About
Two principals, and no one else between you and the work.
Arunima Choudhury and Amit Ray have about fifty years between them, most of it spent either selling to senior people or hiring them.
Arunima Choudhury
Her whole career before search was B2B sales. Consultative, long-cycle, and mostly to people senior enough to end the conversation. Global companies, large Indian ones, and teams across APAC.
She started in telecom, back when it was still a sunshine industry here. Customer service first, then sales, then a bit of marketing. British Telecom and AT&T is where it became consultative selling properly: large accounts, long cycles, and a fair amount of walking into companies where there was no relationship at all and working out who was actually worth talking to.
Then LinkedIn, selling their hiring product to CHROs and heads of recruitment. The job was helping them understand what the tool could really do. How to fill roles with it, and how to read the data well enough to plan a year of hiring. That was several years spent in the room with the people who own hiring.
What she was consistently good at was relationships across an organisation rather than only at the top. That is where repeat business came from, and it is also how you find out what is really going on inside a company.
Where that was
LinkedIn
- Selling the hiring product to CHROs and heads of recruitment.
AT&T
- Consultative selling into large accounts.
British Telecom
- Where the consultative selling started properly.
Bharti Airtel
- Telecom in India, back when it was a sunshine industry.
Amit Ray
Twenty-four years across insurance, banking, technology, healthcare, human resources, consulting and a long run of startup work, in India and in Europe.
The last stretch of it has been search, and alongside that he runs a coaching practice for executives moving into CXO roles for the first time.
That second thing matters more to this firm than it sounds like it should. Roughly a third of newly appointed chief executives are gone within three years, and the decision to leave is usually taken in the first hundred days. Having somebody who works on that problem professionally changes what happens after an offer is signed, which is the part of a search most firms treat as somebody else’s problem.
He read at St Xavier’s in Kolkata, holds the ICFAI CFA, and did his MBA at IIM Calcutta, where he still lectures on the executive and management development programmes.
Where that was
Search
- Director at a search firm, and the bulk of the recent work.
Banking & insurance
- Where a long stretch of the earlier career sits.
Technology & healthcare
- Plus consulting, HR and a good deal of startup work.
IIM Calcutta
- Guest lecturer on the MBAex and management development programmes.
Why the two of us
Search is two jobs. Judging people quickly and accurately, and then persuading somebody who is not looking, has no reason to move and has no deadline forcing the question. The second is the hardest sale there is, and it is where most search consultants are weakest, because finding people is a research skill and that conversation is not.
Between the two of us that covers enterprise selling to senior buyers on one side, and a search and coaching record on the other. It also covers both of the markets we work in: companies arriving here from abroad, and Indian businesses hiring at the top.
The record so far is fifty-five people placed into leadership roles in two and a half years, which for a practice this size means neither of us has been carrying searches we were not close to.
How we work
Small on purpose
A boutique can only carry a few searches at a time, and that’s the point rather than a limitation. Nobody hands you a longlist assembled by someone who has never spoken to the people on it. If a name reaches you, somebody senior here has had the conversation.
The brief is the first deliverable
Searches usually fail because the role was specified wrong, not because the sourcing was bad. So before we look at the market we want to know what this role actually has to fix, what the board will and won’t tolerate, and which of your stated requirements are real ones. That conversation changes the job more often than not.
Candour, including when it costs us
You will be told if your internal candidate is stronger than anyone we can bring you, and if a search isn’t worth running yet. Neither pays us anything this quarter, and both are why people call again.
Candidates aren’t inventory
The people we approach aren’t looking, and most of them say no. How that conversation goes decides whether they pick up when we call in three years. That relationship is the actual asset here, not a database.