Where ecommerce talent sits, and how to read the CV

The hard part of building in-house is not deciding which roles to open. It is finding people who have actually run a seller panel rather than sat next to someone who did. The pool in India is small, it sits in five identifiable places, and almost every CV in it is written in the same inflated dialect.

The five places experienced people actually sit

• Brand side. Someone already running Amazon, Flipkart and two quick commerce accounts for a consumer brand of your size or larger. Best fit, hardest to pull, most expensive.
• Agency side. Account managers and ads people from marketplace or performance agencies. Deep tool fluency, a high volume of reps across many brands, thin exposure to inventory, cash and the P and L.
• The platforms themselves. Ex category managers and account managers from the marketplaces and quick commerce apps. They know how decisions get made inside the platform and they have a phone book. Many have never operated a seller account from the outside.
• 3PLs and fulfilment providers. Strong on dispatch, SLA, returns and courier escalation. Weak on content, ads and demand.
• Seller support vendors and channel software firms. People from catalogue shops, reconciliation services and channel managers. Very strong on the boring mechanics of bulk uploads, error files and claim filing. Usually narrow.

What each background costs you

Every source has a predictable gap, and that gap is what you spend the first six months paying for.

An agency hire will optimise a campaign beautifully and will not notice that the SKU driving the ROAS has eleven days of cover left. A platform hire will negotiate a good visibility slot and then be unable to get a suppressed listing back without help. A 3PL hire will protect your dispatch SLA and will not have an opinion about A plus content. None of this disqualifies anyone. It tells you what the second hire has to cover and what you are going to have to teach.

The background that most reliably fails at this revenue band is the large FMCG brand manager who has run trade schemes but has never worked in a place where price, ad spend and stock cover are the same conversation on the same screen.

Reading the GMV claim

Nearly every CV says managed Rs X crore of GMV. On its own the number tells you nothing. Three questions turn it into information.

First, was that GMV the account total or their slice of it? Someone on a team of nine at a Rs 200 crore brand will often write the full 200. Ask which SKUs, which channels, which months.

Second, what was the number when they arrived and what was it when they left? Growth from 4 to 9 crore in a category that tripled in the same period is a tailwind, not a performance. Ask what the category did around them.

Third, was the growth bought? A lot of impressive numbers from the funded years were discounting with a marketing budget behind it. Ask what contribution margin looked like at the start and the end of the period. A candidate who has never seen that number was running a dashboard, not a business.

Four tells that separate the owner from the observer

• The ad account. Did they build the campaign structure, set bids and pull the search term report, or did they approve a plan an agency sent every Monday? Ask them to describe the last time they restructured a campaign and why.
• Settlement. Did they ever tie a payout back to orders, or did they only read dashboard revenue? People who have done reconciliation name specific deduction types without being prompted. People who have not use settlement as a synonym for payment.
• Escalation. Ask about the last listing suppression or account block they lived through. An owner remembers the case, the appeal and how many days it took. An observer remembers that it got sorted.
• Inventory. Ask who decided how much stock went into the quick commerce dark store network last festive season. If the answer is that supply chain handled that, they have been doing half the job.

Red flags worth a hard no

Titles inflating faster than tenure, three roles in four years each a level up, at companies nobody can verify. A CV listing twelve platforms including ones the brand never sold on at any scale. Percentage claims with no base, such as grew sales 340 percent, when 340 percent of a six lakh month is still a six lakh business. And an unwillingness to name any brand or SKU, which is occasionally a real confidentiality obligation and is more often a story that does not survive detail.

The strongest positive signal is unglamorous. A candidate who volunteers something that went wrong, names their own part in it and can tell you what the fix was is rare enough that it is close to a hiring decision on its own.

Where to actually look

Job boards will fill your inbox with agency executives who all describe the same year. The channels that work better at this size are the seller community groups on WhatsApp and LinkedIn where people argue about deduction disputes, your own courier and 3PL account managers who see dozens of brands a month, the category manager you already deal with at a platform, and founders in adjacent categories who have just been through a hiring round. Operator referrals beat cold applications at this band on both quality and speed, and they cost you nothing except the favour you owe back.