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

If the localisation trend were flat, this would be a curiosity. It isn’t. The government expects global roles held from India to rise from 6,500 to over 30,000 by 2030, against a sector heading for roughly 2,400 centres and 2.8 million people.

A four or five-fold increase in senior roles, drawn from a group of people who have spent twenty years being managed by head office rather than being put in charge of anything. Demand for exactly the profile you want is about to rise much faster than the supply of people who have done the job before.

What that means in practice is that the person in your job description is being repriced while you write it. Every company that has been here longer than you, with a brand people recognise, is promoting internally into the same scarce layer.

It also means something more useful. The pool of people who could do the job is considerably larger than the pool who have already done it, because so few have been allowed to. Insist on someone who has run a centre before and you are fishing in the smallest possible pond, at the top of the market, against better-known competitors. Some of the best first hires I would look for are people who ran something substantial inside a larger organisation and have never had the title.

First-office job descriptions get written by someone who has never operated here, describing the role by analogy to a job at head office. What the role actually 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.

That’s a general management job with a recruiting job stapled to it. The brief usually describes a functional leader, and the gap between those two is why so many first hires leave inside two years.

The sector’s own direction of travel makes this sharper. The Economic Survey notes that these centres have moved beyond back-office roles into engineering R&D in aerospace, defence, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing, with engineering research centres growing 1.3 times faster than the sector overall. Nobody good wants to run a cost centre any more, and the ones who would are not the ones you want.

There’s a version of this you can’t fix with money. A senior candidate in Bengaluru has heard of your competitors and hasn’t heard of you. Being the first India leader for an unknown foreign company is a genuine career risk, and it gets paid for in the size of the job rather than in salary. If the answer to "what decisions will this person own" is vague, no package closes it.

The first hire compounds, because they set the standard for everyone after them and they do most of it across a nine-hour gap with nobody watching. You generally won’t know whether you got it right for about four quarters, by which point the team has been built in their image and the cost of being wrong has stopped being a hiring problem and become an organisational one.

All of which argues for treating the first search as the strategic decision rather than as the administrative step that follows the strategic decisions, though most plans I see are still built the other way round and nobody involved seems to notice until the second year.