HR, administration, legal, procurement and business support hiring across India and the UAE, the roles every company runs on and almost nobody hires until the incumbent has already resigned.
Overview
Mars Consultancy recruits for corporate and support functions across India and the UAE, HR, payroll and compliance, administration and facilities, legal and secretarial, procurement and vendor management, and executive support. These are the roles that keep a business running rather than the ones that appear on its org chart's front page.
This is a cross-cutting function, not a vertical. A payroll executive at an NBFC, a plant HR generalist and an office manager at a software firm do broadly the same job with different context around it, which is why this page exists separately from the sector pages. If you are hiring a finance controller, read the Finance & Accounting page; if the role sits inside a tech team, read IT & Technology; if the compliance requirement is regulatory rather than statutory, read BFSI & Financial Services. What lives here is everything hired *by* the business rather than *for* the product.
Two things make these roles unusually hard to fill well. First, they are almost always hired reactively (the requirement is raised the day someone resigns), and the role is frequently a single incumbent, so the process, the vendor relationships and the undocumented workarounds walk out with them. Second, the job titles are generic and the applicant volume is enormous. A single 'HR Executive' posting in a large city will draw hundreds of applications, and almost none of the screening that matters (statutory knowledge, judgement, discretion) is visible in a keyword.
From requirement briefing to a suitable candidate closing.
For clients in Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai and other Indian cities, and in the UAE.
We are paid by the companies that hire, never by candidates.
The hard part
Talent acquisition, HR operations, HR business partnering and compensation & benefits need different people. A TA specialist who has closed positions all year has never run a PF challan; an HR ops executive who has never negotiated with a hiring manager will struggle as an HRBP. We take the brief against the specific sub-function and screen for that, rather than sending four kinds of 'HR Executive'.
One payroll executive, one company secretary, one office manager, support functions frequently run on a single person, and when they resign the process leaves with them. The replacement has to be productive quickly with little handover, so we screen for someone who has owned the full cycle end to end rather than handled one slice inside a larger team, and treat the notice period as the real deadline.
PF and ESIC filings, professional tax, gratuity, Shops & Establishments registrations, POSH constitution and reporting, labour welfare fund, contract labour records. None of it appears meaningfully on a CV, and every candidate lists 'statutory compliance' as a skill. We ask what the candidate has personally filed, in which state and at what frequency, before the profile reaches you.
Generic titles plus a huge applicant pool means an 'Admin Executive' or 'Executive Assistant' posting returns hundreds of loosely relevant CVs, and the qualities that actually decide the hire (judgement, discretion, composure under a demanding principal) are not keywords. Volume here is the problem, not the solution. We shortlist against the working reality of the role instead of against the job description's noun list.
Support headcount is the last to clear budget and the first to be treated as an emergency, because the vacancy is felt immediately across the whole office. That pressure produces rushed hires who leave within a year. We keep briefing tight and shortlists small so the panel can decide quickly without lowering the bar to whoever is available this week.
Roles
Use cases
Common shapes of requirement in this sector, and how each one is run. These are illustrative patterns rather than accounts of specific engagements.
Track record
Across India and in the UAE. Our longest record is in the Mumbai region, and these are the belts where we have hired most for this sector. For most roles below management there, travel time decides whether an offer is accepted, so we screen for it.
Talk to the sector deskCorporate head offices with full HR, legal, secretarial and procurement functions in one place.
Head-office HR, admin and EA roles across corporate towers and mill-land campuses.
The densest cluster of mid-sized company head offices in the western suburbs, HR generalist, admin and payroll roles.
Technology and services campuses hiring HRBP, L&D, TA and facilities roles at scale.
Shared services and back-office centres running HR operations, payroll and MIS for larger groups, served from our Thane office.
Corporate offices and plant-adjacent HR, admin and compliance roles across the Thane belt, served from our head office.
Services
Who we hire for
We hire support functions for employers in every sector we work across, start-ups building a first HR function, SMEs and mid-sized businesses replacing a single incumbent, and established enterprises staffing shared services, facilities and procurement teams at scale.
Discuss a requirementYes. We hire across HR, administration, facilities, legal and secretarial, procurement and vendor management, and executive and business support, across India and the UAE, from HR Business Partner, Payroll Executive and Compensation & Benefits Analyst through to Admin Manager, Company Secretary, Procurement Manager and Executive Assistant.
By asking what the candidate has personally handled rather than what they have listed. For an HR operations or payroll hire, that means which returns they file (PF, ESIC, professional tax, gratuity, labour welfare fund) for how many employees, in which states, and whether they have handled Shops & Establishments registrations, POSH committee constitution and contract labour records themselves or only supported someone who did.
We ask before sourcing. 'HR' covers four largely unrelated jobs (talent acquisition, HR operations and payroll, HR business partnering, and compensation & benefits), and someone strong in one is rarely strong in another. The briefing establishes which of them your role is actually 80% made of, and the shortlist is screened against that.
Through the working reality of the role rather than the keyword list. We look at the seniority of the principals a candidate has supported, the calls they were trusted to make without checking, how they have handled confidential information, and how they have managed competing demands from senior people. The shortlist is deliberately small, because a longlist of EA CVs tells you almost nothing.
Typically 7–30 days from briefing to a suitable candidate closing, though notice periods usually decide the real date. Single-incumbent roles are screened for someone who has owned the full cycle end to end rather than one slice of it, because the handover will be thin and the replacement has to run the next cycle largely unaided.
Yes. Company Secretary, Legal Counsel, Contracts Executive, Procurement Manager, Purchase Executive and Vendor Management Executive all sit within this function. Qualification requirements (ACS membership, an LLB, the specific contract or category exposure) are confirmed before a profile reaches you rather than at BGV.
Yes. Corporate and support functions cut across every sector rather than forming one. Controllership, FP&A, audit and taxation roles are covered on our Finance & Accounting page, and roles inside a technology team on our IT & Technology page. This page covers the functions a business runs on internally (HR, admin, legal, procurement and business support), in whichever sector the employer happens to operate.
Get started
Tell us the role, the team around it and the deadline. We'll come back within one business day with questions and an honest view of what it will take.
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