An interview with:
Deepthi Nair
Job Title: Senior Research Associate

Where I come from, in India, you are either a doctor or an engineer. So as a child I wanted to become a cardio thoracic surgeon (just a fancy word I picked up in a movie with no clear notion as to what it is!) and then you fast forward 15 years later and here I am enjoying a career being a head hunter! They call it Serendipity.

I joined the Grafton Group while still enrolled as a final year undergraduate student in June 2005. The Middle East Africa contingency recruitment arm Grafton Recruitment was established in Dubai and they required a data coder & receptionist. As a first job it was not terribly exciting but I wanted to be a step ahead and find myself employed before I graduated. It was a 'foot in the door' opportunity and I took it! And knowing what happens to a CV after you send it to the search firm was a revelation! cant say that I attained nirvana knowing that though...

After 8 months, I walked up to the MD’s office and said I wanted to do recruitment. I was a clean slate ( that does not describe my appearance!) with no preconceived notions or impressions of the recruitment industry. I have not looked back ever since. I joined as Junior consultant with Grafton brand and later wanted to experiment with executive search. I joined the SF brand in May 2007 as Junior Researcher and in a year’s time progressed to my current role as Senior Research Consultant.

In my current role, I am responsible for the end to end delivery of projects i.e. a complete market mapping and head hunting process which involves identifying target companies, determining organizational structures , name generation and sourcing of candidates to match client requirements, salary surveys et al. I have thoroughly enjoyed this role over the last three years and have been specialised within the healthcare practice group servicing clients across Middle East Africa and the Subcontinent. I balanced this with my academic life and also earned a postgraduate degree in Strategic HR Management.

For me, my role as an executive head-hunter has been a calling! Each day I work hard to fine tune and perfect myself to do the job even better. It has a been a long 5 years of progress in career, exponential learning curve, completed projects, happy clients, winning some great friends at work and building a good network of contacts across the region. It is never monotonous within the healthcare practice at SF MEA with regards to diversity in clients, their expectations, role requirements, and the research challenges across different markets being quite different. A 100% partnership and consultative team approach between my consultant Annie Dolmadjian and I is what makes this all very successful. It is also very rewarding to know when clients come to us and say there is no executive search firm in the region with our level of industry knowledge and client network servicing the MEA healthcare segment.

After 10 long years of expat life in Dubai, I am returning home to India to assume a new role - that of a wife.(that my fiancé knew what a 'headhunter' means, and did not panic and head for the nearest exit while begging for dear life when I said it ,clinched the deal!) I will continue to work with Spenglerfox but from home. Working remotely is quite a different twist but one I look forward to!