Octavian Donnelly

Principal Consultant, Legal & Strategic Hires

​About Octavian Donnelly

Octavian Donnelly is an experienced Principal Consultant at Rutherford, a London-based recruitment firm that specialises in compliance and legal searches within professional, legal and financial services.

Throughout his career, Octavian has launched the London Blockchain Week, co-authored the first wide-scale economic profile of Sierra Leone and led a multinational expansion for a managed services delivery company based out of West Africa.

With more than 8 years of experience, Octavian oversees in-house legal and strategic hires searches.

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How do you define success?

Success is measured in different ways, but I find that it most often manifests as follows. When you are in a position where you are constantly learning and evolving from a position of confidence and security. Whether that means you are expanding your personal and professional skills and knowledge or are enabled by your development to reward yourself – success leaves you feeling energised and ready to meet and overcome the next challenge.

​Professionally, success in my career has taken me to work in a dozen economies (G20 and Emerging Markets) across 4 continents.

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How do your values guide the way you work?

I have always enjoyed enabling others to achieve their full potential. This drives my approach to any problem-solving situation. Executive Search is a classic area in which we as consultants enable others to develop their own skills and provide business growth solutions to our clients.


Whilst I hesitate to use the word karma – I believe that what goes around comes around. You need to treat clients and candidates with the same duty of care as you would offer yourself, and expect from others.

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What can colleagues – and friends – expect when they’re around you?

They will never lack for a story or something to talk about.

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What’s the most unexpected thing you ever did?

Move to Sierra Leone.