Director of Talent and Culture — Interim, Engineering GCC

The mandate

A rushed vendor-to-GCC insourcing moved 700 engineers without harmonised levels, managers or career paths. Regretted attrition reached twenty-seven per cent, and the people director left after the global sponsor rejected an across-the-board retention payment.

The interim must begin within three weeks for ten months, after which a newly recruited director inherits the repaired function. Permanent search runs from month five, with six weeks allocated for live workforce-planning transfer.

Handover requires regretted attrition below fourteen per cent annualised for two quarters, validated skill and level architecture across ninety-five per cent of roles, seventy per cent internal fulfilment of lead vacancies, and a successor who owns the workforce review.

The director may redesign roles, move HR capacity and approve targeted retention within a ₹3 crore envelope. Broad pay-band changes, redundancies above twenty roles and permanent executive appointments require committee approval; engineering delivery and individual technical promotion decisions remain with line leaders.

Office redesign, global HR-system replacement and unrelated sales hiring are excluded. The assignment focuses on engineering workforce health, manager quality and a sustainable internal talent market.

Why this seat is open

The insourcing programme counted transferred heads but did not create a coherent employment proposition. Attrition and duplicate titles now threaten promised engineering capacity. The GCC needs a finite people operator to make specific structural corrections rather than a blanket cash response.

What you will own

• Reconcile inherited titles, pay, skills and accountabilities into one engineering job and level architecture.
• Decide targeted retention actions using skill scarcity, performance, replacement time and pay-position evidence.
• Build quarterly workforce planning that connects work-package demand to hiring, redeployment and learning supply.
• Establish manager quality reviews covering span, attrition, mobility, performance differentiation and employee relations.
• Launch an internal talent market for lead roles with published skills and transparent selection panels.
• Redesign HR service capacity around the moments causing engineer delay, ambiguity or avoidable departure.
• Transfer the workforce dashboard, sensitive cases and decision calendar through one complete successor review.

Candidate qualifications

• Eighteen-plus years in HR leadership with substantial engineering, technology or product GCC population accountability.
• Led a vendor insourcing, workforce transfer or rapid scale event involving at least 500 professional employees.
• Demonstrated reduction in regretted attrition through role, manager and career interventions rather than generalised payments.
• Strong command of engineering job architecture, skill taxonomies, internal mobility and workforce analytics.
• Experience resolving inherited pay inequity while distinguishing structural correction from retention noise.
• Credibility challenging senior delivery leaders on management quality using evidence and employee-risk judgment.

Non-negotiables

• Can be Chennai-based within three weeks and work closely with engineering leaders onsite.
• No current relationship with staffing vendors used in the insourcing wave.
• Able to handle sensitive employee data and active cases under strict confidentiality.
• Accepts the ten-month closure and planned transfer to a permanent people director.

1. 49 words maximum. When can you begin, and what other HR or board commitments would overlap?
2. 49 words maximum. What regretted-attrition rate did you inherit and sustain after intervention?
3. 49 words maximum. Which retention-payment request did you decline, and what targeted action replaced it?