Onboarding and Offboarding Executives - Navigating Digital Risk
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septembre 03, 2025
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With corporate data now existing as a valuable and vulnerable asset, onboarding and offboarding employees have become sensitive, complex and critical activities. In the context of digital risk and investigations, effective onboarding helps new employees integrate seamlessly into an organisation, while thorough offboarding mitigates potential exposures and protects corporate data. This is particularly important for senior executives, where added complexities and heightened digital risk considerations demand careful management.
Onboarding Senior Executives: Reviewing Social Media and Online Presence
As part of onboarding, it is critical to assess an executive’s unique working habits, including preferred communication channels, device usage, collaboration tools and data handling practices. Executives often bring established ways of working that may not align with the new employer’s security posture, compliance requirements or acceptable use policies. Identifying these habits early enables tailored guidance, configuration of secure alternatives and proactive risk mitigation. The objective is to ensure that secure practices are enforced and also embedded in a way that supports productivity and executive autonomy.
An often overlooked aspect of onboarding senior executives is reviewing their social media and online presence to identify any public online content that could potentially harm the organisation once they become part of leadership.
Organisational harm can include reputational damage caused by an executive’s online content, expressed views or past actions. It can also heighten cybersecurity risks if publicly available information is available for exploit via social engineering or impersonation attacks against the organisation, employees or customers. Executives should be briefed on deepfake and impersonation risks, including securing verified social handles and verifying social media profiles before they start.
Notably, artificial intelligence tools can now scan public profiles and contextual risk signals such as sentiment trends, influencer associations or dormant posts that algorithms may resurface. Reputational velocity should be considered: even old posts can quickly resurface through generative search engines or activist accounts once an executive is appointed.
Just as background checks should be conducted on new employees to help minimise fraud risks, online background checks offer similar value. They allow proactive mitigation of concerns and a starting point to work with the executive to cleanse or update their online profiles before joining, protecting the brand and supporting a smooth overall transition. In certain government roles, successful applicants are required to disclose their online aliases and associated email addresses. It’s not a stretch to imagine more corporations adopting a similar level of digital due diligence, particularly for roles where reputation, risk and public trust are at stake.
Non-Contentious Offboarding: Protecting Data Privacy and Security
When offboarding is smooth and cooperative, organisations should focus on the following key areas:
- Identify and remediate personal data, such as photos and personal messages, from corporate devices.
- Locate company confidential data on personal devices to help maintain data privacy and security.
- Untangle intertwined personal and professional online accounts to prevent the departing employee from accessing sensitive corporate information. For example, a work email used to register for personal services or if an executive assistant managed personal and professional passwords in shared vaults.
- Review and wind down off-channel communications, such as WhatsApp or WeChat. Identify executive participation in informal messaging groups used for business purposes. Ensure that appropriate records are retained where required and group admins are updated to remove access post-departure.
- Include all devices in offboarding risk assessments, beyond laptops and smartphones, such as tablets, digital notepads, voice assistants and wearables. They often contain a mix of personal and confidential business data that must be securely handled to protect corporate information while respecting executive privacy.
- Manage multi-factor authentication (“MFA”) risks by addressing the use of personal devices and phone numbers as MFA points. Provide and uphold clear policies, multiple recovery options and backup methods to prevent losing access to critical accounts when an executive departs.
- Update or cleanse social media profiles to reflect the departure, ensuring the organisation’s digital presence remains accurate and professional. Market communications and social media releases are also essential to keep stakeholders informed of the change and maintain transparency.
- Proactive post-exit monitoring of social and digital channels for up to six months can help detect emerging reputational issues, including activist commentary or speculation about the executive’s departure.
- Use Search Engine Optimisation (‘SEO’) and Generative Engine Optimisation (‘GEO’) to ensure accurate and updated corporate content ranks highly in search results, reducing the risk of misinformation gaining traction.
Additionally, it’s not uncommon for executives to have shared data on mobile devices or to forward professional information to personal accounts. This level of trust and integration can make the offboarding process more complex, as it requires careful separation of personal and professional data without unnecessarily disrupting the executive’s personal life, impacting their privacy or compromising the organisation’s data security.
By acknowledging and addressing these unique challenges, organisations can ensure smooth and respectful transitions for all parties involved.
Identifying and Securing Personal Accounts With Enterprise Access
In the early stages of an organisation’s founding, especially when an executive is a founder, personal accounts are often linked to the enterprise, often to help lower technical barriers amid rapid change. However, as a company grows, these personal accounts can be forgotten. During offboarding, it’s easy to assume the executive has only one user account, but they may have multiple accounts, like personal webmail, with lingering access to enterprise systems. Though often overlooked, these accounts pose security risks if not properly managed. A thorough review and full revocation of all linked accounts is essential to protect the organisation long term.
Executives Holding Board Positions: Navigating Data and Liability
More senior executives now hold board positions, whether representing their employer or serving independently. Each scenario introduces distinct considerations around data ownership, confidentiality and personal liability.
When executives are appointed to a board as representatives of their employers, they carry personal fiduciary and legal responsibilities with that board role. However, any related information or materials, such as board packs, minutes or internal communications, are generally considered the property of the employer, not the individual. These materials must be handled in line with the employer’s governance, retention and data protection protocols, and remain recoverable and auditable in the event of departure or investigation.
When an executive holds a board role in a personal capacity, it’s important to identify any corporate systems and devices used to manage or store related data. Mixing personal board responsibilities with corporate infrastructure creates risk, particularly during offboarding.
Contentious Offboarding: Forensic Imaging and Post-Exit Monitoring
When offboarding becomes contentious, extra measures are often needed to protect the organisation. These include:
- Create forensic images of the departing executive’s devices and accounts to preserve data for potential investigations. While this is now common practice for exiting executives or high-risk roles, analysing that data requires careful consideration, legal approvals and guardrails to prevent unnecessary privacy infringements.
- Use AI-driven behavioural analytics to flag unusual pre-exit activity patterns, such as spikes in data downloads or unusual off-channel communications, helping identify risks or misconduct as quickly as possible.
- Deploy social listening tools using advanced sentiment and keyword tracking to detect real-time reputational attacks or breaches of non-solicitation agreements.
- Analyse the captured data (where approved) to uncover signs of collusion, intellectual property theft, workplace behaviours and breaches of non-solicitation agreements or director duties. Post-exit social media monitoring can help confirm that the former employee complies with any applicable contractual obligations.
- Address off-channel communication platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat or Signal, which typically operate outside sanctioned corporate systems and often lack enterprise-grade logging, auditing and archiving. These tools can make it difficult or impossible to reconstruct key conversations or decisions involving the departing executive. In regulated industries, failure to produce relevant communications can lead to compliance violations, legal exposure and reputational harm.
The key lesson is preventative: organisations should enforce clear policies prohibiting off-channel messaging for business purposes, while providing approved communication tools that are secure, monitored and capable of retaining records essential for governance, compliance and investigations.
AI Digital Twins and Their Impact During Offboarding
As technology advances, some executives are using AI digital twins. In this context, a Digital Twin is a virtual replica of a person or position that can simulate behaviour, preferences and decision-making styles to help streamline workflows. When an executive who uses an AI digital twin leaves the organisation, questions of ownership and data rights become paramount. These concerns are especially complex when the AI digital twin is uniquely tailored to reflect the individual’s persona and decision-making approach.
In these cases, separating personal characteristics and company-confidential information embedded within the model is not straightforward. Emerging techniques like model unlearning, data redaction and targeted cleaning offer some support, but they remain immature and lack standardisation. As a result, most onboarding or offboarding processes fall short of enabling defensible separation between personal and professional inputs within AI models.
If the digital twin was designed to support the business and any executive in a specific role, ownership post-exit can be relatively straightforward, typically favouring the organisation. In this scenario, the business may continue using the digital twin to preserve the executive’s legacy knowledge for future leaders and refine decision making and executive actions of the role to align with the company’s risk profile.
An emerging challenge in Australia is the evolving nature of personal rights. If the second tranche of the Australian Privacy Act introduces the right to be forgotten, any content within an AI model that qualifies as personal or sensitive information would fall under strict retention rules. This would require the data to be destroyed or de-identified in accordance with an organisation’s data retention schedule, once the original purpose for its collection has expired.
Digital twins can also continue to “speak” in the executive’s voice after they leave, posing a reputational risk if they are not properly deactivated or aligned with new leadership.
Generative AI, Social Media and the Next Frontier of Executive Risk
Generative search engines and social media algorithms are reshaping how executives are perceived. Old or obscure content can resurface instantly in AI-generated overviews, while deepfake videos and fabricated interviews can spread within hours. For high-profile executives, this means that reputational management cannot stop at onboarding. It must be continuous. Organisations should consider pre-emptive content audits, proactive brand seeding and AI-driven misinformation detection as standard elements of both onboarding and offboarding protocols.
Shifting Trust Dynamics and the Need for Rigidity
One of the more nuanced challenges of executive offboarding is the rapid shift in the trust dynamic. Executives are often well-liked and deeply trusted, making it difficult for those managing the exit process to adjust to a more structured and cautious approach once the departure is confirmed. It’s crucial to recognise that when an executive leaves a position, the trust dynamic changes, and the organisation must act quickly to protect its interests, stakeholders and shareholders. Striking this balance can be delicate, as departing executives, accustomed to significant flexibility, may perceive the change as abrupt or overly rigid. External advisors can play a key role managing data separations while helping the business maintain a healthy ongoing relationship with the executive.
Where senior exits attract media or activist attention, having prepared holding statements and information on hand is essential to respond to inquiries with transparency and protect both the company and the executive’s reputation.
Offboarding as a Mirror: Reflecting Stronger Onboarding Processes
The intricacies of executive offboarding provide a framework of principles to apply when onboarding new executives. Following these steps at entry and exit can help ensure secure and well-managed transitions from the outset.
By recognising the complexities of separating personal and professional data during offboarding, organisations can build stronger onboarding practices that establish clear boundaries early on. This proactive approach safeguards corporate data, protects privacy and paves the way for smoother departures.
Modern onboarding should also include social media governance, personal brand coaching and AI literacy training to help executives understand how their online presence interacts with generative search engines and digital risk models.
In doing so, an organisation can build digital resilience from the start, turning every onboarding into a strategic investment in long-term security, continuity and trust.
Next Steps: Strengthening Your Onboarding and Offboarding Protocols
Organisations looking to strengthen their executive onboarding and offboarding processes should adopt a strategic approach that balances risk mitigation with operational continuity. FTI Consulting offers tailored services to meet these needs, ranging from incident response advisory that swiftly addresses emerging threats like data loss, insider activity or regulatory scrutiny, to proactive solutions designed to reduce risk. These solutions include secure onboarding protocols, digital footprint assessments and robust offboarding frameworks that address data separation, communication monitoring and reputational safeguards.
Whether responding to a crisis or building resilient processes from the ground up, FTI Consulting partners with clients to protect sensitive information, ensure compliance and support confident leadership transitions.
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Date
septembre 03, 2025
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