Six minutes: the three things every GCC gets wrong about senior hiring
Sachith Rai, direct to camera, on the mistakes we watch centre after centre repeat — and the cheap fix for each.
Draft. Figures marked like this are illustrative and pending verification against Recruise placement data & Sachith sign-off before publication.
In this video
- Mistake one: centres hire from the active pool by default and never seriously work the leaders who aren’t looking.
- Mistake two: they optimise for speed at the top, where speed and quality come apart — and pay for it two years later.
- Mistake three: they treat the offer as the close, when the real close is the ninety days they never make concrete.
Mistake one: hiring whoever raised their hand.
Sachith opens the six minutes on the most common and most invisible error: building senior hiring around the active funnel. The people applying are self-selecting for availability, and at the leadership level availability is rarely a good sign. The strongest operators are mid-mandate, trusted, and not reading job postings. Hire only from the pool that responds and you’ve pre-filtered yourself down to whoever was reachable, not whoever was right.
The cheap fix he names on camera: for every senior seat, force the question ‘who are the five people we’d want who aren’t looking?’ before you look at a single application. It reframes the search from processing inbound to going after the right leader — and it’s the difference between filling the seat and filling it well.
“Three mistakes, and I watch centre after centre make all three. The frustrating part is that each one has a cheap fix — the fixes just don’t show up on a dashboard, so nobody reaches for them.”
Sachith Rai · MD & Founder, Recruise
Mistake two: chasing speed where speed betrays you.
The second segment takes on time-to-fill. In IT and BFSI centres under pressure to move, speed becomes the metric everyone can see and therefore the one everyone optimises. But at the senior level, fast and good pull apart — the scarce leader isn’t sitting in the funnel waiting to close in a fortnight. Compress the timeline and you don’t find them quicker; you just default to whoever was already available, which loops you back to mistake one.
The fix Sachith offers is a measurement change, not a slowdown. Stop reporting how fast the seat was filled and start asking whether the hire is still right in year two. A rushed senior hire fails slowly — competent at first, then a bench and a set of decisions bent slightly wrong — and the two weeks you saved never come close to covering the eighteen months you spend correcting it.
Mistake three: mistaking the offer for the close.
The final segment lands on the moment centres think they’ve won. The offer goes out, the number is strong, and the process relaxes — right when the candidate’s real deliberation begins. What tips a senior leader is almost never the money, which was settled earlier. It’s whether they can see the first ninety days: the specific mandate, the sponsor, the first problem they’ll own. Centres that leave that abstract lose people they’d already ‘closed’ — often to a doubt they then misread as a comp problem.
The cheap fix closes the video: make the near future concrete before the candidate has to decide. Draw them the picture they’ll be standing inside. Three mistakes, three fixes, none of them expensive — and, Sachith notes, that’s exactly why they’re so easy to keep making.
One pattern worth knowing, every week.
The Signal is our weekly read on the senior GCC talent market — one chart, one pattern, no noise. Written from live placement data.
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