Improving Lives With New Opportunities

Every person I have ever hired, placed, or worked with had more potential than their circumstances suggested.

That is not an optimistic statement. It is an empirical one.

Talent is not rare. It is everywhere: in the villages of Kalahandi, in the peripheries of growing cities, in the minds of people who never got the chance to show what they could do. What is rare is not talent. What is rare is access.

Access to information. Access to networks. Access to the right door at the right time, and someone willing to open it.

Talent is not rare. It is everywhere. What is rare is access - to information, to networks, to the right door at the right time, and someone willing to open it.

The binding constraint

When I think about what limits human lives, I keep arriving at the same answer: not capability, but opportunity. The world is full of capable people who never found the opportunity to deploy their capability. The world has fewer capable people who found opportunity and couldn't use it.

This asymmetry is the most important fact about human potential. And it is almost completely ignored by the systems we build to organise society.

Research on intergenerational mobility in India found that despite sustained economic growth since the 1980s, children born into the bottom half of the education distribution have scarcely improved their relative position. Only 37.6% of those born to professional families end up in professional occupations: meaning the vast majority of professional-calibre talent born outside professional households never reaches those roles at all. The system doesn't fail by accident. It is designed to reproduce existing advantage.

Our hiring systems make this worse. A Harvard Business Review study found that 88% of employers felt highly qualified candidates were screened out by applicant tracking systems because they didn't match exact criteria, not because they lacked capability. 94% said the same for middle-skilled candidates. The system doesn't find the best person. It finds the person whose CV matches the keywords.

88% of employers believe they are losing qualified, high-skilled candidates who are screened out by ATS - not because they lack capability, but because their resume didn't match the keywords.

Our education systems are designed to sort talent, not cultivate it. Our economic systems reward proximity to existing opportunity, not the creation of new opportunity. The result is a vast underutilisation of the human capital that already exists.

Why this matters

I am not making this argument in the abstract. I grew up in Kalahandi, Odisha, one of India's most underserved districts. I attended a government Odia-medium school. I had no internet, no mentors who had done what I wanted to do, and no clear path forward.

What I did have was curiosity, stubbornness, and an unreasonable belief that the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be could be crossed.

The journey to close that gap began with a 32-hour train ride to Delhi. When I arrived at Hazrat Nizamuddin station, it felt like a different planet. The language, the people, the scale: all of it was new. I did not know a single person in the city.

In college I was reasonably good at studies. My communication skills were not.

My HOD, a former Air Force officer, saw it and decided to do something about it. From the early days he told me: you have come this far, you are not going back. Work on your communication. Make yourself employable by the time you graduate.

I took that seriously in a way that surprised even me. During session breaks I enrolled in courses. I joined call centers to practise in real time, not for the money, but for the repetitions. I got so absorbed in the process that I did not go home for four or five years.

By graduation, I had an offer from a highly regarded MNC.

That access, one person, one conversation, one piece of direction given to a student who arrived not knowing anyone, was not guaranteed. It was, in every meaningful sense, accidental.

The question that has driven everything I've built since is: what if that access were not accidental?

What happens when you change the system

The story I told about my HOD is a story about an individual intervention. One person, one conversation, one changed trajectory.

But the more interesting question is whether the intervention can be systemised: whether you can build the conditions for that kind of access rather than waiting for it to happen by accident.

I believe you can. This is what Majhi Group is, at its core: a system that finds people who are capable and places them in situations where that capability can be expressed. The candidates we reach are not always the ones who would have been found by a standard process. Sometimes they are. Often they are not: they come from institutions that aren't on the default shortlist, from career paths that don't look canonical, from places that most search firms don't think to look.

One that stays with me: a finance leader who had spent over a decade running the numbers for a mid-size family business: no MBA from a recognised name, no referral from anyone we had worked with, no CV that would have cleared a standard ATS screen. What he had was twelve years of managing real P&L under real pressure, through a restructuring and a succession. A Series B company needed exactly that: not someone who had read about operational finance, but someone who had lived inside it. He was placed. He is still there. The standard process would have never reached him.

Every placement like that is a small version of what my HOD did for me: someone capable encountering an opportunity they might not have encountered otherwise. The outcome is not charity. It is better hiring: the client gets a candidate who is genuinely right for the role. But the access side of it is real and deliberate.

Majhi OS is the same impulse applied to the system that governs whether searches succeed or fail. When searches stall, the people who suffer are not just the company that needs the hire. They are the candidates in the pipeline whose opportunity is being delayed or destroyed by a broken process. Fixing the process is also fixing the access.

The obligation that comes with getting through the door

There is a version of this story that ends with me having made it, and the conclusion is that individual effort is sufficient. I don't believe that.

I got through a particular door because of specific people, specific accidents, and a set of circumstances I did not control. The question of what I owe as a result of getting through is one I take seriously. The answer I keep arriving at is: widen the door.

Not to create dependence. Not to perform generosity. But to make systemic what should not be left to accident: the access, the orientation, the permission to take yourself seriously as someone who could do more than your immediate circumstances suggest.

What I'm building toward

This site exists because of a version of what my HOD gave me: orientation. A way of making sense of what is happening and what is possible. The right framework, at the right moment, can do for someone what that conversation did for me, not by handing them anything, but by showing them the shape of something they already had inside them.

I write about opportunity because it is the lens through which everything else makes sense: India's potential, the future of work, the systems that organise hiring, the possibility of better institutions.

Improving lives with new opportunities is not a tagline. It is the actual work, and the actual measure.

Not scale. Not reach. Whether someone who would not have found the door found it. That is what I am building toward. That is what is not finished.

This is the first essay in the Opportunity collection. Continue with Talent Is Evenly Distributed next.

Sources: AEA: Intergenerational Mobility in India · Select Software Reviews: ATS Statistics

See also: How Opportunity Compounds Over Time, Opportunity Changes Lives, Systems That Create Opportunity

Sources

American Economic Review: Intergenerational Mobility in India

Select Software Reviews: Applicant Tracking System Statistics

World Bank Human Capital Index 2024