For India-headquartered businesses
The addressable field is smaller than the brief suggests.
You know this market, so we will not explain it to you. At senior level the credible field is small, fully employed and not in play. What decides a mandate is who will take the call, what it would take to move them, and whether any of it reaches your stakeholders before you do.
How the mandate is run
The intake decides the mandate
- Most senior role specifications describe the incumbent, or their inverse where the incumbent is leaving badly. Neither describes what the next three years require. Time spent with the hiring manager and with the people the appointee has to carry, before any approach is made, is what stops a slate being rejected on sight.
Mapping before names
- You see the market as it is: who holds the remit today, at what scale, and which of them are genuinely addressable once off-limits and recent moves are accounted for. The people we judge unreachable are on it too, with the reason. It is also where comp and narrative get tested, which is considerably cheaper to discover at mapping than at offer.
At this level referencing is the assessment
- Credentials stop separating candidates well before CXO. Two people with comparable track records behave very differently inside a given business, and no interview panel reliably tells you which is which. Back-channel work decides it: whether the last team they built is intact, and whether the people they hired would join them again.
Confidential by default
- Succession benchmarking, replacing an incumbent who has not been told, or calibrating an internal candidate against the external market are routine reasons to run a mandate and impossible to run openly. Fewer people involved means fewer ways for it to travel, which is one of the few things a boutique does structurally better than a large firm.
Who you are bidding against
Increasingly it is not a domestic peer. India now hosts more than 1,700 foreign-owned capability centres employing over 19 lakh people, and their senior layer is the part growing fastest: government projections put global roles held out of India at more than 30,000 by 2030, against 6,500 today.
Those mandates draw on precisely the cohort you are hiring from, and they compete on dimensions a domestic offer does not automatically match. A global remit. A title that travels. Occasionally a currency.
What an India-headquartered business can offer against that is scope that is unmatrixed, proximity to the decision, and ownership of a business rather than a region of one. For a certain kind of senior operator that is the more attractive proposition, and it is worth constructing the offer around it deliberately, because the candidate is weighing exactly this comparison whether or not it is discussed.
Where mandates are lost late
Notice is contractual, not statutory
- Ninety days is convention at senior levels, not law. Private employment here is governed by the contract, with notice running from 15 to 90 days depending on seniority and the applicable state. Buyouts and partial waivers are ordinary. Whether one is available depends on it being raised at intake rather than at offer.
The counter-offer is the competing bid
- A quarter between acceptance and joining is a quarter in which the incumbent employer can restructure the role around them. At this level the counter is rarely compensation alone. Establishing early what their employer would have to put on the table is part of the assessment, not a conversation for the closing week.
Onboarding is still the mandate
- Senior appointments that fail are generally decided within the first hundred days, usually because the role diverged from the one accepted. Staying close to both sides through that period costs very little against the price of restarting, and it is where one of us spends a good deal of time.
What you can expect
A slate of three or four with written assessments that set out the case against each candidate as well as for them, on the date agreed at intake.
Position on the mandate when there is something to report and when there is not, early enough to be useful to you internally. Nothing reaches a hiring manager, a promoter or a board before it reaches you.
And a view, offered plainly, where an internal candidate is stronger than the external market will produce or where the mandate is not yet specified well enough to run.