Senior Leadership Hiring in India: What We’re Seeing in 2026–27
Vivek Nath is a Managing Partner at HRBx, a boutique executive search firm in Bangalore working with founders, boards, GCCs and family businesses on senior leadership appointments across India.
This post is about what we’re seeing in the search for senior leaders, and what it tells us about the businesses doing the hiring: the job title isn’t the whole story.
A company wants a CTO. Another wants a business-unit head. A third is looking for a marketing leader to launch its D2C brand.
Sure, on paper, these look like fairly straightforward hiring mandates. But spend time understanding what the business actually needs, and the brief can look very different.
The CTO might be expected to build a technology function from scratch. Or take charge of an existing engineering team. Or turn an AI innovation into a product that can finally get to market.
The business-unit head might be expected to drive growth, while the founders continue to hold on to most of the decisions that would make that growth possible.
And the marketing head? The company might expect one person to handle everything from strategy to driving executive narrative and owning campaigns, channel mix and branding.
These aren’t just differences in job descriptions. They change the kind of person a company should hire, and the likelihood that the person will succeed once they join.
That’s what has stood out to me in HRBx’s executive-search work over the past year. The interesting question isn’t simply which roles companies are hiring for. It’s what they expect these people to do, what they are prepared to give them, and where the gaps start to show.
This report draws on HRBx’s mandate records and anonymised experiences from search and briefing calls. It isn’t a survey of the Indian hiring market. I’m sharing what we’ve observed, what I think it means, and what I’d like businesses to consider before their next senior hire.
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What our mandates look like
Between April and October 2026, HRBx recorded a sample mix of 19 mandate entries across these functional categories.
| Function | Mandate entries |
|---|---|
| Technology | 6 |
| Design | 5 |
| Business development | 3 |
| VP – Construction | 2 |
| Customer Success | 1 |
| Functional Consultant | 1 |
| UX/Design | 1 |
| Total | 19 |
So what does the mix tell us?
In FY 2025–26, we worked on more enterprise engineering mandates. In FY 2026–27 so far, I’ve noticed more AI and technology leadership roles, more business-unit and commercial leadership, and more briefs centred on building something new rather than replacing someone who has left. We’re comparing a full financial year with April–October of the next one, so the periods aren’t directly comparable.
Still, the mandates raise some interesting questions about what businesses need from their next leaders.
A CTO can mean three very different things
I’ve seen AI companies look for technology leadership for quite different reasons.
One was a bootstrapped physical-robotics business trying to get to an MVP. It needed its first technology employee or leader. This wasn’t a case of inheriting a sizeable engineering organisation and improving its performance. The person would have to establish the technical foundation and help build the team.
Other AI businesses had secured funding or gained traction over the preceding 12–18 months. They were establishing operations in India or expanding their engineering teams here. They needed leaders who could help them scale.
Then there were companies that already had engineering teams but no senior leader at the top. Three such companies hired CTOs. Roughly a year later, those CTOs brought in VP Engineering or other key leaders beneath them.
An AI innovation lab presented a different problem. It had a team, but needed a CPTO who could take the vision forward, move towards an MVP and get the product closer to launch.
In healthcare AI, we also encountered a brief for a leader who would remain hands-on, with experience requirements defined around an 18-year bracket.
Put these examples together and one thing becomes clear to me: the company stage matters as much as the title.
A business building its first product has a different problem from one trying to scale an engineering team. And a company with an innovation vision but no product in the market needs something different again.
Yet it’s easy to begin a search with the title, a list of years of experience and a set of technical requirements. Those things matter, but they don’t tell us what the person will actually need to accomplish.
Before looking for a CTO, I’d want to know: what exists today, what is missing, and what must be different six or twelve months after this person joins?
That question is likely to produce a more useful brief than another round of polishing the job description.
These are examples from the AI businesses HRBx has worked with. They illustrate different requirements; they don’t establish how common each type of role is across India’s AI sector.
You want a business leader. But are you ready to let them lead?
One pattern I’ve noticed in our search work is that family businesses reach a point where they want professional leadership. The business has grown, the founders can’t do everything themselves, and they need someone who can take a business unit forward.
On paper, it sounds straightforward: hire a capable leader, agree on the goals and let them get on with it.
Except the decision-making doesn’t always change along with the title.
In one search, the business was run by a father-son duo. The son approved a candidate. The father rejected the candidate at the final stage.
The problem wasn’t just that a candidate had been rejected late in the process. The people making the hiring decision hadn’t agreed on what they wanted in the first place.
We’ve seen a repeat of these situations: misaligned decision-makers, a changed commitment and a compensation gap.
None of them could have been solved simply by sending more profiles. It takes a nuanced approach that HRBx navigates to close the mandate successfully.
This is the part of professionalising a family business that deserves more attention. Hiring an experienced leader is one thing. Giving that person the authority to make decisions is another.
If every important decision still has to go back to the founder or family, the new hire can end up with the title and the accountability, but not the freedom to do the job.
That doesn’t mean family businesses shouldn’t retain control over important decisions. It means they need to be clear about which decisions the new leader can make independently and which ones remain with the owners.
Otherwise, both sides can end up frustrated. The business wonders why the leader isn’t moving fast enough. The leader wonders why every move needs another round of approval.
Before hiring a senior external leader, I’d ask a more basic question: what are we genuinely prepared to let this person own?
This is an observation from HRBx’s search experience, not a claim that all family businesses face the same problem.
The hands-on leader is back in the brief but what does that actually mean?
In the technology and D2C mandates we’ve encountered, clients want leaders who can do more than manage people or set direction.
They want someone who understands the work and can get involved in execution when needed.
For a technology leader, that might mean staying close to architecture, technical decisions or early product development while leading a team.
For a D2C marketing leader, it can mean knowing how to use AI in the actual work: automating content production, scaling ad creatives and increasing the pace of campaign execution. Not simply presenting an AI strategy.
That expectation makes sense in a small team or a business trying to get something off the ground. There may not be the budget, or the need, for a large specialist team yet.
But there is a difference between wanting a leader who understands execution and expecting one person to do the work of an entire department.
I’ve seen briefs where the leadership title suggests one level of responsibility, while the actual expectation is that the person will personally execute across several functions.
That distinction needs to be addressed before the search begins. What must the person do themselves? What can they delegate? What resources will they have? And is this an interim arrangement while the business gets started, or the expectation for the long term?
A hands-on leader can be exactly the right hire. An impossible combination of responsibilities is a different matter.
This is what we’ve observed in our technology and D2C searches, rather than a claim about every employer’s preferences.
The job description can look impressive and still miss the point
I estimate that around eight out of ten mandates we encounter now involve AI-generated job descriptions. That’s an estimate from our experience at HRBx, not an industry-wide statistic.
What interests me more is what happens when we actually speak to the hiring team.
The written brief and the conversation don’t always tell the same story. Sometimes the conversation reveals expectations that weren’t obvious from the document. Sometimes the document is long and detailed, but the business outcome is perfectly clear.
Take a consumer brand that was yet to launch. It advertised for a Head of Marketing. During the in-person briefing, we discovered that the company expected one person to handle the launch end to end hands-on: website, social media, branding, offline events, campaigns, influencer marketing, and D2C channels.
The title suggested a marketing leader. The actual job was much closer to a hands-on launch operator who would personally take responsibility for several functions.
That changes the candidate search. It also changes the conversation about seniority, compensation, workload and what success should look like.
Now compare that with an IT services company looking for a Chief Business Officer. The job description was ten pages long, but the mandate was clear: bring in business.
The length of a job description doesn’t tell us whether the role has been thought through. What matters is whether the company can explain the problem it needs this person to solve.
AI can help write a comprehensive brief. It can’t decide which of ten responsibilities matters most, whether one person can realistically own all of them, or which trade-offs the company is willing to make.
Those decisions still need to be made by the people doing the hiring.
When I take a briefing, I want to understand five things:
- What business problem are we trying to solve?
- What should this person have achieved in the first six to twelve months?
- What are they expected to do themselves?
- What team, budget and decision-making authority will they have?
- Which requirements are genuinely non-negotiable?
The answers matter more than how polished the document looks.
When a search doesn't close, more sourcing isn't always the answer
It’s tempting to think that if a role hasn’t been filled, the solution is to find more candidates.
Sometimes it is. But our search experience has also shown how a search can stall for reasons that another batch of profiles won’t fix.
Feedback may be slow. Decision-makers may disagree about what they want. The company may want a more senior profile than its budget can attract. A candidate may like the role but see too little financial upside in moving. Relocation may be a deal-breaker. Or a commitment made during the hiring process may change.
These are different problems, and they need different solutions.
If the hiring team hasn’t agreed on the requirements, more sourcing simply creates more candidates to disagree about.
If the budget is too low for the capability being sought, the company has a choice: reconsider the budget, change the requirements or accept that the search may take longer. Continuing as though nothing needs to change doesn’t make the gap disappear.
And when a candidate meets the essential requirements, there is a point at which the employer needs to decide whether the remaining differences matter. Continuing to interview indefinitely in the hope of finding someone marginally better isn’t necessarily a better hiring strategy.
I’m not suggesting that companies should lower their standards or rush senior appointments. The point is to know what the standards are before interviewing, assess candidates against them and make a decision when there is enough evidence to do so.
In practical terms, that means agreeing on evaluation criteria early, establishing who makes the final decision, giving timely feedback, setting a realistic compensation range and being clear about what the company can commit to.
A search can be difficult because the right candidate is hard to find. It can also be difficult because the employer hasn’t resolved the decisions needed to make the hire.
The distinction matters.
These are observations from HRBx’s search work. We don’t yet have a consolidated dataset that quantifies how often each factor causes a mandate to stall or remain unclosed.
What I'm watching as we move into 2027
I wouldn’t turn a set of search experiences into a confident prediction about the entire Indian hiring market. But they do raise some questions worth watching.
For AI and technology companies: Are they defining the technical capability they need, or starting with a title and hoping the right candidate will figure out the rest? The distinction between building a function, scaling a team and bringing a product to market will matter when they define the role.
For businesses looking to professionalise: Are they prepared to give external leaders meaningful operating authority? Hiring someone experienced won’t, by itself, change how decisions get made.
For companies asking for hands-on leaders: Are they clear about what hands-on means in practice? Combining leadership with execution can work well. Expecting one person to perform several full-time jobs is another proposition.
For employers using AI to prepare hiring briefs: Has the technology helped clarify the problem, or simply produced a more comprehensive document? The test is whether the hiring team can explain what success looks like and what the person will actually be expected to do.
For all employers: How quickly can they make a decision when a suitable candidate emerges? Delays, unresolved differences and changing commitments can undermine an otherwise promising search.
These are working hypotheses based on HRBx’s experience, not quantified forecasts.
Over the coming quarters, we should track the functional mix of mandates, how many roles are created to build new capabilities versus replace incumbents, and how often searches stall because of budget, decision-making or candidate constraints. We should also record the time between briefing, shortlist, offer and candidate joining.
That would allow us to test whether the patterns we’re seeing persist, rather than assume that a handful of examples represent a wider trend.
The question I’d ask before the next senior hire
Looking back at these mandates, I keep coming back to the same issue.
A company can have a detailed job description, an ambitious growth plan and a clear idea of the title it wants to hire. Yet it may still be unclear about the actual problem the person needs to solve, the authority they will have or the compromises the business is prepared to make.
That is where I think a lot of the important work in executive search happens – before the candidate search gets underway.
The question isn’t just whether we can find a capable person. It’s whether we’ve defined the job honestly enough to find the right person, and whether the business is ready to let them succeed.
Getting that right won’t eliminate every hiring challenge. But it is a better starting point than assuming the answer is always another round of sourcing.
About this report
This report draws on HRBx’s anonymised executive-search mandate inventory and observations from briefing calls and candidate-selection processes during FY 2025–26 and April–October 2026.
The mandate counts describe HRBx’s recorded work. The case examples have been anonymised. Qualitative observations reflect HRBx’s experience, and the outlook for 2027 represents questions and hypotheses to monitor rather than a statistical forecast.
The report is not a representative survey of Indian employers and does not estimate national leadership-hiring demand. Client and candidate names have been withheld to protect confidentiality.
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Vivek Nath
admin@hrbx.in
Vivek Nath is the founder of https://hrbx.in Vivek Nath brings 20+ years of people experience across India, APAC, North America, and South Africa, with the last 15 years focused on helping startups and family-led companies build their teams. He has successfully closed 100+ leadership mandates over the past decade, including Co-Founders, CEOs, CTOs, CPOs, CHROs, and CBOs for tech startups and multinationals. Having personally built two tech and engineering startups from the ground up into sustainable businesses that were acquired, Vivek now helps founders hire the right talent, build retention-focused processes, and create talent-magnet brands. His philosophy: "little less conversation and little more hustle."
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