Biography

Military, multilateral, mega project.

Sanjay Sharma spent six years as a commissioned officer in the Indian Army before moving into corporate human resources. As a Captain he led a squadron known by its call sign, the Hunters. A captain is often called the skipper: the one responsible for the mission and for the people carrying it out. Much of how he works today, the bias toward clarity under pressure and the instinct to put the mission first, was shaped there.

He then spent two decades on the client side of search. He held senior human resources leadership roles with international contractors, a master developer, a multinational engineering group, a family owned distributor and a services firm, and ran people functions on three landmark joint ventures. His projects include Mohammed Bin Rashid City District One, Atlantis on the Palm, Dubai International Airport Terminal 3, Mall of the Emirates, Etihad Rail, refinery programmes across Asia and a nuclear power plant build in China. Earlier he worked alongside multilateral and development agencies on post conflict reconstruction in Iraq, Afghanistan and Djibouti.

In 2016 he founded Hunters and Skipper in Dubai, naming it for the lesson of his service: thought before action, because judgement is everything. He has sat on the client side of search and lived with the consequences of leadership appointments, and he built the firm to treat leadership hiring as a strategic act. He leads its CEO, board and senior executive mandates personally, and most of the firm's work comes by referral.

Five questions

The questions he asks every board and CHRO.

Most boards and CHROs already know the answers. Our role is to help them act on them.

  1. 01

    What does it cost the business each month a critical leadership decision remains unresolved?

  2. 02

    Is leadership hiring governed with the same rigour you apply to a major capital allocation decision?

  3. 03

    Does the proposition you take to senior leaders reflect the organisation they will actually join, or the organisation you hope it will become?

  4. 04

    Are you appointing the leader the business requires, or the candidate the organisation finds easiest to approve?

  5. 05

    When a leadership appointment is made, who is ultimately accountable for the value it creates?

Domain

Where he leads searches personally.

  • Engineering and Construction
  • Real Estate
  • Oil and Gas
  • Aerospace and Defence
  • Manufacturing