Chief Human Resources Officer — Digital Services Career Institution

The mandate

A mid-sized digital-services business is changing the mix of work its professionals perform, but its career arrangements still reward the previous delivery model. Employees see new capability expectations without a clear route from learning to recognised responsibility. The business is creating a CHRO seat for a continuing people institution serving approximately 1,200 professionals. Employment is open-ended, beginning with an eighteen-month agenda to establish credible career streams, managerial capability and accountable workforce-change practices across the two principal delivery bases.

The challenge is to define progression around work that can be demonstrated, not around course completion or a fashionable skill label. Some roles require deeper customer judgement, others better collaboration with increasingly automated delivery, and some need a different balance of domain and technical understanding. Service leaders determine the actual work and its performance standard. The CHRO translates those facts into people frameworks, tests manager interpretation and ensures employees understand how to move. AI-related capability belongs within evidenced role requirements; technical solution design and automated employment decision systems are outside the remit.

Eighteen people and capability colleagues report through the office, supported by retained reward and employment-law specialists. You own people strategy, career governance, manager development and the quality of workforce-change implementation. Within approved policy and budget, you decide talent programmes and the people-function operating model. Directors reserve material reward-policy changes, workforce restructuring and executive succession decisions. Specialist owners advise on legal and reward implications. The CHRO must connect those disciplines to coherent executive choices without treating a learning framework as sufficient authority to change employment terms or promise promotion to every participant.

The opening agenda should leave managers able to explain role expectations, make consistent development decisions and handle changing work without relying on an HR presentation. Bengaluru is the base, with Pune engagement and selected talent-partner interactions. Continuing accountability includes employee trust, capability renewal and a people leadership bench able to sustain the institution. The board should see which workforce choices have been made, what implementation evidence supports them and where the operating model still lacks a credible progression path, rather than receive only aggregate engagement or training-volume measures.

What you will own

• Establish career streams from validated delivery work and accountable role expectations, connecting progression to demonstrated responsibility rather than allowing training certificates or inherited titles to substitute for evidence.
• Decide the people-function operating model within approved policy and budget, joining employee support, capability development and manager guidance so workforce-change decisions have one maintained implementation route.
• Set career decision governance with service leaders through worked role cases, detecting inconsistent manager interpretation and requiring clear reasons when similar employee evidence produces different development or progression advice.
• Shape AI-ready capability expectations around actual changes in work, separating useful judgement and collaboration skills from unsupported technical claims or promises that one learning pathway guarantees future employment.
• Build managerial capability to explain change, assess demonstrated work and conduct development conversations, testing practical application rather than counting attendance as proof that leaders can use the framework.
• Present people and workforce choices to the chief executive and committee with implementation evidence, distinguishing decisions inside CHRO delegation from reserved restructuring, reward-policy and executive succession matters.
• Develop the people leadership bench and specialist relationships to sustain career governance, keeping employee trust and unresolved progression conditions visible when delivery priorities or capability requirements change.

Candidate qualifications

• Describe a career or competency framework that changed how managers made real people decisions, not just how roles were described. Explain the delivery evidence, employee implications and inconsistency you discovered during use. The required achievement is practical institutional adoption: demonstrate how you corrected the framework or manager behaviour and retained an understandable route for employees whose work was changing.
• Evidence former VP-level people leadership or comparable senior executive responsibility over a credible services organisation, alongside 28+ years across HR, talent or capability transformation. The candidate should have personally joined business strategy to people implementation, handled senior stakeholder disagreement and developed functional leaders. Coaching, structured change-management or cross-cultural practice is valuable where it improves judgement and adoption rather than merely adds certification to a programme plan.
• Show how you shaped future-ready capability expectations without equating a new technology label with a verified role requirement. Explain an example where delivery leaders' changing work needed a revised career or learning response. Strong industry-academia or talent-partner experience is useful, but the proof must connect the external input to internal job responsibility and employee opportunity, not only to a partnership launch or training catalogue.
• Demonstrate executive judgement about delegated people authority and the use of reward or employment-law specialists. You must be able to make a coherent recommendation while preserving reserved governance decisions and communicating uncertainty honestly. Regular delivery-site engagement, careful employee information handling and constructive manager challenge are essential. The role needs a CHRO who builds dependable institutional capability and trust, rather than personally mediating every career question indefinitely.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 11 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-156.