Manish Singh left 14 years in aerospace and steel to build a recruitment franchise in Kanpur. The logic, he says, was simpler than it sounds.
Manish Singh grew up in a small village in Ghazipur district, Uttar Pradesh. He went on to study Metallurgical Engineering at IIT BHU, Varanasi. Then XLRI, Jamshedpur for HR management. Then fourteen years across steel plants, power plant construction, defence aircraft manufacturing, testing and overhaul, and strategic planning for new aircraft projects. The resume was complete. The career was built. He walked away anyway.
Manish is not a man who romanticises decisions. When he started looking for business opportunities, he evaluated them the way an engineer evaluates systems — logically, comparatively, with a clear eye for what is unnecessarily complicated. He looked at QSR franchises, pre-school models, and teaching institutes. Then he found recruitment. “It readily caught my attention owing to its logical and cost-effective investment model, ethical business style, and less complicated SOPs as compared to the other business options,” he says. For a man who had spent fourteen years navigating the operational complexity of defence manufacturing, that clarity was not a small thing. That was the whole point.
The move from placing aircraft components to placing the people who build them is, in Manish’s framing, less of a leap than it first appears. Fourteen years inside organisations that hire for high-stakes technical roles — defence systems, power plants, steel manufacturing — gave him something most recruiters spend years trying to develop: a precise understanding of how organisations think about talent, what they actually need, and the gap between the two. That knowledge does not leave when you change industries. It becomes an advantage.
He describes what Talent Corner HR Services provided with an image that stays with you. “Talent Corner is like a roof to your house,” he says, “which always makes you feel secure in the first place and allows you to build a solid foundation.” In practice, that roof looks like this: a dedicated team leader, flexible working hours, quarterly reviews, business development support, and a training structure that does not leave a new franchise partner to figure out the fundamentals alone. Each element is unremarkable in isolation. Together, they are what the roof actually is.
What has surprised him most is not what he expected to develop — sharper negotiation, cleaner communication, the growing confidence of someone building something for the first time. It is something he did not expect at all.
Manish spent fourteen years in industries where outcomes are measured in tolerances and specifications. Steel plants. Defence aircraft. Systems where precision is everything and the margin for error is engineered out before it can occur. He was good at that world. He understood it.
In recruitment, the outcome is a person’s career. The placement is not a component finding its position in a larger machine. It is a professional finding the role that changes what their working life looks like — and sometimes, what their family’s life looks like.
“It is very satisfying to help professionals shape and upgrade their career,” he says.
For a man trained to measure everything, that sentence contains a number he did not expect to care about. And yet.
His wife — a Mechanical Engineer with an M.Tech from IIT Dhanbad, currently working for a Defence PSU in Kanpur — understands the discipline required to build something from a standing start. Their four-and-a-half year old is growing up in a household where both parents chose demanding paths. Manish’s target for the business is characteristically precise: revenue growing at least two-fold every year. Engineers do not set targets randomly. When a man who has spent fourteen years in defence manufacturing says two-fold annually, he has already done the calculation. That number is a projection, not a wish.
His advice to anyone entering the recruitment industry is delivered in four words. Patient. Ethical. Sincerely, Committed. “These are the few mantras if followed,” he says, “recruitment is bound to reap good rewards for your career.” It is a distillation.
Manish Singh is a franchise partner at Talent Corner HR Services, based in Kanpur. He holds a degree in Metallurgical Engineering from IIT BHU, Varanasi, and a postgraduate qualification in HR from XLRI, Jamshedpur.
About Talent Corner HR Services: Talent Corner HR Services is India’s leading recruitment franchise network, with over 90 active franchise partners across more than 25 cities. Founded in 2002, the company has successfully filled over 25,000 positions for 3,100+ client companies across India.
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