Who we work with
Six ways companies end up hiring here.
Something changed at head office, India became the answer, and nobody there has hired anyone in this market before. The six situations below look unrelated from the outside, and underneath they are the same problem.
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Your first India office
The board signed off on an India centre. You have no network here and a date to hit.
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Scaling engineering fast
You’ve raised, the cost maths points at India, and you need someone who can hire at speed.
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After the H-1B changes
US immigration policy moved, then moved back. Roles you planned around it are now in limbo.
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Moving out of China
Supply chain is shifting, India is on the shortlist, and you need people who have actually done it here.
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Cost out under new ownership
A new owner wants margin, an India centre is the plan, and the clock is the hold period.
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Clinical & regulatory teams
You’re building clinical, regulatory or pharmacovigilance capability in India and the senior bench is thin.
Why these six and not six industries
Most firms sort this work by sector. We sort it by what just happened to you, because that is how the problem actually arrives and because the sector categories overlap so badly as to be useless. A private-equity-owned medical device company moving production out of China sits in three industry buckets at once and gets no useful answer from any of them.
What it has instead is a trigger. Someone signed something, a deadline appeared, and now a senior hire has to happen in a market nobody at head office can read. That is a single problem with six entry points.
The problem underneath all six
India has absorbed an enormous amount of the world’s work without being given much say over it. Nearly two million people here work inside foreign-owned capability centres, and Indians hold about a tenth of the senior roles in them. Whichever of the six situations brought you here, you are hiring from the narrow end of that.
It also explains a specific trap. Insisting on someone who has run exactly this before means competing for a very small group against companies with recognisable names and a decade of local history. The pool of people who could do it is considerably larger than the pool who have been allowed to, and telling those two apart is most of what you are paying a search firm for.
The other constant is the brief. Nearly all of these searches begin with a job description written by someone who has never operated here, describing the role by analogy to a job at head office. What the job involves in year one is hiring, entity wrangling, landing a culture nobody has seen, and pushing back on head office often enough to stop the team being treated as a back office.