Job Description:
Position
Associate Director – Talent Acquisition
Reports to: Director – Talent and People Strategy
Experience: 12–15+ years
Location: Delhi
About The Convergence Foundation
The Convergence Foundation (TCF) is an Indian philanthropic foundation set up by Ashish and Manisha Dhawan in April 2021. TCF builds on their legacy of impactful philanthropy, which includes founding institutions like Ashoka University and the Central Square Foundation (CSF).
Our mission is to transform the lives of all Indians through rapid, sustained economic growth and inclusive development. We work across three pillars: direct engines of economic growth that enable job creation; human capital development through education and employability; and development enablers that strengthen the philanthropic ecosystem and improve state capacity.
Across these areas, we build pioneering institutions to address India's most complex socio-economic challenges, and shape the larger ecosystem by sharing knowledge with philanthropists, governments and other stakeholders. We believe the government is the key actor for system change, and philanthropy's role is to strategically support it. CSF's work, for instance, helped build momentum on foundational learning and numeracy and led to the NIPUN Bharat Mission. On the economic growth side, Foundation for Economic Development and Prosperiti have served as knowledge partners to the government and helped accelerate the Reform Express. Our portfolio of 25+ organisations has enabled outcomes at system and population scale.
Why this role exists
TCF closes 200+ hires a year across our portfolio, with a meaningful share at senior leadership level — CXOs, Heads of Function, and Directors. The Director runs the function today, and at this volume the Director needs more bandwidth and the team needs deeper capability built into it. We're hiring a second strong operator who can run mandates alongside the Director, own the hardest senior searches end-to-end, and build the team into a sharper search practice as our portfolio grows.
Why this might be the right move for you
If you've spent years in executive search running mandates for clients, this is the role where you stop delivering shortlists and start owning outcomes. Same craft — mapping markets, developing candidates, closing — but on a platform shaping how India develops, not whoever paid for the search this quarter. The work is varied, the stakes are real, and the calendar is more sustainable than partner-track life at a firm.
The shape of the role
You'll lead a small team of your own — a couple of direct reports who run searches alongside you — and draw on the broader in-house team of 6 as mandates require. This is a hands-on leadership seat, not a manage-from-above one. The team splits between you and the Director based on what's on the docket. You will run searches end-to-end and source candidates yourself. The Director sources too. That's how this team works — flat, hands-on, and built around the craft.
What you'll do
- Run senior mandates end-to-end. Own a portfolio of searches across the 25+ TCF organisations, with a particular focus on the hardest senior roles. You're measured on closures, quality of hire, and the relationships you build with candidates and hiring managers.
- Map markets and develop candidates yourself. When a search is hard, you don't push it back to the team — you map the market, build the longlist, and develop the top candidates personally. The Director maps alongside you.
- Translate vague briefs into structured search. When a hiring manager describes an archetype, convert it into a real strategy — where these people are, how to reach them, and what will make them say yes.
- Build the practice and the systems behind it. Sharpen how we run searches across the portfolio — the intake conversations, the search rituals, the candidate-development standards. And build the in-house systems the function runs on — the ATS workflows, the trackers, the dashboards, the hiring-manager intake formats, the data we look at every week. The function today runs largely on individual capability; your job is to turn it into a practice that runs reliably as the portfolio grows.
- Diagnose the funnel. Use data to figure out where searches are stalling — top of funnel, candidate development, or close — and act on it. Hold your ground with hiring managers when needed, the way you would with a client.
- Coach the team. Lift the in-house team on the craft — sourcing, candidate calls, assessment, closing — the way a senior partner coaches associates at a firm. Raise their independence so more searches close without senior intervention.
What we're looking for
- Search craft, deep and current. You know what good market mapping, candidate development, assessment, and closing actually look like, because you've done all of them recently — not just supervised them.
- Comfortable closing the loop yourself. You will personally run the hardest mandates and source for them. If that feels like a step down at this point in your career, this is not the role.
- A practice builder, not just a search runner. You can design how a team operates — the rhythms, standards, and quality bars — so a group of strong individual contributors functions as one sharp practice.
- Stakeholder maturity. You can navigate 25+ organisations and a wide range of hiring managers, hold your ground, and influence without formal authority.
- A coach, not a gatekeeper. You grow people by raising their standards and giving them room to own, not by holding the work close.
- Resilient and ambitious, with realism. You aim higher, stretch the team, but stay grounded in what's achievable in a given quarter.
Where this role goes
This role is designed to grow as the function grows. As you build the team's capability and our portfolio expands, the scope, seniority, and ownership of the role grow with it. We're hiring someone who can be a long-term partner to the Director and eventually a leader of a larger function.
How we'll know it's working
Senior searches close on time, at the quality bar we set. The Director has the bandwidth to focus on strategy and the hardest searches. The team grows in capability — more independent closures, fewer escalations. Our portfolio is served by one sharp search practice, not 25 disconnected efforts.