ACE Search
Drawn portrait of Amit Ray and Arunima Choudhury

Executive search · Bengaluru

Senior search, run by the two people you meet.

Board, chief executive and senior functional hiring in India. A small number of searches at a time, both principals on every one of them, and nobody between you and the work.

Book fifteen minutes

The two practices

What working with us is like

The thing worth knowing

India has spent twenty years absorbing the world’s engineering and back-office work, to the point where nearly two million people here now work inside somebody else’s capability centre. Leadership hasn’t followed at anything like the same rate. Indians still hold only about a tenth of the senior roles in those same centres, which is the part that rarely gets mentioned alongside the growth figures.

That is starting to shift, and the pace of it matters more than the direction. The government expects global roles held from India to rise from 6,500 to more than 30,000 by 2030, which means the fairly small group of people who can credibly run something here is being competed for harder every year, and priced accordingly.

The same squeeze is arriving from the other direction. India’s most valuable family businesses are worth around ₹138 trillion, and seventy-one of them now run with a professional chief executive rather than a family member. Owner-led companies that have never hired an outsider at the top are now competing for the same people as the multinationals.

What we’ve been writing

  1. The addressable field is smaller than the brief suggests.

    At senior level the credible field is small, fully employed and not in play. What decides a mandate is who will take the call.

    For Indian businesses

  2. India does the work. It still doesn’t run the centres.

    The board signed off on an India centre. You have no network here and a date to hit.

    Your first India office

  3. Three things your India plan assumes that aren’t true.

    You’ve raised, the cost maths points at India, and you need someone who can hire at speed.

    Scaling engineering fast

  4. Don’t let immigration policy design your org chart.

    US immigration policy moved, then moved back. Roles you planned around it are now in limbo.

    After the H-1B changes

  5. India built the factories faster than the managers.

    Supply chain is shifting, India is on the shortlist, and you need people who have actually done it here.

    Moving out of China

  6. The hold period is not a hiring timeline.

    A new owner wants margin, an India centre is the plan, and the clock is the hold period.

    Cost out under new ownership

  7. India’s clinical ambition has outrun its regulatory bench.

    You’re building clinical, regulatory or pharmacovigilance capability in India and the senior bench is thin.

    Clinical & regulatory teams

The principals

Arunima Choudhury spent twenty-five years in B2B sales. Airtel, British Telecom, AT&T, then LinkedIn, where she sold their hiring product to CHROs and heads of recruitment. Long deals, senior buyers, and a job that came down to reading people quickly and being right about them.

Amit Ray has twenty-four years across insurance, banking, technology, healthcare and consulting, in India and in Europe, most recently in search. He also coaches executives moving into CXO roles for the first time, which bears directly on the part of a hire that usually goes unwatched. He did his MBA at IIM Calcutta and still lectures there.

Finding people is a research problem and it is the easy half. Persuading a senior person who isn’t looking to take a real risk is a sales problem, and it is where searches are won and lost. That part cannot be delegated down, so we keep the firm small and the caseload smaller.

More about how we work

What we take on

Board & independent directors

This usually turns out to be a question about the shape of the board rather than about one empty seat. The useful first question is what the table is missing — a sector view, a functional gap, someone willing to be the dissenting voice — and that conversation tends to change the specification before anyone is approached.

C-suite & executive committee

Chief executives and their direct reports, including the hires who have to work alongside an incumbent team that didn’t choose them. Whether someone can do the job is usually the easy thing to establish. Whether a team that wanted somebody else will follow them is the part that decides it.

Succession & the first outsider

The first professional leader a family or founder business brings in, and the handover that usually sits behind it. Small in title sometimes, disproportionate in consequence always, because what is really being decided is how much of the company is being let go of.

How a search runs, week by week

Reasonable objections

“You’re small.”

Deliberately. A boutique carries fewer searches at a time, which is what makes it possible to put senior attention on all of them. At a large firm the partner you meet is often not the person doing the work, and that gap is the thing you end up paying for without seeing it.

“We already use one of the big firms.”

Sometimes you should. Worth checking who actually does the work, though. A partner relationship in London, New York or Mumbai often does not extend to the person deciding which candidates are genuinely reachable and which are being shown to you because they happen to be available.

“This one has to stay quiet.”

Most of the senior ones do. Replacing an incumbent who does not know, testing the market before committing, or working out whether a family member is ready are all searches that cannot be seen to be happening. A small firm is better suited to that than a large one, because fewer people need to be told anything.

“You haven’t done this for a company exactly like ours.”

The hard part of these searches is rarely the sector. It is reading senior people accurately, and then persuading someone with no reason to move that they should.

If you’re about to open a role that matters, talk to us before the brief is written.

Book fifteen minutes