Senior Vice President, Consulting Workforce Economics

The mandate

A multi-practice consulting delivery platform is moving from opportunistic staffing to managed capability investment. Revenue forecasts and hiring plans currently travel through separate management conversations, leaving finance to explain idle capacity after it has been created. The new Senior Vice President will bring workforce economics into the decisions that precede recruitment, subcontracting, training and commercial commitments.

This is an open-ended appointment, with a twenty-four-month initial transformation agenda. The first priority is a credible relationship between qualified sales demand and deployable skills rather than a single optimistic utilisation target. Practice heads will retain delivery ownership, while this executive establishes the economic rules through which competing capability plans are assessed and funded.

The analytical challenge includes fixed-price delivery, time-and-materials work and advisory projects whose revenue recognition differs from their staffing pattern. A utilisation percentage alone cannot reveal the cost of specialist scarcity, unfunded transition work or a project sold below the effort needed to perform it. Finance must distinguish those effects before proposing headcount reductions that simply create a different commercial problem.

The role may approve planning methodologies, analytical staffing and workforce business cases within its delegation. Hiring decisions remain with designated operating and people leaders; exceptional capability investments, restructuring and changes to the platform's commercial risk appetite require executive approval. The function is not a substitute for delivery quality assurance, employee performance management or contract legal review.

Success will be visible in the investment record. New capability proposals should state the demand evidence, ramp assumptions, redeployment options and downside cost before funding is released. Portfolio reviews should reveal where skills investments earn their return and where a practice needs to change its proposition. The leader will build a durable finance team that can repeat these decisions after the initial agenda ends.

What you will own

• Construct a demand-to-capacity planning model that separates signed work, qualified opportunities and speculative pipeline, making the economic consequence of each probability assumption visible to practice leaders.
• Define the finance evidence required for specialist hiring proposals, including ramp time, realistic chargeability, supervision costs and the conditions under which redeployment can absorb a demand shortfall.
• Decide how contract types enter portfolio margin analysis, reconciling booked revenue, delivery effort and unbilled work so commercial teams cannot confuse accounting timing with underlying project economics.
• Develop a capability investment register linking approved training, recruitment and subcontractor commitments to named propositions, expected returns and post-investment review dates rather than aggregate staffing targets.
• Challenge bench and utilisation actions through skill-specific scenarios, identifying where apparent savings would impair profitable delivery or create expensive replacement capacity during a foreseeable project ramp.
• Establish commercial forecast reviews that test sales and delivery assumptions together, documenting disputed inputs and the executive decision needed when the financial plan depends on unproven conversion rates.
• Lead a commercial finance talent programme that builds understanding of consulting delivery, giving analysts experience in project reviews rather than rewarding consolidation speed without economic judgement.

Candidate qualifications

• Show extensive finance planning leadership in consulting or a comparably people-intensive delivery business, with direct exposure to workforce investment decisions. Explain a case where changing the assumed skill mix, ramp profile or subcontractor dependency materially altered a hiring or pricing recommendation rather than simply improving the forecast's formatting.
• Demonstrate fluency across project commercial models and their planning consequences. You should be able to reconcile fixed-price effort risk, time-based billing, transition costs and revenue recognition differences without treating utilisation as a universal measure. Provide evidence of resolving a disagreement between a delivery leader's margin claim and the underlying financial record.
• Bring enterprise modelling discipline that remains usable under imperfect data. Relevant experience includes designing pipeline confidence rules, validating timesheet and billing interfaces, preventing double counting of capacity and creating explicit sensitivity cases. Describe how you changed decision behaviour when stakeholders preferred a favourable average to uncomfortable skill-level evidence.
• Establish a record of building senior finance partnerships across sales, operations and people functions while retaining independent judgement. The appointment requires leading specialists, coaching practice finance partners and sustaining difficult investment reviews. Evidence should identify your own decision contribution, the governance route used and an outcome observed beyond the original approval meeting.

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 14 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-183.