AI & Tech Talent Trends in India

Q1. To begin, could you walk us through your journey across talent acquisition — spanning campus hiring, lateral and leadership hiring, and talent operations — and how these experiences have shaped your approach to building high-quality tech talent pipelines in India?

Over the past 19 years, I’ve had the opportunity to work across the full spectrum of talent acquisition — beginning with campus hiring at UST Global, then moving into lateral hiring, talent operations, strategic sourcing, and eventually leadership hiring across APAC at organisations such as Capgemini, HPE, Epsilon, Target, and Allianz Technology

This breadth shaped my philosophy in three ways:

1.A long-term, pipeline-first approach:Campus hiring taught me that today’s interns and graduates become tomorrow’s architects, managers, and engineering leaders. Building sustainable pipelines requires multi-year engagement with universities, alumni networks, and early career programs.

2.A data-driven and operationally disciplined TA engine:My talent operations experience helped me appreciate the importance of structured processes, compliance, stakeholder alignment, and metrics. At Target and Allianz, data analytics played a central role in improving hiring efficiency, NPS, and leadership hiring outcomes.

3.A leadership-hiring lens that raises the bar:Having closed Director/VP roles across Product, Engineering, Data, and Supply Chain, I’ve…