TALENT ACQUISITION LEAD - INDIA

This is a remote position.

TALENT ACQUISITION LEAD, INDIA - Remote, India | Full-time
Also searched as: Talent Acquisition Lead, Talent Acquisition Manager, Recruiter, Talent Acquisition Partner, Headhunter, Sourcing Specialist, Recruitment Specialist, Talent Partner

Could you take a rough onshore brief, turn it into a role that lands in the Indian market, headhunt the person who was never going to answer a job post, and then own the brand and the bar that make the next search easier than this one?

A typical day

On a typical day you might turn a rough onshore requirement into a proper India market brief in the morning, headhunt and approach the people who aren't looking right after lunch, and review funnel numbers with a hiring manager or sign off on a careers page update before the end of day.

About Contour

We started in 2020 with a handful of students and a belief that great education should not be out of reach. Today we operate across three brands with 8,000+ students and 425+ team members: roughly 100 in India and 325 onshore in Australia. The India team is Contour's Global Enablement and Support platform, sourcing and running delivery, automation, people, and operations for the whole company.

The offshore platform is being built now, seat by seat. This is one of the seats it runs on.

About This Role

You lead talent acquisition through Contour's India platform. You run the search, the screen, and the close for the roles the business needs sourced offshore, and you own the systems, the brand, and the bar those searches run against.

The standard here is different in three specific ways.

First, onshore rarely hands you a finished brief. You take a rough requirement, sometimes a job title and a sentence, and turn it into a real India market role: the right level, the skills written the way candidates here actually describe them, and a package that is realistic in this market. A recruiter who can only work a clean, ready-made brief will not last in this seat.

Second, you headhunt. The best people for these roles are not scrolling job boards, so you find them, approach them directly, and sell the move. Posting a role and screening whoever applies is the floor, not the job.

For every search, you decide the approach: which channel first, whether it's direct outreach or pipeline build, and when to escalate back to the manager or reset the brief. Nobody hands you a playbook for this. You build it as you go.

Third, you don't just fill the search in front of you. You build the pipeline, the employer brand, and the process that make the next ten searches faster than this one. Every search you run either leaves something behind for the next one or it doesn't, and that difference compounds.

A manager raises a single requisition that names the role, not the location. It routes to the right recruiter, and when it lands with you, you work directly with that manager from there.

The People Partner owns pay and ratings. People Ops runs onboarding once a hire starts. Everything up to and including the handoff is yours: the brief, the search, the interview process, the hiring bar, the employer brand, and the systems behind all of it.

You sit in the People and Ops function and work to the People Partner. Recruitment support sits underneath you as volume justifies, and you hire and develop that team when it does. Leading people is welcome here, not a gate on the role.

Here is why it matters. The India entity has scaled to 100 people on a function that has run without dedicated ownership of its own pipeline, brand, or bar. A hire that's almost right ends up needing constant support, slowly stops matching the role, and costs more in the end than if you'd waited for the right one. A gap in how Contour is seen in the India market makes the next headhunt harder than it needed to be. Build the system that gets this right and every pod after this one gets sourced through what you built, rather than reinvented from scratch each time.

By the end of month three, you will have closed full searches across multiple roles including at least one senior hire, be running the scorecard and hiring bar as standard practice rather than a checklist you're still learning, have a live pipeline on Naukri and LinkedIn Recruiter that managers trust enough to hand you a rough ask and walk away from, and have the India careers presence in better shape than you found it. That trust is the job. Once a manager stops double-checking your shortlist, you've done it.

What You Will Do

• Translate the onshore brief, and own the strategy behind it. Take a rough onshore requirement and turn it into a real India market role: level, titles, skills as candidates here describe them, and a package the market will actually give. Then decide how you'll find that person: which channel, in what order, direct approach or pipeline build.You localise the brief and you design the search.
  
• Headhunt, don't just post. Source passively and approach the people who are not looking. Naukri and LinkedIn Recruiter are the baseline, not the ceiling: if a channel or tool would work better for a given search, make the case and run with it once it's backed.
  
• Build pipeline beyond the live requisition. Run talent pooling, referral programs, and campus recruiting so a search doesn't start from zero every time. Campus runs from a low base in year one.
  
• Own the search end to end. Scope with the hiring manager, run the outreach and screen against the scorecard, and take the process to a close within the agreed band.
  
• Maintain the hiring bar and scorecard for offshore searches. Calibrate against onshore's standard and evolve it as the India platform matures. Nothing gets graded on a curve because it's offshore.
  
• Design and run the interview process. Structure the stages, train hiring managers to run a consistent and fair interview, and manage assessments and background checks.
  
• Shape how Contour is seen in the India talent market. Own the India careers page content, recruitment marketing, and hiring social presence, and keep an eye on AmbitionBox and Glassdoor reputation. A candidate who already knows the company is a shorter conversation than one you have to convince from cold, which is why this is your work and not someone else's.
  
• Own the systems and the numbers. Run the ATS, keep funnel and diversity metrics visible so a manager can see where a search is up to without asking, and manage any agencies or vendors you bring in when a search needs outside help.
  
• Run a clean handoff. Close the candidate, then hand them to People Ops, who own onboarding from there. You're accountable for how that handoff feels: documented context, not scramble.
  
• Build the read over time. Every search you close adds to what actually works for a given role type in this market: which channel finds them, what pitch lands, where the ask usually needs reshaping. That read becomes the playbook the next person in this seat inherits.
  
• If a better sourcing channel or tool exists for something you're doing by hand, make the case and we will back it.
  

The Kind of People Who Thrive Here

The people who do well here see a gap and close it without being asked. They hold a bar under pressure to fill fast. They give hiring managers a direct read, including when the read is "not this one," and they build something that keeps producing after they step back. When a brief is wrong, they say so, but they bring a better one with them.

Contour's current cluster heads started as team leads. The path from operator to leader is real here.

What Good Looks Like

• Right, not available: the person you close fits the work and the bar, and holds up six months in.
  
• A sentence becomes a hire: onshore hands you a rough ask, and you give back the brief and the right person to fill it.
  
• Warmer every time: the candidates you approach have heard of Contour before you called, because of work you did.
  
• Visible, not silent: anyone can see where a search is up to without asking you.
  

Requirements

What You Need

• Full-cycle searches you owned end to end and hires you closed across more than one function, not a single vertical. People who can point to all of that are usually four to eight years in.
  
• Real headhunting you have done: pipelines you built by approaching passive candidates directly on Naukri and LinkedIn Recruiter, not just worked from inbound applications.
  
• A brief you took from vague to hired: a time you turned a rough or onshore-framed requirement into an India market role that actually got filled, with the level, titles, skills, and package all sound.
  
• An interview or assessment process you built or ran, not one you only took part in.
  
• Employer brand or recruitment marketing work you can point to: a careers page, a campaign, a review site turnaround.
  
• Comfort owning an ATS end to end: you can configure it, keep it clean, and report funnel and diversity numbers from it without help.
  
• Shortlists you have defended: screens you ran against a bar and stood behind with a hiring manager, including the calls where you said "not this one."
  
• Sharp written English. A candidate note or a manager briefing lands exactly as intended.
  

Nice to Have

• EdTech, education services, or a student-facing organisation background.
  
• Experience hiring across creative, content, ops, or automation roles.
  
• Hands-on with an ATS such as Zoho Recruit.
  
• Experience managing a small recruiting or sourcing team.
  
• Agency or vendor management experience.
  

Benefits

Fully remote, anywhere in India. Comfortable working across the India and Australia time difference. Compensation is competitive and benchmarked to the role and your experience. We discuss it openly early in the process.

Apply with

A CV and one paragraph on a role where you wrote the brief yourself and headhunted the hire: what the original ask was, how you turned it into something that worked in the market, and how you found and closed someone who was not looking.