The first brief a new capability centre sends to a search firm is usually a list: twelve roles, a target headcount for March, a set of job descriptions lifted from the parent's career site, and a request for "a proposal". What comes back is a proposal for twelve roles. What the centre needed was a partner who understood that the first four hires decide whether the next forty are possible. The brief is where that understanding is either built or lost.
Why a GCC brief is different
A product company hires into an existing culture, a known pay structure and a management team that is in the room. A GCC in its build phase has none of those. The culture is being imported from London, New York or Singapore by people who have not yet moved. The pay structure is being invented against a local market the parent does not know. The decision-makers are in a different time zone, and the local site leader may not have been hired yet. Every one of those gaps shows up in the search: candidates ask questions the firm cannot answer, offers wait for approvals that take a fortnight, and the parent's compensation committee discovers Indian market pricing one declined offer at a time.
Financial services captives add a second layer. The work is regulated, the parent's control functions want to see the same rigour in Pune as in the home market, and the roles that are hardest to fill, in technology risk, information security, financial crime operations and platform engineering, are exactly the ones where domain context cannot be trained in after joining. Our hiring guide for GCCs and captives covers why. The brief has to give the search firm enough to screen for that context, or the shortlists will be full of people who can do the job at a product company and not at a bank.
Before the brief: five decisions head office must make
A search firm can work around a lot, but it cannot work around decisions the parent has not made. Before the first conversation, the centre needs written answers to five questions, and the brief should carry them.
What is the charter? A centre that exists to take cost out of the home market hires differently from one that will own products, platforms or control functions end to end. Candidates can tell the difference within a conversation, and the ownership version commands a premium: engineers who own roadmaps rather than execute against specifications are placed at 15 to 20 percent above delivery-centre pay, and they decline the delivery-centre version of the same role. If the charter is "cost centre now, ownership later", say so, and say when.
Where does the centre sit in the parent's organisation? Do the Bengaluru engineers report to a local head of engineering who reports to the CTO, or to individual product leads in the home market? The answer shapes every senior brief, and candidates will ask it in the first interview. A centre where every team reports to a different overseas manager is hard to hire leaders for, because there is nothing for a leader to lead.
What is the pay philosophy against the local market? Banking and insurance GCCs in India pay 30 to 60 percent above IT services for the same title and increasingly attach RSUs and joining bonuses at senior levels. That is the market a new centre competes in. A parent that has budgeted against its outsourcing rates will lose every senior offer for six months before the budget is revised. Decide now whether the centre pays at, above or below the established GCCs in its city, and for which roles. Our GCC compensation guide sets out how the established centres price.
Who signs off an offer, and how fast? The most common cause of a lost senior candidate in a build phase is an offer that took three weeks to be approved across two time zones and a compensation committee. Agree, before the search opens, that offers within the approved band can be signed locally within 48 hours. If that is not possible, the brief should say what is, and the firm should plan the pipeline around it.
What is the sequence and the real timeline? "Forty people by March" is a target. "A site leader by October, four function leads by December, first teams by March" is a plan. The brief should carry the plan, with the dependencies stated, because the search firm will otherwise start on the forty and the site leader will arrive to a centre that has been shaped without them.
The hiring sequence, and why order matters
The build that works hires in three waves. The first is the anchor: a site leader or a small number of function heads who will be in the room for everything that follows, who carry the parent's trust and who can answer candidates' questions about the charter from personal conviction. This wave is a genuine executive search, run confidentially where the appointment is sensitive, and it is worth taking eight weeks over. On one captive finance arm we worked with, the senior delivery lead was placed in under two months after two earlier searches had failed, and the difference was a brief that finally stated what the role would own.
The second wave is the leads: engineering managers, platform leads, the heads of risk, information security and operations for the functions the centre will run. These are the people who will interview the third wave, so their calibration matters more than their speed. Hire them with the anchor in the panel, and give them a say in the pay bands they will be hiring into.
The third wave is the teams, and this is where volume, employer brand and process discipline take over from individual search. By this point the centre should have a name in its city, a pay position it can defend, an interview loop that runs in ten business days, and a search partner that has already placed the people the candidates will report to. Reversing the order, hiring teams first because the headcount target is public, produces a centre of thirty people with no one to lead them and a site leader who inherits a structure they would not have built.
What the brief must contain
The eight questions in our hiring brief template apply to every seat: the business reason for the hire, what the person will own, what has already been tried, the panel, the pay band, the timeline, what a strong candidate looks like and what disqualifies one. For a GCC build, add a centre-level section that the firm can reuse across every role, so the answers stay consistent when different hiring managers are involved.
That section should state the parent, the charter and the ownership trajectory in two paragraphs the firm can put in front of candidates. It should give the reporting structure, including which roles report locally and which overseas. It should give the pay philosophy against the city's established centres, the equity and bonus components available, and the notice-period buyout policy, since most senior candidates will be serving 60 to 90 days. It should name the decision-makers for offers and the turnaround they have committed to. It should state the office, the working pattern and whether relocation from another city is supported, because Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune candidates differ on all three. And it should set out the sequence: which roles open now, which open when the anchor is in place, and which the centre will hire directly once it has its own team.
Two things belong in the brief that firms rarely volunteer. The first is the employer story for candidates: why a strong engineer or risk professional should join a centre nobody has heard of rather than the established GCC down the road. If the answer is the charter, say what the charter is. If the answer is pay, say what the pay is. If there is no answer yet, the first hires will be the ones who write it, and the brief should say that too. The second is what has already gone wrong: the offers that were declined, the agency that sent generalists, the pay band that was rejected. A firm that knows what failed does not repeat it.
What to ask the search firm
How large is the real pool for each senior seat, in this city, at this pay? A firm that answers "large" has not looked. A firm that says "for a head of technology risk with regulated-entity experience in Hyderabad, a few dozen, and here are the employers they sit at" has.
How will you screen for financial services context, and who does it? The answer should describe a person with domain experience, not a keyword filter. Ask to see how a recent shortlist was calibrated.
When will the first shortlist arrive, and how many people will be on it? Two weeks and three to four calibrated candidates per seat is a credible answer for senior roles. Six weeks and fifteen names is a long list, and the panel will be doing the screening.
What are the commercial terms, and what happens if a hire leaves? Success-fee, paid on joining, with a stated replacement commitment, is the model that aligns the firm with the centre. Retained terms make sense for the confidential anchor search and rarely for the waves after it. Our comparison of retained and success-fee search sets out when each fits.
Will you stay with candidates through the notice period, and how? The notice period is where accepted offers are lost, and a firm that considers its work done at acceptance will cost the centre joiners.
Are you also running RPO or staffing for centres in this city? Volume models and specialist search are different businesses, and a firm doing both for competing centres has a conflict the brief should surface. Our comparison of RPO and specialist search explains where each belongs.
Red flags on both sides
From the firm: a proposal that prices every role the same regardless of level; shortlists that arrive without pay expectations or a note on each candidate's counter-offer risk; a refusal to say how many similar seats the firm has filled in the last year; and a pitch built on the firm's database rather than on the centre's brief.
From the centre: a brief without a charter; a pay band set in the home market and converted at the exchange rate; an offer process that needs a committee; job descriptions copied from the parent's career site with the location changed; and a headcount target that was announced before the site leader was hired. Each of these is fixable, and each is far cheaper to fix in the brief than in the fourth month of a stalled search.
A GCC build is one of the few situations where the search partner is chosen before the people who will manage it have arrived. The brief is the only instrument the centre has to make that choice well. Written properly, it is also the document the site leader will thank you for on their first day.