Rajesh Pandian
He has sat on both sides of the hiring table: the recruiter placing people, and the HR director who was the client.
Connect on LinkedIn ↗Rajesh has spent fifteen-plus years across the full HR spectrum: talent acquisition, HR business partnering, HR director, and now strategy. He has placed hundreds of people as a recruiter (Oracle, L&T Infotech, Snapdeal) and led entire HR functions as the client (Freecharge, HealthPlix), building the Snapdeal Bengaluru tech team from zero to 300 in nine months.
That dual view, recruiter and client, is what most people in this space don’t have. It shapes how he writes about hiring, diversity and inclusion, culture and engagement, and what the full employee lifecycle actually reveals about a company.
Read more from Rajesh.
The roles AI is quietly creating inside GCCs
Not the ones in the headlines. The senior seats that appear when a function moves from doing the work to governing it.
Most GCC AI pilots stall at the same place. Here's why.
We've mapped GenAI rollouts across the GCCs we work with. The failure mode is consistent, and it isn't the technology.
GCCs are de-coupling from the parent, and hiring hasn’t caught up
When the centre starts owning charters instead of executing them, you need leaders who decide, not leaders who run. That’s a scarcer hire.
The proximity trap: when a GCC leader can’t let go of the work
As span grows, the best builders lose the distance the role now needs, staying too close to the work they used to do. A leadership-psychology read, distinct from the org-design side of span of control.
What we hear in the last conversation before a leader says yes
It’s almost never the money. From hundreds of senior closes, the one thing the winning offer got right that the runner-up didn’t.
How centres earn their next charter
The parent grants ownership to the centre it has stopped checking. We mapped the leadership behaviours behind that quiet handover.
Hiring fast and hiring well are two different things, and the market keeps confusing them
Speed is easy to measure, so it’s the thing everyone optimises. Rajesh Pandian on what a rushed senior hire actually costs you two years out, when the bill finally lands.
New operating models: how ER&D centres are restructuring the leadership bench
We mapped how engineering centres are moving from staff-augmentation to product ownership, and the seniority shift underneath it.
The reference check is the new skills test
When a senior candidate’s portfolio is AI-assisted, it stops proving their judgment. Verification becomes the hard part of the hire.
Counter-offers work because your process gave the leader time to have doubts
The market blames the counter-offer. We think that’s the wrong culprit. A contrarian view on where senior mandates really lose the candidate.
A GCC head and a site manager differ by what they can say no to
Real ownership shows up in veto rights. What the mandate looks like once the first 90 days are over.
One hiring pattern worth knowing, every ten days.
The Mandate Desk is our read on the senior GCC talent market — one signal that moved, the read behind it, and one thing worth doing. Written from live placement data.