Achyut Menon "AK"

For 33 years, I have had a ringside view of one of the most consequential decisions a professional can make.

Coming home.

I am an Executive Search consultant and career transition specialist. I work with two groups of people. 

-Senior NRI professionals who want to return to India
-Companies that want to hire global talent without losing them in six months.

The work sounds straightforward. It rarely is.

Most NRI transitions fail not because of skills, but because of perceptions, positioning, and conversations that never happen. I fix that.

► WHAT I DO: I place senior professionals of Indian origin, returning from the US, UK, Singapore, UAE and beyond, into leadership roles in India's fastest-growing companies. I also advise MNCs and startups on building cross-border leadership teams.

► HOW I DO IT: Through a network of 5000+ companies and 550 recruitment partners across 51 countries, built over 3 decades. I do not just match CVs to job descriptions. I match careers to contexts.

► WHY IT WORKS: I have spent 40 years inside hiring rooms on both sides of the table.I know what Indian companies fear about NRI hires, and what NRI candidates consistently underestimate about coming home. That knowledge is the gap I close.

► WORK WITH ME. Executive Search mandates. Options Executive Search Private Limited. Career Coaching and NRI Transition Advisory -https://topmate.io/achyutmenon

If you are sending a connection request, a brief note on why you are connecting helps me respond meaningfully. Thank you.

► WHERE YOU'VE SEEN ME: Top 20 HR Influencers in India | Featured in SHRM, People Matters, Economic Times HR World | NHRD and NIPM Recognitions

► TYPES OF BUSINESSES I've HELPED:  IT, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals,
Banking & Financial Services, Automobiles & Infrastructure | Funded Startups & Family Business Groups

Career Architect

AskMenon.com is a one-to-one telephonic career coaching service where you can ask questions regarding YOUR career -you always wanted to ask but didn’t know whom to ask.

As a global hiring expert, I help candidates check their blind spots restricting their career transition and take a full charge to get ahead.

I also provide pointers to align your LinkedIn profile to your goals and target companies so you can unlock their true potential.

AskMenon Talent Advisory Services consults Startups regarding their hiring solutions by providing hourly consulting/recruiting services. This is a great way for business owners to get the recruitment services they actually need.

Feel free to schedule a call. Please visit http://askmenon.com/scheduletime.php.

Achyut "AK"

"Nobody told me returning home would feel like starting over."
 
After 14 years in Singapore, Priya had managed teams across 6 countries.
Led a $40M product launch.
Built a reputation that preceded her in every room.
 
Then she came back to India.
 
And spent 8 months being asked:
"But do you know the local market?"
 
Here is what I have seen in 30 years of executive search —
 
The NRI returning home does not have a skills gap.
They have a perception gap.
 
Companies want global thinking.
They just do not always recognise it when it walks through their door.
 
The ones who crack it fastest do one thing differently.
They stop translating their experience.
They start contextualising it.
 
Not "I managed a P&L of $40M."
But "I can show you how a $40M business decision gets made in a market like Singapore, and what that means for your expansion into SEA."
 
Same experience. Different frame. Completely different conversation.
 
What has been the hardest part of your own re-entry, or what have you seen others struggle with most?

Hyderabad’s GCC Boom: New Jobs or Just New Lanyards?

Hyderabad is back in the headlines.

Thousands of jobs. Global names. New office spaces in Gachibowli.

But step back.

Is this net-new employment for the ecosystem, or a reshuffling of existing talent under a different logo?

The Déjà Vu Effect

Take two recent examples.

UBS has been in Hyderabad for years. Last year they announced a significant headcount expansion. This year’s “3,000 jobs” narrative feels less like a greenfield entry and more like a continuation packaged as fresh news.

Sanofi too is not new. Their expanded office footprint signals growth, yes. But much of the workforce is already in place. The ramp-up appears incremental, not an overnight hiring surge.

This is expansion. Not explosion.

The Great Rebadging

The deeper shift is structural.

When GCCs hire, where is the talent coming from?

A large portion appears to be lateral movement from IT services firms.

 Same engineers. Same domain knowledge. Different payroll.
IT services trim discretionary exposure.

GCCs internalise high-value work in AI, data, security.

Volume reduces in one pocket. Value consolidates in another.

The Narrative Trap

The optics suggest a jobs engine running at full throttle

On the ground, the ecosystem story looks more measured.

New badge. Same commute.
Different cost center.

The real question is not whether GCCs are growing. They clearly are.

The sharper question is this:
Is Hyderabad creating new capability, new IP, new leadership depth?

Or are we largely reallocating existing talent within the same pond?

Because that difference will determine whether this is a five-year headline cycle
or a twenty-year structural transformation.

800% job growth in nine months.
Not in coding.
Not in AI engineering.
Not in data science.

In a role most people have never heard of.
Forward deployed engineers.

Think of them as the human bridge between what AI can do and what a business actually needs it to do.

They sit between the technology company and the client. They translate capability into adoption.

 They make AI work for people who will never understand how it works.

And demand for them just grew 800% in nine months.

Here is why this matters more than any AI layoff headline.

The bottleneck in the AI economy has shifted.
It is no longer about building the technology.

It is about making it work for the rest of us.
And the skills that crack that problem are not what anyone predicted.

Autodesk analysed nearly three million job postings. The finding stopped me.

Design skills have now overtaken coding as the most in demand skill in AI roles.

Communication, leadership, empathy and collaboration are in the top ten.

The most valuable person in the AI economy is not the one who built the model.

It is the one who can walk into a room of confused, resistant humans and make the technology actually land.

Now here is where this gets personal for me.

After three decades in executive search, I have been watching India's GCCs invest heavily in AI tools.
The tools are there.
The adoption is not.

Because the people who can bridge that gap, who have lived at the intersection of technology and human behaviour in global markets, are still sitting in Singapore, London and San Francisco.

They are called NRIs.

And India's AI adoption problem is, at its core, an NRI hiring opportunity that nobody is framing correctly yet.

The 800% job boom is happening in the West.
The equivalent need exists right here.
We just have not named the role yet.

What do you think - is India ready to hire for human centred AI skills, or are we still chasing the wrong profile?

The pay premium for switching jobs just hit its lowest point since 2020.
1.9% points.

That's the gap between what job-changers and job-stayers are earning, according to ADP Research for January 2026.

Two years ago, that gap was 8.4% points.

The Great Resignation is behind us. What we have now is the Big Stay. Low hiring, low firing, and a job market where searches are up 31% but new postings remain flat.

I've watched hiring cycles for four decades. This kind of reset changes how you should think about your career, not just this year, but for the next few years.

Don't switch for a marginal bump. The math has changed. 

Your real leverage right now is internal. Specialize in areas where talent is scarce, because that's where the premium still exists.

And think in longer cycles. This is Test cricket, not T20.

The gold rush is over. The builders win from here.

I've written a longer piece on what this means in practice, for salary negotiation, career planning, and for NRIs watching the India opportunity quietly widen on the side.

What are you seeing on the ground? Are candidates more cautious about switching right now?

What the collapse of the job-switching premium means for your career in 2026 and beyond Four years ago, switching jobs was the smartest career move yo

Open article: The Great Job Switch is over. Welcome to the era of the Big Stay. by Achyut Menon "AK" • 4 min read

The Great Job Switch is over. Welcome to the era of the Big Stay.

McKinsey & Company  just announced it is moving from selling advice to underwriting outcomes.

Recruiters have been doing this for decades.
We just never called it that.

In contingent recruitment, the model has always been brutally simple.

No hire.
No fee.

You can map the market for 60 days.
Interview 40 candidates.
Present a strong shortlist.

If the role is not closed, you earn zero.

That is pure outcome underwriting.

Executive search evolved this further. Retainers and staged payments were introduced not to reduce accountability, but to align commitment. The client shares risk upfront. The search firm commits brand, research depth and access. But the real test remains the same.

Did the hire create impact?

Now consulting is discovering something recruiters have lived with for years.

Advice is easier to sell than accountability.

In a world where AI can generate frameworks, benchmarking reports and strategy decks in minutes, analysis is becoming abundant. What remains scarce is execution and measurable business impact.

So the language shifts.

From “we recommend”
To “we underwrite.”

From “here is the presentation”
To “here is the business case we both stand behind.”

This is not about McKinsey alone. It is about the future of professional services.

Recruitment will not be spared either.

If we only fill roles, we will be commoditized.
If we connect leadership hires to business outcomes, we stay strategic.

The next decade will reward firms that can answer one hard question:

What measurable value did you create?

Not how many resumes.
Not how many slides.

Outcome.

The rest is noise.

Curious to hear your view. Is outcome based pricing becoming the default across advisory services?

The Economist says the bottom has fallen out of the job market for graduates. The data is real. The conclusion is incomplete. 

Here's what's actually happening and what to do about it.

The headline is dramatic, the diagnosis is partly right, but the conclusion is dangerous for a whole generation.

Across the West, recent graduates are losing the privileged position their degrees once guaranteed. In some markets their unemployment rate now exceeds the average. The college wage "safety premium" has started to decline, and traditional absorbers of young talent ,finance, law, media, have been stagnant for over a decade.

But three things are getting lost in the noise.

First, this is not simply "AI killed your job." AI has mostly exposed structural issues building for years: too many generic degrees, too little investment in real skills, and employers clinging to risk‑averse hiring instead of building early‑career pipelines.

Second, employers are already signalling the way out. Degree requirements are being dropped. Skills‑first hiring is gaining ground. Non‑graduates with digital fluency are now competing effectively for roles that once demanded a degree.

Third, the crisis is uneven, not universal. Youth unemployment is brutal in some regions, milder in others. This is a design problem in how we transition people from classroom to workplace not the end of work itself.

From where I sit in executive search, the pattern is clear.

Employers claim a "talent shortage" at mid‑career, yet quietly cut investment in entry‑level hiring and mentoring. Universities sell employability, but measure success in enrolments and grades , not 3‑year career outcomes. Young people are told to collect credentials, when the market now pays for demonstrable capability.

The question is not "Are graduates screwed?" but "Who helps them re-tool fastest?"

Three shifts I see working on the ground:

University is one input, not a ticket. Complement it with projects, portfolios and internships that prove value in digital, data and customer‑facing work.

Career planning to career prototyping. Shorter bets, more experiments, willingness to start in smaller firms or new geographies rather than waiting for the perfect brand name.

Policymakers and employers  invest in apprenticeships, bootcamps tied to real vacancies, and mid‑career reskilling. Stop subsidising more degrees.

The bottom has not fallen out of the job market.

It has fallen out of an old social contract: "Study hard, get a degree, and the system will look after you."

The new contract is harsher, but more honest: build skills the market values, show you can create outcomes, keep learning faster than technology changes.

Not a comforting slogan. But a path forward,for graduates, employers, and the economies that depend on both.

What are you seeing on the ground  from hiring managers, young professionals, parents? 

I'd like to know.

153 people voted this week.

Most chose the logical answers.

Salary too high.
Local knowledge gap.

All true. All rational.

But after three decades in executive search, I can tell you this:

The real objection is often not the one written in the feedback note.
It is the one felt in the room.

Trust.
Context.
Belonging.

Returning NRIs do not lose out because of capability. They lose out because of calibration.

And companies do not hesitate because of compensation alone. They hesitate because they are unsure whether the leader will stay, adapt, and build in the Indian context.

This week’s newsletter goes deeper.
• What hiring managers actually worry about
 • What returning professionals are struggling with
 • What successful NRI transitions do differently
 • And what companies must change on their side

If you are planning a return, or hiring someone who is, this is worth five minutes of honest reflection.

The honest answer from three decades of executive search - and 153 people who voted this week. This week I ran a poll on LinkedIn. The question: what 

Open article: Why companies really hesitate to hire returning NRIs. And what you can do about it. by Achyut Menon "AK" • 5 min read

Why companies really hesitate to hire returning NRIs. And what you can do about it.

In cricket, the game changed the day T20 arrived.

Not because the ball or the bat changed. But because the format did. 

Suddenly, skills that took years to master, classical technique, and patient accumulation were no longer enough on their own. You needed to orchestrate. Read the match. Deploy the right player at the right moment.

AI agents are doing the same thing to work.
I spent part of my weekend at a webinar by Vaibhav Sisinty on the future of work. No hype. No doomsday. Just a clear-eyed look at what is already unfolding in real organisations.

We are moving from prompts to agents. Not tools that answer questions. Systems that execute outcomes.

The part that made me sit up: customised agents built for specific workflows. Voice agents. Entire apps built on agent logic. 

One example: an executive assistant agent that reads your emails, attends meetings on your behalf, drafts responses in your tone, prioritises by business context and follows up automatically.

That is not a feature. That is a function that used to belong to a person.

Then came agent swarms. Multiple specialised agents collaborating toward a single goal. Think of it like a well-drilled fielding unit. One researches. One analyses. One writes. One validates. One executes. A complex research task that would normally take days was done in under ten minutes by ten coordinated agents.

Vaibhav mapped five levels of AI application. Most professionals are still at level one, prompting. The edge is at the higher levels, where you design workflows, manage agents and build systems that do the work.

One line stayed with me long after the session ended:

Eighty percent of job tasks will be done by agents. Twenty percent of professionals will manage those agents.

Now here is where I would add a pause.

In thirty years of executive search, I have seen many "this changes everything" moments. And they did change things, just not always in the way predicted, and rarely as fast as promised. 

The professionals who navigated those shifts well were not the ones who panicked or ignored the change. They were the ones who quietly upgraded their judgment while others were still debating the threat.

Agents will not replace people who understand business outcomes. They will replace people who only execute tasks without understanding why.

The emerging role Vaibhav describes, the AI Generalist, resonates with me. 
-Someone who understands what the business needs and knows how to deploy AI tools, models and agents to deliver it. 
-Senior leaders will increasingly manage a mix of people, AI strategists and AI generalists.

What you have done in the past no longer guarantees relevance. How you direct intelligence will.

The question worth sitting with this Sunday:

Are you still playing Test cricket in a T20 world? Or are you learning to read the match differently?

Curious how you are thinking about this, especially those of you leading teams or making hiring decisions right now.

1 in 4 job seekers have been searching for over six months.

And AI hasn't even fully hit yet.

Here's what I'm seeing from the executive search side:

Companies are offshoring mid-level roles to India, Poland, and LATAM ,not just for cost savings, but because visa constraints make it easier. 

At the same time, they're preemptively cutting headcount based on what AI *promises* to deliver, not what it actually does today.

The result? 

A double squeeze on professionals. Offshoring from one side. Automation anxiety from the other.

Anthropic's CEO has warned of 10–20% unemployment spikes and up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs disappearing in the coming years. 

Whether that timeline is right or not, the direction is clear.

So what separates the professionals who thrive from those who get squeezed?

One thing: they stop competing with AI and start compounding with it.

The highest-value people I place right now aren't the ones with the most credentials. 

They're the ones who combine deep domain expertise with AI fluency,  and pair that with judgment, creativity, and the ability to navigate ambiguity.

That combination is becoming the new premium skill set.

My advice to every professional I speak with:

Audit your role honestly.


- If 60% of your week is routine analysis, content generation, or data processing,a that work is on a countdown. 

-Shift your energy toward the parts machines can't replicate: strategy, relationships, ethical judgment, knowing which problems actually matter.

The career playbook has changed. Waiting it out is not a strategy.

What are you seeing in your industry?

 I'd love to hear whether this matches your experience.

#FutureOfWork #AIinWorkforce #CareerStrategy #TalentAcquisition

153 people voted. 71% chose the two safest answers.

Here is what 33 years of search tells me they missed.

Salary expectations too high -36%
Local market knowledge gap - 35%

Both real. Both solvable in 90 days.
Neither is the real reason.

The two options that got fewest votes:

Fear they will leave again -16%
Bias toward known names -14%
Just 30% combined.

Yet in my experience, these two decide more NRI hiring outcomes than anything else.

Here is why.

Salary and knowledge gaps are stated objections.
Fear and bias are felt objections.
Stated objections get discussed in debrief calls.
Felt objections never get said out loud.

And what never gets said, never gets resolved.

I have sat in hundreds of hiring rooms over three decades. The candidate clears every technical bar.

The panel nods. Then someone says, "let us keep looking."

That is not a knowledge gap talking.
That is risk aversion dressed as diligence.

The NRI candidates who crack this fastest do one thing instinctively.
They make the interviewer feel safe, not impressed.

They lead with curiosity about the business, not credentials from abroad. They ask about the problem before they offer the solution. They make the hiring manager feel like a partner, not a gatekeeper being auditioned.

In cricket terms, even the most talented overseas player reads the dressing room before he reads the pitch.

Same game. Different rules of belonging.

The poll still has 4 days to run, curious whether the pattern shifts.

Which felt objection have you encountered most, in your own transition, or in your hiring decisions?

Shak brings in 17+ years of end to end software testing experience having worked in US, UK and India. He has set up testing practice for multiple organizations and mentored 100+ software testers directly to help them deliver the best quality software on time. He has been instrumental in building robust test strategies that reduce the overall cost of quality and enhance skills of the entire testing team.

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