Global Head of Workforce Economics and Capacity

The mandate

The Global Head will turn workforce choices into an integrated view of capacity, capability, cost and delivery risk. Headcount is currently visible as an expense, yet the economic consequences of vacancy timing, location, skill scarcity, contingent labour, productivity assumptions and management layers are not consistently connected to operating plans.

This permanent portfolio owns the financial methodology for workforce demand and supply, not people policy. It will establish planning units that reflect productive capacity, reveal the cash and performance lag between approval and deployment, and distinguish genuine efficiency from cost movement that transfers pressure elsewhere.

The role can approve workforce-planning measures, challenge unfunded or unsupported hiring plans, and require options before a resource case reaches executive review. It cannot select individuals, determine employment terms or direct organisational design. Those accountabilities remain with people and operating leaders, supported by transparent economics.

The first year should leave a rolling twelve-quarter capacity view, consistent vacancy and attrition assumptions, governed location economics and a benefits ledger for productivity investments. The durable measure of success is whether workforce decisions move earlier, with clearer trade-offs and fewer emergency corrections after financial commitments are already fixed.

What you will own

• Define productive-capacity measures that connect role families, proficiency, availability and time-to-effectiveness to financial and operating outcomes.
• Build a workforce bridge separating approved positions, filled capacity, vacancies, contingent coverage, attrition, location mix, compensation effects and productivity.
• Establish hiring-lead and ramp assumptions using observed ranges, with named owners and expiry dates for judgemental overrides.
• Create scenario choices for demand shocks, scarce-skill bottlenecks and delayed recruitment, including costs of waiting, substituting or stopping work.
• Govern location economics through total cost, time-zone coverage, transition burden, resilience and capability evidence rather than wage comparison alone.
• Introduce investment cases for automation and capability building that prevent double-counting of avoided hires, released cost and improved output.
• Chair a quarterly workforce-capacity review with finance, people and operating owners, recording decisions and backchecking realised effects.
• Develop a specialist team able to challenge executive resource plans while maintaining appropriate boundaries around individual employee data.

Candidate qualifications

• At least 16 years in strategic FP&A, workforce planning or capacity economics, with five years leading cross-border portfolios.
• Evidence of a workforce model that influenced hiring pace, location, mix or capability investment and subsequently reconciled to actual financial outcomes.
• Technical command of vacancy, attrition, compensation, utilisation, productivity, learning-curve and contingent-labour modelling.
• Experience working with aggregated people data under strict access and minimisation controls, including how small-population risks were handled.
• Examples of exposing a false productivity benefit caused by transferred workload, deferred activity or double-counted headcount avoidance.
• Demonstrated ability to align finance, people and operating definitions while leaving employment decisions with their proper owners.
• A record of building planning teams whose challenge is welcomed because assumptions, not personalities, remain the object of scrutiny.

Working terms and boundaries

• The continuing appointment has first-year gates for taxonomy approval, rolling-view adoption, the first quarterly backcheck and successor depth.
• Authority covers financial measures, assumptions and readiness of resource cases; employment policy, individual decisions and organisation design do not transfer.
• Hybrid presence will cluster around quarterly capacity reviews and major resource-allocation windows, with planned travel agreed in advance.
• Analysis must use aggregated authorised data, and no individual performance inference may be drawn from financial planning proxies.
• The year-one endpoint is an operated twelve-quarter model, controlled assumptions, documented benefits and established joint governance.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 5 October 2026. Mandate reference FPA-PER-2026-DUB-09.