15+ years building institutional relationships — in education, luxury hospitality, and the platforms that connect both.
I have spent 15+ years building institutional relationships in markets where no one knew who I was when I arrived. That has been true in international education, in luxury hospitality, and in the technology platforms I have built to serve both. The industries are different. The work is the same: long cycles, senior stakeholders, trust built over months before anything gets signed.
I started in study abroad and institutional partnerships — closing agreements with universities and education groups across India, the Middle East and Europe that took the better part of a year to land. The recruitment work came later, pulled in by the sheer volume of what the hospitality industry needed. By the time I had placed candidates into Waldorf Astoria, Park Hyatt, Oberoi Group, Trident, and a few hundred others, I had a precise picture of exactly where hospitality hiring breaks.
SOEGi is what I built from that picture. Not a patched portal. A purpose-built intelligence layer for the way hospitality actually hires.
The Platform
SOEGi. Built for Hospitality. Not adapted from something else.
SOEGi launched in India in March 2026. It handles the full hiring workflow: job description generation, candidate matching, pipeline management, and screening, with logic that is specific to how hotel operations work.
The matching system runs on three gates: department, specialisation, seniority. In that order. A Chef de Partie in Pastry and a Chef de Partie in Continental are not interchangeable. The system knows this because it was built by someone who has placed both, hundreds of times.
AI Job Description Generation
Two lines of input. The system builds a structured JD, maps the role correctly, and keeps it consistent across every posting in the property.
Three Gate Candidate Matching
Department first. Specialisation second. Seniority third. Match scores that reflect how hospitality hiring actually works.
Department Aware Workflows
Kitchen hiring moves differently from Front Office hiring. SOEGi reflects that in every stage of the pipeline.
Pipeline Visibility
Matched profiles, applicant movement, stage tracking. All in one view. No spreadsheets. No missed candidates.
The platform is free to sign up. Hotels post a role, the system handles matching and screening logic, and a hiring manager sees only the candidates worth reviewing. Speed to a quality shortlist is the metric everything is measured against.
Where This Came From
The same work, across three industries, over fifteen years.
Most of what I know about building commercial relationships came from institutional education — closing university partnerships where a Vice Chancellor and an international director both need to say yes, across six months of conversations, before anything gets signed. Swiss Education Group, University of Salford, Emirates Academy. That kind of work teaches you patience, specificity, and how trust actually forms in a room where the other person has no reason to hurry.
The hospitality work ran in parallel and eventually took over. Preopening recruitment for Waldorf Astoria Ras Al Khaimah — 500 plus hires — then a global portal that reached 500 plus properties across 10 countries before COVID closed the industry in 2020. What survived was not the platform. It was the understanding of exactly where hospitality hiring breaks. SOEGi is the product of that understanding.
SOEGi is not a rebuilt version of the old portal. It is what I would have built then, if I had known what I know now.
How I Think About This
The recruitment industry defaults to more — more profiles, more filters, more candidates. In hospitality, the opposite is true. The problem is never scarcity. It is the inability to identify the right three quickly enough before they accept something else.
Every product decision at SOEGi runs through the same filter: does this reduce recruiter time, increase closure probability, or improve retention? If it does not do at least one of those things, it does not get built. The same question applied to every institutional partnership I have closed — whether the room had a hiring manager, a Vice Chancellor, or a university international director. The industries differ. The method does not.
The longer-term vision runs past recruitment — skill verification, workforce intelligence, a data bridge between hospitality employers and the education institutions producing their next hires. Recruitment is the entry point, not the ceiling.
Get in Touch
If you are building something in hospitality, education, or the space between them.
SOEGi is live and growing. The hospitality hiring market is still largely manual and fragmented. The gap between what hospitality education produces and what employers actually need is larger than most people in either industry admit.
If you run a hotel, a restaurant group, or a hospitality operation and want to move faster from job posting to a shortlist worth reviewing — the platform is free to start.
app.soegjobs.com →If you are an education institution, an EdTech company, or a technology partner thinking about the workforce side of hospitality — there is a conversation worth having. The gap between what hospitality education produces and what properties actually need is where most of the interesting work is.
Connect on LinkedIn →Investors, researchers, or anyone who has read this far and wants to understand where this is heading — LinkedIn is the right place to start.
linkedin.com/in/manishjha →