An Interview With Guy Erricker: Why Did I Move To India? (Part One)

The beginning of 2020 marks the third-year anniversary for one of our Partners, Guy Erricker when he moved to Bangalore, India to work closely with our India founding Partner, Vijay Varier. To mark this ‘milestone’, we thought of taking this opportunity to put forward some quick-fire questions at him to get his reflections, thoughts and insights on the last three years and his thoughts on the next three years! This is the first part of a three-part series.

The Edge: So Guy, it’s probably not the first time you’ve been asked this, but after 3 years in Australia and 11 years in Hong Kong, um…how and why India?!

Guy: For me, purely from a professional development perspective, these days it is not often you have the chance to join the ride of a large, rapidly expanding English business speaking economy at its relatively early stages of development, that is what was and is exciting for me personally.

From a business perspective though, we were spending a lot of time, money and effort in regularly visiting India, but the visiting partner’s impact was only superficial at best. With India’s potential and challenges, it was clear another pair of hands were needed to help us make the most of this unique opportunity. We could have spent another 2 to 3 years looking and building the next leadership level and missed out on a lot of opportunities.

What was already built was being successful in its own right, but we were struggling to find additional leadership support that was able to implement and support the growth we believed we could have and build the efficiencies our business model required to expand in India.

The Edge: But you have a wife and kids, how did that go down?!

Guy: You mean how did I get my family to India? The fact is my wife had never been to India and didn’t have much of an idea what to expect and my kids were too young to argue; it made things pretty easy really! I’d persuaded my girlfriend, now wife, to move to Hong Kong from Australia on a 2-year stay, so 11 years seemed a good time to come good on the promise!

The Edge: What were the main differences you found in the Indian recruitment market compared to the other markets you had worked in?

Guy: I was very surprised by how ‘fractured’ the recruitment process is in India.

The Edge: What do you mean?

Guy: Our model, and the majority of recruitment in the rest of the world outside India, operates on a 360-degree model (i.e. an individual is a specialist in their function, does business development, search, delivery and execution). In India, while people often call their role ‘360’, in reality, it’s not. The process is often broken up into different teams which can leave a lot of room for error in the selection and dissolving of ownership and accountability of a search process.

The Edge: Why do you think the India market generally operates like that?

Guy: I think that it is partly to do with a lot of recruitment firms originally being relatively small privately held businesses, generating concerns around relationships and being lost should business developers move on to another organisation. It tends to only be the owners’ or partners’ who front-end the business and pass the roles to back-end team members for the delivery.

However, I also think it partly grew that way out of necessity, as the volume of demand from organisations, due to their size, can be overwhelming so you need teams continually sourcing for talent while also needing a continual business development effort as well. In addition, some of the skills companies are looking for are not prevalent in the market so it can require real leg work in searching to identify the right talent either domestically or internationally.

The Edge: So you’ve changed your model to the India recruitment company model?

Guy: Not really, but we have adapted it slightly as we have had to take time to train the functional specialisation we wanted, as opposed to just the generic industry specialisation. It was hard to find functional specialists in the market but that was the niche we identified as missing in India, but clients have demanded in all the other markets I’ve worked in previously.

Actually, we have seen a number of competitors adopt our model over the last few years in India, which is kind of flattering. It has been a compromise of what is necessary to do in the market here, combined with what value we think we can bring to our clients in terms of our specialisations.

The Edge: Anything else you have found different?

Guy: The type of relationships here strikes me as being very unique in their style and openness, both on the client and candidate side, from what I’ve experienced. I sense there is a very strong cultural and alumni network operating in white-collar India. Culturally or organisationally associated people will support each other to help get that initial toe in the door either by referring their network or by giving you a chance to prove yourself, depending on which side of the fence you sit. I haven’t seen it to this level in any other country I’ve worked in.

For example, personally, I am pretty sure there are more Keralites living outside of Kerala and operating across India than there are in Kerala. Conspiracy theories talk about the New World Order but that’s chicken feed to Kerala’s seemingly imminent domination of professional India. Two of my partners are from Kerala, so I can say that with confidence!

The Edge: OK, enough of that chat, what’s your favourite food in India then?

Guy: I’m certainly eating much more vegetarian than I used to and my favourite vegetarian would have to be a good Dal Makani with garlic naan. It is followed very closely by a Mysore Masala Dosa though! My favourite dosa is not far from our office in Powai made ironically by two street vendors from Mysore. It is truly awesome. From a non-veg perspective, anything with the words pork and Coorg in the title is a definite winner for me!

The Edge: What’s your best and your worst meal in India so far?

Guy: My worst meal was comfortably an end of the month team lunch. I had put the responsibility on the team to find a place to go for lunch at the end of the month. My choice is normally beers and burgers pretty much, but I felt this time I should be more culturally sensitive to the vegetarian, non-drinking contingent in the office, which isn’t exactly all of them, but close enough… depending on which day of the week it is! Clearly, a lot of effort had gone into the choice as the restaurant was about 150m walk from the office, which is the second closest restaurant to our building.

On getting there, it seemed no one could be that bothered to walk up the three flights of stairs to the chosen restaurant. Taking the path of least resistance, we went to the restaurant directly opposite instead…, which is the closest restaurant to the office. We proceeded to have the worst version of any Indian dish we ordered, as verified by every team member. Combined with being a ‘dry’ restaurant there was really nothing left to make up for it.

The Edge: Maybe you should be more careful about the responsibilities you delegate?! And the best meal?

Guy: Pretty much any meal over a long weekend sitting on the beach in Goa wins it for me! Though I did recently have a very memorable and special family lunch in a beautiful palace in Jodhpur. The Indian food and setting were spectacular. Unfortunately, so was the bill.

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week as we dig deeper into Guy’s journey and his experiences in India and the recruiting world. If you’d like to reach out to Guy or any of the team members at The Edge, simply talk to us.