DEEPAK LYNGDOH · BHARAT (INDIA)
This is the real version. The LinkedIn one has better lighting.
Nearly two decades of field work: shop counters, call floors, hiring desks, and plenty of rooms where nobody agreed with me on the first meeting. B.Com second-year dropout. Real conversations, real people and real consequences. Across Bharat, the UK, the US, the UAE and beyond.
Numbers stay with me until we talk. They mean little without the story behind them.
At IMS People, hiring mid-level and executive engineers for the US market. Mechanical, electrical, design, product and implementation roles across automotive, pharma, biotech, banking and utilities.
Same principles. Sharper execution. Understand the role properly, speak to the person properly, close properly. Recruiter is the day job. HR is a practice, and it stays with me either way.
One-to-one, structured, long-form guidance for ages 8 to 55: students, first-time job seekers, engineers, designers, working professionals. Not a one-hour advice call, because nobody's life gets sorted in an hour.
Underneath it, I have been building the system behind the counselling since 2016. Slowly, and on purpose. Its default intention is simple: time a person spends should be valued.
I am not here to play startup-startup or unicorn-unicorn. This is a business. Boring, strategic, numbers on paper. That is the plan. Money should keep flowing from more than one direction. Purpose should stay in one.
1989 to today, in order. Some chapters are funny only now. I kept them anyway.
Born in Shillong in 1989, into a home with two belief systems under one roof. Festivals, prayers, arguments, love, all in the same week. So I learned early to read a room. Mixed breed from day one, and I took my identity from both.
Mountains, rain, fog, sun: four seasons in a single day. Nobody in Shillong is surprised by anything. You carry an umbrella and an opinion. First skill acquired: crying at exactly the right volume to get fed. Still useful in negotiations.
Somewhere around 1992 things started to register. I became conscious of what was going on around me, and I started observing. Who spoke first. Who paid. Who got the bigger piece. Who was only pretending to be busy. Nobody asked me to watch. I just did, and the habit never left. It is why people think I have been reading them for the whole meeting. I have. It also makes me unbearable at family functions.
Then the details. Class 1 to 5, topper, which meant the teachers liked me and the back-benchers tolerated me. Class 5 to 8, top eight in a batch of two full sections. Maths, science, history, chess, carrom, puzzles, cricket: anything with a system I could figure out. There was always a challenger next to me, in studies, in games, in everything. Honestly, I preferred it that way. Nobody grows next to someone who doesn't push.
The money lesson started long before school ended. Somewhere between six and twelve I was buying and selling marbles, cards, carrom coins. Shopping, eating, trading, and all of it moved with the weather. I noticed that. And in cricket, we played with bets inside our own game. I would go in with ₹2 and mostly come out with ₹20 or more. That ran till Class 10. Nobody called it a business, but it was one.
Taught nursery and pre-nursery kids for small earnings. Left the dream of cricket and singing early, because life got practical and I stopped waiting for it to get less practical.
Cleared Class 10. Applied for Science. No seat. Moved to B.Com instead. Looked like a setback at the time. It wasn't. Maths was always strong, and business was always where I was heading. Also still a very good bathroom singer. Nobody has objected. Nobody has heard.
Late bloomer, by circumstance and not by nature. I am 37 now. Still blooming. No rush.
School was ending. The money lessons were not. Time to find out what the real world charged for tuition.
First job: pharmacy store boy. Lasted fifteen days, too shy for the counter. Yes, the future recruiter was too shy to talk to customers. Growth is real. Second: a crockery wholesale shop at ₹4,000 a month. Two months in, I looked at the storeroom full of broken sets the owner called worthless. I called it inventory with a marketing problem. I proposed selling by the piece: one plate ₹2, two glasses ₹5, two spoons ₹1. Day one, he made ₹3,000 and I made ₹5,000. Within a few months we cleared most of the dead stock. First real lesson: value is not fixed. It is framed.
Around then: carried cement on a construction site, sold umbrellas on the street when it rained, sold garments on the roadside, did wool rounds for my mother, and hung around my father's garage, mostly cars. Not glamorous. All of it was tuition, and none of it sent a fee reminder.
B.Com mornings from 6 to 10, then work from noon to 10 at night. No leaves. Field marketing for a telecom operator, then telecom sales and service at SS Netcom. There I started at 6 sales in a month and grew it to 3000+, and held that for three straight months. Nobody handed me the number. I kept the conversation honest and kept showing up.
Somewhere in the second year I dropped out of B.Com. Work was already running full time, and I chose the work.
Then I left Shillong for Kolkata and joined Wipro, because staying comfortable was going to cost more later.
Kolkata was a bigger stage, a bigger city, and my first proper salary slip.
Wipro, UK process: broadband support and sales for two telecom brands. Three months of proper training before touching a live call, then daily volume that teaches patience quickly. I learned to say "have you tried switching it off and on again" with genuine empathy. Harder than it sounds. My scores stayed the team benchmark and customers kept writing in. X of those commendations reached CEO level.
When a manager went on medical leave, I ran a 22-member floor for three weeks: full attendance, customer scores held at the top. Nobody had asked me to be a leader. I just stopped waiting for the title.
Learned what corporate discipline looks like, which parts to carry forward, and which to leave at the exit gate. Also learned to watch people more than their titles. Titles lie politely.
Four years of headsets teach you patience. They also teach you what you do not want to become.
Concentrix: customer operations across a travel platform and a telecom operator. Billing, itineraries, usage disputes, escalations. Nothing builds character like explaining a bill to a person who has already decided you wrote it personally. Same lesson every single day: large organisations confuse process compliance with actual care. Those observations quietly became the first drawings of what I would build later.
2016 is also when blockchain and fingerprint science walked into my life together. I did not plan it. I just kept following the curiosity.
Somewhere in this stretch I lost my grandmother, the best person in my life, and went almost broke. Both hit hard. I chose to rebuild.
Self-taught C++, HTML, CSS, blockchain, AI, IoT and digital marketing. YouTube, Google, forums, documentation, every free door that was open, long before ChatGPT or any assistant made it easier. Three months offline for a digital marketing course, not for a resume, but because I wanted to know where the world was heading.
The chapter that built the framework.
Bangalore next. New city, new company, and two acquisitions before I had found the coffee machine.
Transworld Systems. I joined one company and finished under another, without changing my desk. US property-insurance operations: escrow and non-escrow accounts, carrier coordination, claim documentation.
I led a team through the switch to work-from-home and restructured the day around it. Per-agent throughput went from 128 to 300+ calls in the same eight-hour shift. No overtime. Fewer errors, and the best attendance on the floor.
Then COVID-19 closed the chapter with a layoff. I won't dress that up. It was a bad month that turned into the best redirection I have had. It pushed me fully into recruitment.
Politics, the good kind, exists everywhere: home, office, corporate. Reading a room, representing people fairly, holding a team together without shouting. I stopped resisting it. That kind is needed.
COVID took the job and handed me a different game: recruitment. Turns out I had been training for it since the crockery shop.
Randstad India: commission-based leadership hiring across India and EMEA. Director, VP and Function Head roles. You eat what you close. Excellent teacher.
SCGB Solutions: full-cycle hiring across IT, non-IT, legal, fintech and digital, including CXO-level roles. Started using AI tools early for sourcing and screening, back when most people were still laughing at them.
Idur Global Tech: joined a growing team and built HR from nothing: hiring, onboarding, policies, documentation. The company wound down when the investor pulled funding, and I handled the device recovery and the hard conversations. That is part of the record too.
Aurokripa Technologies: end-to-end recruitment across India, the UAE and Africa, facing both the client and the team. A large client book across many industries, one repeatable process for all of them. Built an AI-assisted matching tool for the team.
IMS People (now): US-market hiring for engineering and executive roles across several staffing programs under one roof.
Across these years the clients ran from Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies to unicorns, startups and the small business where the owner is also the accountant, the HR and the chai boy. Different rooms, same process. The requirement is also the same everywhere: "immediate joiner, 10 years of experience, and a budget that has not met inflation." Recruitment is dating with a notice period.
The business families of Rajasthan, Gujarat and the Sindhi community taught me a lot in these years: patience around money, no drama in negotiation, and the worth of a handshake with paperwork behind it. Every hard challenge in those rooms turned into a lesson I still use.
Recruitment also keeps me in current affairs, whether I like it or not. In one week I talk to a designer, an engineer, an all-rounder enabler and a first-time job seeker. Free MBA, minus the debt. I love learning new things, and this job never runs out of them.
One of my best memories from this stretch: mentoring an IEEE-backed hackathon at a university in Bangalore. Student teams, most of them building on blockchain, taught from scratch in one sitting. Every team delivered. That room reminded me why I do this.
Alongside: resume design, interview preparation and counselling started earning on their own from 2021. Today it is family time, two dogs, weekends off, and a problem from 2016 that is still unsolved at scale. Patient. Consistent. In it for the long haul.
Which brings me to today.
After all these years, my LinkedIn connection list is the part of the résumé I am quietly proud of. Not the "congratulations on your work anniversary" kind. Real people, built one honest conversation at a time: designers, engineers, government officers, investors, builders, students, counsellors, HR professionals, and a few who fit in no box. The ones who fit in no box are usually the interesting ones.
What I am looking for now: the right people, with long-term thinking. Builders who like slow, hard problems. And investors for GrovNest who measure in decades and don't need a demo by Friday. Real conversation first. Paperwork second. If that is you, say hello.
I have watched the world change gears more than once. Every stage arrived with people preaching that this one would fix everything. Very few of them were working on the human being. LOL.
I also know Capital. With enough money, almost anything can be done. That is exactly the problem. Today's world glorifies even the unethical version with full audacity, then calls itself developed. I have decided to keep doing it the boring way.
Every week: AI, blockchain, education policy, geopolitics. Not to impress anyone. To stay oriented, and to decide what is worth holding for decades.
Tracking: LLMs, agentic AI, MCP, AI in HR. Already using it in real hiring work.
Holding: AI supports the human. It doesn't replace one. I watch what holds up and what is a demo with good lighting.
Tracking: consensus models, token economics. Self-taught since 2016. A builder, not a trader.
Holding: a ledger where time invested is recorded and valued. Designed for decades, not for a cycle.
Tracking: assessment science, policy shifts, workforce development in India and globally. What works versus what is sold as progress.
Holding: twelve months of guidance, not twelve minutes.
Tracking: trade shifts, talent migration, regulation, economic policy.
Holding: context. Careers and businesses move where the world moves.
The system I am designing runs from government to business to citizen, with a peer-to-peer wallet at the base. You don't ship that on a Friday and post about it. So I build it and use it inside my team, or I build it and hold it for the day it is needed. That day will come.
Hashing, keys, consensus, age-gated wallet logic. Written, tested, waiting.
Token economy, mining and packaging built end to end. Parked deliberately.
Candidate matching, shortlisting, structured interview sheets. Used daily.
A knowledge vault that works without internet, and without anyone else's servers.
Knowledge is never the constraint. Timing is.
These are not job descriptions. They are things I have done repeatedly, in different rooms, with real outcomes behind them.
End-to-end hiring, intern to CXO. X placements across engineering, design, sales, finance, legal and manufacturing, for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies, unicorns, startups and small businesses. Competency and intent over pedigree.
Human-development based profiling. X assessments across X students, X first-time job seekers and professionals, ages 8 to 55. Long-form, not one-session advice.
Policies, onboarding, documentation, process fixes. HR for a growing team, built from nothing and without external help.
From a crockery counter to CXO interviews. X candidate conversations with X engineers, X designers and X counsellors. Mindset over resume.
C++, Python, blockchain architecture, AI tools, digital marketing. Applied, not theoretical. Learned before the shortcuts existed.
Institutional sales, partnership design, long-term architecture. Business tone, numbers on paper. It started with a conversation with my father in Class 8. Miss him.
I don't bend this for convenience, a good reason or a good client. Once you start, it never stops.
I have placed too many capable people who were simply in the wrong room. The problem is almost never ability. It is alignment.
If someone puts in real effort and grows, the system around them should see it. If it doesn't, something in the system is broken.
I watch a room before I speak in it. Most mistakes come from acting before understanding.
If nobody in the room ever pushes back, I start to worry. Disagreement with respect is one of the best investments in a relationship.
Same core idea since 2016. That is not slow. It is intentional.
8 hours for professional life. 16 for me, family and friends. Monday to Friday. If something important lands on a weekend and it is worth it, I do it. If it isn't worth it, I still do it, for the experience. Either way, work and professionalism don't get compromised.
I am open-mouthed and I say what I think, after checking where I am standing. Words are the strongest tool I own. I use them carefully.
You have read the work. Here is the part that doesn't go on a resume.
Marvel fan, Iron Man first, Batman close behind. Pushpa too, yes. Plenty of favourites, and there is always one scene worth a second watch. If I have watched something, I will tell you honestly what I thought.
Office, client location, event, or the road: there is usually music on. I know a few hook steps rather than actual dancing. With effort, I think I could learn. LOL.
I like HR and industry events. Good rooms, good conversations. Sometimes one question from a stranger is worth the whole ticket.
I love to cook. Home-cooked, no matter whose home. Non-veg by geography and birth. Tungrymbai is my favourite Meghalaya dish, hands down. Outside food is also fine. Strong stomach.
Shah Rukh Khan, the outsider who stayed patient. Priyanka Chopra, Tom Cruise, Hrithik Roshan, Thalapathy Vijay. Growing up it was Sonu Nigam, Shaan and a lot of 90s songs. These days I listen to everything.
Spiritual in my own way. An occasional drink, a few bad habits, and more good intentions than all of them combined. LOL. Same person as in school, when it comes to the basics. That part never needed a job title to be true.
Stories are free. This is what stands behind them.
Certificates? I have plenty. None of them ever closed a role, fixed a floor or convinced a client. The work did. That is why they are not on this page.
I am open to genuine conversations about hiring, career counselling, building systems, or anything that needs honest thinking. Not from a post. Not from a cold call. From a correct intention. I am looking to connect with the right people: long-term thinkers, builders, and investors for GrovNest who think in decades, not quarters.
Weekdays, roughly 12 PM to 6:30 PM IST. Saturday only if you genuinely need support, and then come with purpose. Sunday is offline. WhatsApp is your best shot, so save my number. I might miss you sometimes. It is never the intention.
So the family stays happy. So life stays normal. So responsibility stays in its lane. On weekdays I live with work, ethics, law, code, security and privacy. On weekends I am allowed to think about myth, history and mystery.
Life is simple, once you start believing in yourself, even when you are alone.
Using ChatGPT or any AI system is not bad. I use it myself, for real work. But if we keep normalising every trend without a purpose, we will be doomed. A tool without direction is just a faster way to get lost. Wait for the December Marvel release. It will give you the gist. LOL.
Purpose first. Tool second.
I have been in the luxury room and the professional room. I have sat across people with big titles, big companies and big confidence. I have also been the person with nothing on paper, only what I carried in my head and my hands.
The crockery shop, the cement work, the layoff, the broken years and the quiet rebuilding were not stepping stones I planned. They were the road. I would rather be honest about that than present a version of me that sounds better than it is.
About a year into recruitment I was at an industry event. A hundred-plus people in one room, from twenty-year-olds to people past sixty. A man with the mic asked a simple question: what is short term, and what is long term?
Answers came from all over. Short term was three to five years, most said. A few stretched it to ten or fifteen. Long term? Till the person is alive. The man laughed, politely, and answered: short term is your 30 to 50 years, because you are still figuring out life. Long term, ask my grandchildren.
Earth: 510 million square kilometres.
Land: 149 million.
Half of the habitable part is already farmed or grazed.
8.3 billion of us, sharing what is left.
India: 6.3 crore graduates under thirty.
1.1 crore of them have no job.
Nearly 40% of the youngest ones, unemployed.
And the hiring desk still says: degree yes, skill no.
Forests going. Air choking. Planet heating.
We call this development.
Really. Dude.
Wake up, kids.
Learn something real. Build slowly. Be good to people.
The planet is not a rental, and neither is your time.
— A poem from me to the world
Keep it simple. Life is already complicated.
— Deepak