At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead crisis response efforts and design exercises to enhance organisational resilience.
- Company: Dynamic risk and resilience consultancy focused on real-world impact.
- Benefits: Competitive daily rate, remote work, and the chance to shape crisis management strategies.
- Other info: Opportunity to work in a fast-paced environment with significant career growth potential.
- Why this job: Make a difference by ensuring organisations can effectively respond to crises.
- Qualifications: Experience in crisis response and ability to communicate with senior leadership.
- Crisis and Event Response Lead
- 6 Contract, outside IR35
- Remote
I'm supporting a growing specialist risk and resilience consultancy that is looking to hire a Crisis and Event Response Lead on an outside IR35 contract.
When an institution is disrupted, two things happen at once.
The visible fight is fixing what broke.
The quieter one is keeping the organisation viable while that happens.
Most firms have rehearsed their leadership team.
Very few have rehearsed the specialists doing the technical work, or the third parties who often decide how quickly anything is restored.
This role closes that gap.
The role
- Assess where an organisation's response will fail, and set it out in terms an executive committee can act on. Named failure points, not maturity scores.
- Build the structures that let people decide under pressure: delegated authority that is real, roles that have been rehearsed rather than assigned, and coordination that holds when the room is full of people who each believe they are in charge.
- Get the difficult questions settled in advance and in daylight, so the hardest calls are not being made at three in the morning.
- Design and run exercises that test the specialist response and the third party response, not only the leadership tier.
- Hold the discipline of situational awareness in a live room, separating what is known from what is believed from what is professional judgement.
- Establish how the organisation keeps planning its recovery while it is still responding, holding current operations and future operations as parallel workstreams.
- Define, in advance, the conditions under which a response stands down.
- Convert what happened into embedded change, then verify the change took hold.
The measure of success is whether the organisation can run a serious event without you in the room.
- What they are looking for
- You have been inside a real event while it was still running, on the response side, with responsibility. Not the review afterwards.
- You have designed and facilitated exercises yourself, for people more senior than you, including exercises that departed from the script.
- You can hold a room you do not outrank, and tell a chief executive something unwelcome at the moment it is least welcome.
- You understand why capable, senior people escalate rather than decide, and you can identify the missing condition rather than diagnosing a training gap.
- You can write for a board. Short, concrete, landing on a decision.
- Working knowledge of the UK operational resilience framework, including SS1/21, PS21/3, SS2/21 and DORA, alongside FCA and PRA expectations on technology, cyber and change risk.
- Experience in UK regulated financial services, ideally with PRA supervised firms.
- What would strengthen your application
- Technology recovery fluency: enough to hold a credible conversation with a CIO or infrastructure lead about sequencing and dependencies without needing to be the engineer.
- Third party and supply chain response experience.
- Coaching and debriefing skill, running a debrief that produces honesty rather than defensiveness.
- Baseline standards literacy across Cyber Essentials, NIST CSF and ISO 27001.
- CRISC, CISM or CISA, or formal internal audit training such as IIA or ACCA.
- What this role is not
- A documentation role. Plans, policies, frameworks and business impact analyses are not the output.
- A crisis communications role. Communications is one component of a response and this is not it.
- Exercise facilitation from a standard scenario library. Facilitation matters here, but it is the smallest part of the work.
Please message me directly if you would like to discuss the role, or feel free to share it with someone in your network.
Crisis and Event Response Lead in Aberdeen employer: LT Harper Recruitment Group
Join a dynamic and innovative risk and resilience consultancy that prioritises employee growth and development, offering a collaborative remote work culture where your expertise in crisis management will be valued. With competitive daily rates and the opportunity to lead impactful projects, you'll play a crucial role in shaping organisational responses to crises while enjoying the flexibility of remote work. This is an excellent opportunity for professionals seeking meaningful and rewarding employment in a supportive environment that encourages continuous learning and professional advancement.
Contact Details:
LT Harper Recruitment Group Recruitment Team
