In January 2024 I joined Omnicom Media Group to start a capability centre in Bengaluru. There was no team and no hiring pipeline. By the time I left in May 2026 it had 250 people.
The centre covered Ad-Tech, Mar-Tech and Retail Media. In staffing terms that meant five functions: engineering, analytics, forecasting, customer operations and reporting. Each one draws from a different talent market and carries a different seniority curve, so very little of what worked for one transferred cleanly to the next.
Four jobs inside one mandate
A build like this looks from the outside like recruitment at volume. It is four separate pieces of work that happen to run at the same time.
- Org design. Deciding what the centre would own before anyone was hired into it. Scope first, headcount second.
- The hiring engine. The process, the sourcing, and the discipline to keep both running across five functions at once.
- The leadership bench. Managers who could hold a function on their own, so the centre did not route every decision through me.
- Culture. The part that gets postponed on most builds, because it has no deadline until it becomes a problem.
Culture was the measurable part
Culture has a reputation for being the soft item on the list, which is mostly a measurement problem. Ours was measured. The centre recorded the highest employee Trust Score in the company and contributed to its Great Place to Work certification.
The DEI work ran through hiring and through employee resource groups rather than sitting alongside them as a separate programme.
What I would tell someone starting one
The mandate you are given is usually headcount by a date. The mandate you actually have is to build something that still works after you stop watching it. Those two are not in conflict, but only one of them is written down.