Location strategy is a talent-supply decision, not a real-estate one

Location decisions tend to be owned by the people who model rent, incentives, and cost per seat — and on those axes a tier-2 city often wins cleanly. What that model leaves out is supply. If the capability the centre needs is thin on the ground there, the saving on real estate is spent several times over on time-to-fill, on relocation to attract seniority the local pool can’t provide, and on the roles that simply sit open while the ramp waits.

The pattern is most acute for the senior and specialist seats. Volume roles travel well; deep judgment and scarce skills tend to concentrate in a few markets, and a location chosen for rent can be structurally unable to supply them at all. A seat that’s cheaper to house but takes twice as long to fill — or never fills at the seniority required — was not the cheaper seat.

The better sequence inverts the usual one. Begin with the capability the centre must own — the specific skills and seniority the charter demands — and ask where that talent already exists at depth. Then let cost act as a tie-breaker between viable supply markets, not as the opening filter that quietly rules out the only places the talent lives. Sometimes the answer is still the lower-cost city; often it’s a split, with the deep roles in a primary market and the scalable ones in a cheaper satellite.

This is why location belongs partly to whoever owns talent, not solely to whoever owns cost. The pharma and BFSI centres that get it right treat the map as a supply question first and a spreadsheet second — and they build multi-site strategies that put each role where its market actually is, rather than pretending one cheap location can supply the whole charter.