Executive search and team build
mandates across India
and international markets.

A Series B fintech was replacing a departing technical co-founder. Three previous candidates from two different agencies had failed at the offer stage. The Board was losing confidence in the process. The offer-stage drop-offs were a motivation problem, not a sourcing problem, the previous firms had correctly identified viable candidates but had never run motivation interviews. All four candidates had equity concerns that were never surfaced before the offer landed.

A 200-person enterprise SaaS company needed its first CFO ahead of a planned Series C. The role required both operational finance depth and investor-facing credibility in European capital markets. The Co-founder was managing finance, and the market could not know a hire was underway. Two previous informal outreach attempts through the Board network had produced no serious conversations.

Six months of inbound recruiting and one prior agency engagement had produced no hires. The founding team had begun to question whether the profile existed in the Indian market. The previous searches had been looking for candidates who self-identified as "AI engineers." The actual population with production LLM experience was much smaller and mostly employed inside platform teams at large technology companies where AI was a product input, not a job title.

A Sydney-based consumer fintech app needed two Senior Android Engineers in Bengaluru. The company had 400,000 active users in Australia but zero brand recognition in India's engineering market. Four months of job postings had produced no qualified candidates. An unknown brand, recruiting remotely, for a small team, is a difficult proposition to put in front of a passive candidate who has options.

A globally recognised US sports and media organisation was building its India technology team in Mumbai with zero prior India presence. Four specific constraints made standard recruiting unworkable: an industry-wide no-poach clause, US / India time zone coordination overhead, a 30-day reference check approval window, and a brand unknown as an India employer.

A Boston-based Series C climate fintech wanted to build a 30-person India engineering GCC. They had approved headcount and no India entity, no employer brand, and no prior India operating experience. Their initial plan was to hire on an EOR and figure out the rest as they went. Talhive changed the sequence before the search began.

A Stockholm-based Series B logistics technology company was scaling its India engineering team from 8 to 40. They needed engineers with logistics domain knowledge, EDI, TMS, and WMS expertise, in a market where that combination is rare. Their internal TA team of two was not equipped for the volume or the specialisation required. A contingency agency had produced only two hires in four months. The problem was a sourcing thesis problem, not a pipeline volume problem.