vikaasSenior candidate sourcing for HR leaders. Outreach that doesn't sound like a recruiter.
Senior candidates ignore 15 recruiter messages a week. Generic InMails get auto-archived. Vikaas approaches VP+ and Director-level passive candidates from your hiring manager or founder's LinkedIn profile, in a voice that reads like a peer conversation — not a recruiter pitch. Interest-gauged shortlists land in your ATS in three weeks.
Senior candidates get 15 InMails a week. None of yours stand out.
In 2026, every senior tech, product, design, finance, and operations leader on LinkedIn receives 8–15 recruiter messages weekly — most of them generic, templated, undifferentiated. Your VP search competes against that noise. Three structural problems every HR leader faces:
Recruiter messages get auto-archived.
Senior candidates have set up filters: "recruiter," "exciting opportunity," "would love to chat" — all filtered out before they're read. Open rates on InMails have dropped from ~40% to ~12% in two years. Your message — no matter how thoughtful — looks identical to fifteen others arriving the same week.
Your internal TA team is bandwidth-locked.
Your TA team is running 6 active senior roles, sourcing for each, screening, scheduling, employer brand work. They can't deep-source passive talent at the volume needed. The 80% of sourcing work that should be off their plate is on it. Active sourcing for senior roles requires bandwidth they don't have.
Retained search runs ₹15–25L per VP role.
A traditional retained-search firm bills 30–35% of first-year CTC. For a VP at ₹60L CTC, that's ₹18–21L per role. For a typical growth-stage company hiring 4–6 senior roles a year, that's ₹70L+ in search fees alone. The math gets ugly fast — especially compared to a monthly managed pipeline that runs all your senior roles in parallel.
Shortlists in your ATS. Not raw lists.
Most "sourcing" services hand you a spreadsheet of names. We hand you a shortlist of senior candidates who have already had a conversation, expressed interest, and are warm enough to interview this week.
Interest-gauged shortlists in your ATS
Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, Keka — candidates flow in with a clear "interested · let's talk" status, the original LinkedIn thread linked, and notes on what excited them about your role. Your interviews start at the next layer of qualification, not at "are you actually open to this?"
Hiring-manager-voice approach
Outreach goes from your hiring manager's or founder's LinkedIn — not a Vikaas profile, not a recruiter-agency profile. Senior candidates reply to people they want to work with, not to outsourced sourcers. Reply rates are typically 3–4× higher than agency-profile outreach.
AI-pre-screened on must-haves
AI confirms must-have fundamentals before a candidate hits your ATS — years of experience, current geography, notice period, comp expectations, must-haves. Humans confirm the nuance. Your hiring manager doesn't waste interview slots on candidates who weren't actually open or qualified.
Weekly funnel report per role
A weekly dashboard per active role: profiles approached, replies, interested, shortlisted, pipeline status. The metrics you'd want a TA director reporting — without the TA director's time. Hiring managers can self-serve the visibility they always asked for.
A compounding talent pool across roles
Candidates who weren't right for Role A but who matched your culture get re-engaged for Role B when it opens. Over a 6-month engagement, you build a warm passive talent pool tied to your employer brand — instead of losing every candidate who said "not now" back into the market. By month 9, ~30% of your senior hires come from this warm pool.
How InterviewGod hired its VP Engineering in 18 days.
InterviewGod is our sister AI-native interview platform. In Q2 2026 it needed to hire a VP Engineering plus a Head of College Partnerships plus a Director of Product — all senior, all niche, all in the Indian tech ecosystem where senior talent is in extreme demand. Retained search firms quoted 18 weeks. Vikaas delivered the first hire in 18 days.
VP Engineering hired in 18 days. Three senior roles closed in 60.
InterviewGod's founding team didn't have a TA function. The roles were too senior for a generic recruiter, too niche for an internal LinkedIn Recruiter spray. Vikaas ran all three searches in parallel from the founder's LinkedIn profile. Outreach was indistinguishable from a peer conversation — because it was authored in the founder's voice, calibrated weekly. First interest-confirmed candidate for VP Engineering hit the ATS on day 11; first offer accepted day 18. All three roles closed within 60 days, at a combined cost ~1/4 of what retained search would have charged.
"Three senior hires in two months without a dedicated TA team. The candidates we ended up hiring told us they replied because the outreach didn't sound like a recruiter — and they wouldn't have replied to one." — InterviewGod founding team · May 2026
Discovery call to signed offer for VP Engineering role.
VP Eng + Head of Partnerships + Director Product in 60 days.
Combined cost ~25% of what retained search firms quoted.
Vikaas vs retained search firms vs in-house TA expansion.
For VP and Director-level senior hiring, the comparison isn't "Vikaas vs recruiters". It's "Vikaas vs retained search firms vs expanding internal TA". Honest math below:
| Retained search firm | Expand internal TA team | Vikaas managed pipeline | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per senior hire | ₹15L–25L (30–35% of CTC) | ₹6L–9L (loaded recruiter cost) | Effectively ₹2L–3.5L (monthly pipeline ÷ hires) |
| Time to first shortlist | 5–8 weeks | 3–5 weeks | 2–3 weeks |
| Outreach voice authenticity | Recruiter-agency profile | In-house recruiter profile | Hiring manager or founder profile |
| Multi-role parallelism | One retained role at a time | Limited by TA bandwidth | 3–8 concurrent roles standard |
| Compounding talent pool | No — search ends at fill | Some, depends on rec ops | Yes — warm pool across roles |
| Risk if no fit found | Pay retainer regardless | Loaded cost of recruiter time | End engagement after month 3 |
What TA leaders ask us. Honestly answered.
VP+, Director+, principal-IC level, senior specialists (staff engineers, senior product, design leads, finance heads, country GMs). Below that, traditional in-house sourcing or LinkedIn Recruiter remains more cost-effective. We'll tell you on the discovery call if your role isn't a fit for our model.
For most senior roles below CXO at sub-1000-person companies, yes — math works out at ~1/4 the cost. For C-suite at 1000+ person companies, retained search firms still bring relationships and discretion we can't match. We tell you which to use, when.
No. We source, approach, gauge interest, and confirm fundamentals (geo, notice period, comp expectations). The interview, evaluation, reference checks, and offer process stays with your team. We're the upstream sourcing layer — not the hiring decision.
Yes — our sister product InterviewGod.ai handles candidate-side and panelist-side interview prep, AI-led screening, and structured assessment. Many of our hiring customers run both: Vikaas sources the shortlist, InterviewGod helps your panel run better interviews. Each works standalone; together they cover the full senior-hiring funnel.
RPO typically takes over the entire recruitment lifecycle — sourcing, screening, interviewing, offers — and bills like an embedded team. We do only the sourcing-and-approach layer. Cheaper, faster, but narrower in scope. If you need full-cycle, traditional RPO firms (Korn Ferry, Allegis, TeamLease's exec arm) are a better fit.
Yes — most hiring engagements run 3–8 roles concurrently. We can ramp up to 15–20 active roles per engagement, especially for senior org build-outs after a funding round or geographic expansion.
₹2L–3.5L/month for a hiring pipeline depending on number of concurrent roles and seniority. Bundled engagements (sales + hiring on the same retainer) get a discount. Three-month minimum, month-to-month after.
Yes — GCC is one of our two primary regions. We handle Emirati/Saudi/Qatari/Bahraini senior hiring with the same engine, calibrated for local market norms, language considerations, and nationalization compliance requirements (Emiratization, Saudization).
Stop spending 18 weeks per VP hire.
Get interest-confirmed shortlists in 21 days.
Thirty minutes with your hiring manager. We'll review the role, the market for it, and tell you honestly whether a managed sourcing pipeline beats your current approach.