Talent and hiring

← 3. Location Strategy5. Tax & Transfer Pricing →

Building the employment framework

• Appointment letters and contracts compliant with the state's Shops & Establishments Act, since India's labour compliance is state-administered, not uniform nationally.
• IP assignment clauses that route anything created on the job back to the parent, drafted at the structuring stage referenced in Entity & Structure, not bolted on later.
• Statutory benefits: Provident Fund and ESI contributions, gratuity accrual once the entity crosses the relevant headcount threshold, and leave policies compliant with state law.
• POSH policy and Internal Committee, mandatory once the entity crosses 10 employees, and worth setting up before it's legally required rather than after.

Talent strategy follows location

Where you hire from is a location decision as much as an HR one; see Location Strategy for how city choice maps to the kind of talent pool, engineering, BFSI, or manufacturing-adjacent, your function needs.

How we help

We don't run recruitment ourselves, but we build and run the compliance layer around hiring: the contracts, the statutory registrations from Setup & Registration, the payroll processing, and the ongoing PF/ESI/POSH obligations, either standing up the function for your own HR team to run, or running it for you through our Managed Services practice once headcount is live.

For the full employment framework, state-by-state contract variance, and the POSH and PF/ESI thresholds in detail, see our briefing on GCC employment compliance.

Talk to us about your GCC.

care@clairvoyis.com

A realistic hiring timeline

For a first cohort of roughly 30 people, sourcing through onboarding realistically takes eight to fourteen weeks for a mid-level engineering team: longer for niche or leadership roles, shorter for high-volume shared-services hiring. Run recruiting in parallel with incorporation rather than waiting for the entity to be fully operational first; the entity has to exist to issue offer letters, but sourcing and interviewing can start well before that.

IP assignment and non-compete, done right

Every appointment letter needs an explicit IP assignment clause: Indian employment law doesn't automatically vest work product created on the job in the employer the way some jurisdictions do, so this has to be written in, not assumed. Non-compete clauses are enforceable in India only during employment, not after it ends; a post-employment non-compete is generally unenforceable, so the protection that actually holds up is a well-drafted confidentiality and non-solicitation clause, not a broad non-compete.

Hiring through the entity vs. an EOR bridge

If the entity isn't yet incorporated but hiring can't wait, an Employer of Record (EOR) can employ the first few people on the parent's behalf and transfer them to the entity once it's live. This buys time but isn't free: EOR fees run higher per head than direct employment, and IP assignment through an EOR arrangement needs its own careful drafting to make sure it flows correctly to the eventual entity. Use it as a bridge for a handful of early hires, not as a long-term structure.

Use our GCC cost calculator to see how headcount and function translate into a first-year cost range once hiring is underway.