The recruiter had become the new hire. After years of helping other people make career decisions, Sumukhi Ramnath was learning the peculiar discomfort of making one herself. Three months into Korn Ferry, she wrote about the adjustment: new methods, mistakes, and the awkward business of finding her voice among unfamiliar colleagues. A person can know a great deal about recruitment and still need help settling in.
There was a pleasing reversal here. At her previous firm, she had encouraged members of her team to speak up during business development calls. Now she understood the hesitation from the other side. In June 2022, she offered a small permission slip to anyone starting again: “It’s OK to not know everything”. The advice had acquired the weight of personal experience.
That moment offers a useful way into Ramnath’s career in financial services recruitment and executive search. Job titles tell us which part of an organisation someone occupies. Her writing is more interested in what happens when people try to move between those parts: who gets an opportunity, what an interviewer notices, and how a newcomer learns to belong.
A psychology graduate enters the banking conversation
Born and raised in Singapore, Ramnath studied psychology at the University at Buffalo. Her early career took her into recruitment at Ambition, where she went on to lead its financial services practice. By November 2021, that remit covered a team recruiting across front, middle and back-office functions, with clients spanning financial institutions, asset management, insurance, fintech and crypto.
That range matters. The phrase “banking jobs” can make a complicated labour market sound like a single queue. Her work brought her into a sector with very different requirements inside it. A business building its client base needs one set of people; a firm strengthening its controls needs another. Both may appear under the same financial services heading.
In February 2019, she was already describing those distinctions publicly as a managing consultant. Discussing demand for data auditors, she separated data science audit from data analytics audit. The former could draw people with machine learning or data science experience, even without a conventional audit background. The latter was more closely connected to established audit teams, with technology and visualisation skills added to controls experience.
It was a precise observation about a changing profession. New work does not always arrive with a conveniently new job title. Sometimes an old title begins asking for a different education. Someone has to notice before the shortlist is written.
The interview has two people in it
Ramnath also spent time on the candidate’s side of that conversation. In December 2018, she appeared in Ambition’s interview advice series addressing a familiar question: how to talk about your weaknesses. It is an oddly theatrical fixture of working life. A stranger asks you to describe a flaw, and you must demonstrate judgement while doing so.
By April 2020, she was writing for employers conducting interviews remotely. Her seven-part guide began with practical preparation and ran through the conversation to the feedback afterwards. Test the equipment. Explain the role. Give people enough clarity to offer relevant examples. The recommendations treated the interview as something the employer also had to prepare for.
One detail was particularly humane: leave room for an ordinary opening conversation before the formal questioning. Another was procedural: keep the candidate informed about feedback and timing. Taken together, the suggestions place some responsibility for a useful assessment on the person asking the questions. A candidate’s performance depends partly on the conditions in which the conversation happens.
Explain the process.
Explore the work.
Keep people informed.
When banks started shopping in a different aisle
In 2021, the competition for talent in Singapore gave her another kind of problem to describe. Banks were looking beyond their familiar recruiting grounds. In March, she pointed to interest in people from technology companies including Google, Shopee and Lazada. Working out whether those candidates would fit a bank’s culture was lengthening the hiring process.
Her observation was about the friction created when employers widen their search. A candidate can have relevant skills and still come from a very different working environment. An employer then has to decide which differences it can accommodate. The longer it takes to decide, the more time that candidate has to consider somebody else.
By June, she was discussing the bargaining position of local technology candidates. She reported expectations of salary increases averaging 20 to 30 percent on a move, alongside competing offers and counteroffers. Those were observations about that particular hiring market in 2021, rather than a standing promise to anyone changing jobs.
Average pay increases local technology candidates expected when moving roles, as Ramnath described the market that June.
There is a human negotiation inside such a number. The employer wants certainty about the person it hires. The candidate wants a reason to take the risk of moving. Meanwhile, another firm may be having exactly the same conversation. Recruitment has a calendar even when everyone involved would prefer more time.
Asking what happens after the leap
The same year, Ramnath was commenting on crypto companies expanding their hiring beyond revenue-generating roles into functions such as compliance, legal and operations. In September, she described the caution of people considering a move from traditional financial services. Familiar backgrounds among a prospective employer’s leadership could make a difference to their willingness to change sectors.
That was a more specific question than whether a new industry sounded exciting. Who runs the business? What experience do they bring? What would a candidate be joining? Her comments put the identities of the people already inside a firm alongside the opportunities being advertised outside it.
On 24 November 2021, she was listed as moderator of Ambition’s webinar “The Flippening: Pivoting from TradFi to DeFi”. The speakers included Chuan Jin Fong of GSR, Paul Watson of EQONEX and Takatoshi Shibayama of Copper. The advertised discussion covered practical career transitions, as well as the benefits, challenges and risks of working in crypto and blockchain.
The moderator’s position suited the subject: between people with experience of a sector and people wondering whether to enter it. The discussion was organised around what a career move would entail. Even the most fashionable destination still requires a person to decide what their working day might become.
Who helps someone get the next chance?
Questions about access recur in Ramnath’s published work. In June 2020, her Women with Ambition interview with Mae Loon, then Swiss Re’s Asia Pacific communications head, explored equal pay, career risks and advancement. The conversation distinguished mentorship from sponsorship: receiving advice and being put forward for an opportunity can produce different results.
Those were Loon’s experiences and recommendations. Ramnath’s role was to ask the questions, including what organisations could do about equality and what might help women progress. The interview gives a concrete example of her professional interests beyond filling an immediate vacancy. It follows the decisions that shape who gets considered for the next one.
Her writing also records participation in Ambition’s corporate social responsibility committee. In March 2018, she joined colleagues from Ambition and HaTCH for a Spartan Race. Her account described a six-kilometre course with twenty obstacles, including walls, barbed wire and a sandbag carry. The office had found an unusually literal way to work on overcoming obstacles.
She wrote about the effort involved in getting through the course and about contributing through activities both small and organised. It is a glimpse of professional life away from interviews and placements: colleagues taking on a shared task, with rather more mud than a meeting generally requires.
Then she took her own turn
Eventually, Ramnath made the move into executive search herself. She is based in Singapore at Korn Ferry, with work in its CEO and Board Practice and Global Financial Markets. It is a continuation of her financial services focus, now attached to leadership and board recruitment.
The adjustment she described in 2022 brings the story back to a recognisable scale. An experienced recruiter was learning another firm’s processes. The routines that had made her effective elsewhere needed revisiting. Her suggestion for building connections was practical enough to fit into a calendar invitation: arrange a virtual coffee with a colleague.
“It’s OK to not know everything”
Sumukhi Ramnath, reflecting on her first months at Korn Ferry, June 2022
And there was a cooking competition. In the photograph she shared with that reflection, colleagues stand behind a spread of food, wearing aprons. Professional introductions can be rather stiff. Preparing a meal together at least gives everyone something else to do with their hands.
Her career has involved explaining unfamiliar opportunities to other people, from new audit specialisms to a different financial sector. The move to Korn Ferry gave her a fresh occasion to experience unfamiliarity herself. The resulting advice was modest and usable: ask, reach out, allow yourself to learn. After years of helping people through the hiring process, she had something to say about the days that follow it.