Lead Recruiter

At Booking Holdings, we believe recruiting is about shaping experiences, building trust, and enabling growth. We're looking for a Lead Recruiter who is both a strategist and a hands-on leader, someone who thrives in a global, cross-cultural environment and can elevate how we connect talent to opportunity.

This role is a senior individual contributor position, but it carries the influence and responsibility of leadership. You will mentor recruiters, partner with senior stakeholders, and independently drive critical senior hiring (up to Director level) across all business units in India.

In this role, you connect people and business for our Non Tech roles: elevating the candidate journey, guiding leaders with insight, and shaping the future of our organisation through every hire.

What You'll Do

• Lead a complex business, work hand in hand with the leadership team & enable them in their journey to expand and hire the best talent.
• Lead senior searches end-to-end, designing and running complex hiring processes with independence, creativity, and speed.
• Shape the experience for candidates and hiring managers, ensuring it is seamless, inclusive, and respectful.
• Be a trusted partner to senior stakeholders, building strong relationships through insight, delivery, and credibility.
• Mentor recruiters, sharing knowledge and lifting the capability of the wider team, even without formal people management responsibilities.
• Work globally, partner with colleagues across in the US and Europe, bringing cultural sensitivity and cross-cultural intelligence to every interaction.
• Use technology smartly, leverage AI tools, sourcing platforms, and data insights to sharpen decision-making and accelerate results.
• Build pipelines for tomorrow, proactively map markets and talent pools to stay ahead of business needs.
• Report and tell stories with data, build dashboards, analyse trends, and translate insights into action for business leaders.
• Navigate ambiguity with agility, adapt quickly when priorities shift and deliver results in a dynamic environment.

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of recruiting experience in global organisations, with a proven track record of delivering senior-level hires.
• Experience operating in complex, cross-cultural environments, with the intelligence to adapt to different contexts and leadership styles.
• Strong communication skills, articulate, persuasive, and able to influence senior leaders with credibility.
• Proficiency in Google Suite , especially in building presentations, reporting, and data analysis that simplify and tell the talent story.
• Demonstrated ability to build and execute recruiting strategies, not just run processes.
• Tech-savviness and curiosity about using AI and new tools to make recruiting smarter and more inclusive.
• A strong focus on both candidate and hiring manager experience, with a reputation for building trust.
• Comfort in managing ambiguity and the agility to prioritise, pivot, and deliver at pace.
• Proven ability to mentor recruiters and elevate team capability, even without direct line responsibility.
• Strong commercial acumen, able to connect talent conversations to business impact.

Who You Are

• A strategic operator who can execute flawlessly while seeing the bigger picture.
• A people-first recruiter who values relationships, empathy, and inclusion.
• A storyteller with data, able to use numbers, insights, and visuals to influence decisions.
• A learner at heart, curious about new tools, trends, and future-focused recruiting practices.
• Someone with executive presence, confident, articulate, and comfortable in high-stakes conversations.
• Agile, adaptable, and resilient, thriving in a fast-changing environment.

This is an opportunity to define what great hiring looks and feels like at one of the world' most global, tech-forward companies where inclusion, innovation, and impact come together.

Competences required:
Excellent Communication Skills, Executive Presence, Hiring Expert (In Sourcing, Attraction, Assessment, Selection & Negotiation), Relationship Management, Business Partnering, Working with Data.

Pre-Employment Screening
If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.