Who we are

IT Leaders Network is a private network for the people who run technology in their organisations: Heads of IT, IT Directors, CIOs, CTOs, CISOs and similar roles.

Why it exists

Senior IT roles can be lonely. The people who understand the job best are usually doing the same job somewhere else, and the public places to talk are full of vendors, recruiters and people performing for an audience. We wanted somewhere quieter: a place to ask a straight question and get a straight answer from a peer.

What's here

• News, open to everyone: stories from sources IT leaders read, with a link to the original, and articles written for this site.
• A forum, for members only, on leadership, security, cloud, data, vendors and careers.
• A jobs board, for members only, with senior technology roles from recruitment agencies and employers.
• Coming soon: opt-in CV search, where recruiters see your experience but not your name until you accept their request.

Who can join

Membership is for people in senior technology leadership roles. When you apply we ask for your job title and your LinkedIn profile, and a person reviews every application before approving it. Recruitment agencies will have separate accounts for jobs and CV search, and can't see or post in the forum.

How it's paid for

Membership is free for IT leaders. The site will be funded by recruitment agencies paying to post jobs and to search opted-in profiles. There is no advertising, and we don't sell members' personal data.

What we don't do

• No spam. We only email you about your account, such as confirming your address or a change to your password; with the occasional notice about the service itself, such as a change to our terms; and with job alerts you've set up yourself, which you can stop at any time. Replies and mentions in the forum show on the site, not in your inbox.
• We don't sell your data. Not to recruiters, not to vendors, not to anyone. Recruitment agencies will pay to post jobs and to search profiles that members have opted into, and even then they'll see your experience, not your name, until you accept their request.
• No advertising. No banners, no sponsored posts dressed up as articles. If you agree to analytics cookies, we use Google Analytics to see which pages are read, and nothing else: no ad networks, no retargeting pixels, no third parties following you around the web.

We'd rather charge the people who want to reach you than sell access to you without your knowing.

How the site is built

This site is built from scratch, in plain PHP, by one person who has spent a career cleaning up after insecure systems. That matters more than it sounds.

Most community sites are assembled from off-the-shelf platforms and a stack of third-party plugins, each one written by someone else, each one a way in. There's no platform and no plugins here. The site's own code is written and reviewed deliberately, and it uses only a handful of well-known open-source libraries, for jobs like sending email and cleaning up formatted text, each chosen on purpose and checked against published security advisories. That means a much smaller surface to attack.

In practice:

• Every database query is parameterised, so the most common attack on sites like this one simply doesn't work here.
• Everything runs over HTTPS, behind Cloudflare, with sign-in sessions locked to your browser.
• We collect as little about you as we can, because data you don't hold can't leak.
• Your profile is yours. Nothing is shared with a recruiter until you say so, one request at a time.
• Every membership application is reviewed by a person, so the forum stays peers only.

No one can promise a website will never be attacked. What we can promise is that this one was built by someone who assumes it will be, and that if anything ever does go wrong, you'll hear it from us promptly and plainly.