Legal, and Security teams have flexible technology that can be tailored to bespoke requirements, whether that’s by business unit, geographical region, or existing tech infrastructure.” said Mike Farrell, Transcend co-founder and CTO. “Our partnership with True represents a mutual commitment to innovative privacy solutions that make data governance simple for any company, no matter their distinct operating environment or business parameters. We’re proud to help True mitigate regulatory risk and enable scalable business growth."