Jim Desmond

Jim Desmond is the Chief Information Security Officer of HireRight, appointed in August 2025. In the role he leads the continued advancement of the company's global cybersecurity and information security programs.

Career path

Desmond's security leadership career has a long-stated focus on financial services, including roles at National City Bank, Merrill Lynch, Intuit and Vantiv. He has also held executive security leadership roles at Elevate. Before joining HireRight he served as Chief Security Officer at Asurion, a global device protection company based in Nashville, Tennessee, where he managed multiple aspects of security and risk for a large global organization. In June 2023, in that role, he joined a Black Hat webcast with Asurion's Director of Vulnerability Management to describe how the company moved to a risk-based vulnerability management program that reduced business-critical vulnerabilities by 80%. HireRight announced his appointment as Chief Information Security Officer effective immediately on August 4, 2025. HireRight President and CEO Euan Menzies said Desmond's "depth of expertise and demonstrated success in leading enterprise-scale cybersecurity initiatives make him an outstanding addition to our leadership team."

Desmond holds an undergraduate degree from The Ohio State University, a master's degree from Norwich University, and a CISO Executive Education Certificate from Carnegie Mellon University. He also serves as a VP and board member of the InfraGard Middle Tennessee Chapter.

Remit and published work

At HireRight, Desmond's programs span global cybersecurity and information security for a company that screens tens of millions of job applicants, employees and contractors each year. He has written about the risk of AI-enabled employment fraud, including fabricated employment histories, manipulated documents, and altered voice or video in remote interviews, describing a verify-before-trust approach to systems access. Desmond said a proactive, risk-driven security posture is essential given increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. His article on workforce trust, originally published on Intelligent CISO, points readers to a HireRight white paper titled Verify Before Trust: Employment Fraud as the Next Insider Threat, covering workforce identity assurance, AI-driven employment fraud, nation-state workforce infiltration and governance recommendations for CISOs. He has also written on AI adoption in hiring among Saudi employers and on how federal marijuana rescheduling affects DOT drug testing requirements.