About The Role

This role sits at the intersection of Talent Strategy, People Operations, Organisational Development, and Culture. The primary mandate is to ensure that we have the right talent in the right roles, identify capability gaps early, build strategies to strengthen our talent pool, and create an environment where people can perform, grow, and contribute meaningfully.

You will work closely with leadership to translate business priorities into people strategies, talent interventions, capability-building initiatives, and organisational systems.

Key Responsibilities

- Talent Density &
- Workforce Strategy
- Build and continuously improve the organisation's talent density strategy — ensuring teams have the right quality, capability, and mix of talent.
- Partner with leadership to understand current and future business requirements and translate them into workforce plans.
- Identify critical talent and capability gaps across functions and build strategies to address them.
- Identify key roles and talent dependencies and support succession planning and internal mobility.
- Build talent pools and external talent networks for critical and specialised capabilities.
- Building a Culturally Fluent Talent Ecosystem
- Develop a talent ecosystem that reflects the organisation's cultural point of view, business context, and long-term capability needs.
- Define what the organisation needs from its talent beyond functional skills — including cultural understanding, adaptability, ownership, collaboration, and creative/business thinking.
- Build frameworks for assessing cultural fit, cultural fluency, capability, and potential during hiring and development.
- Develop relationships with relevant talent communities, freelancers, consultants, specialists, and external creative/professional networks.
- Identify emerging talent, unconventional talent pools, and new ways of accessing specialised capabilities.
- Talent Acquisition &
- Hiring Strategy
- Develop hiring strategies aligned with business growth, organisational priorities, and talent requirements.
- Manage end-to-end hiring workflows, including sourcing, outbound hiring, screening, assessments, interviews, evaluation, and offer management.
- Build structured approaches to candidate evaluation and test/assessment analysis.




- Strengthen hiring quality by developing better role definitions, evaluation criteria, and selection processes.
- Manage discovery and onboarding of freelancers, consultants, specialists, and other non-permanent talent.
- Maintain hiring documentation, trackers, talent pipelines, and offer processes.
- Partner with hiring managers to improve hiring effectiveness, speed, and quality of hire.
- Employee Lifecycle &
- People Operations
- Ensure a seamless employee journey from candidate acceptance to onboarding, development, and exit.
- Coordinate joining processes with HR, IT, and relevant stakeholders.
- Ensure workstation, access, documentation, and onboarding readiness before an employee joins.
- Design and govern onboarding checklists and induction processes.
- Enable new employees to understand the organisation's structure, culture, ways of working, and expectations.
- Conduct and document exit conversations and identify recurring themes from employee exits.
- Capability Building &
- Organisational Development
- Work with leadership to design learning and development strategies based on business and talent needs.
- Build capability-building interventions across functional, behavioural, managerial, and organisational areas.
- Track participation, application, and effectiveness of L&D; initiatives.
- Build systems that encourage knowledge sharing, internal learning, mentorship, and cross-functional exposure.
- Performance, Engagement &
- Employee Experience
- Design and govern employee engagement initiatives that strengthen connection, ownership, and organisational culture.
- Track employee sentiment, satisfaction, feedback, and engagement trends.
- Translate employee feedback into actionable people interventions.
- Manage and support Performance Excellence Plans (PEP) and Performance Improvement Plans (PIP).
- Partner with managers on performance conversations, development plans, and employee challenges.




- Support conflict resolution and employee relations matters with fairness, confidentiality, and sound judgement.
- Identify patterns affecting employee experience, retention, and performance and recommend corrective action.
- Organisational Design &
- Change
- Support organisational restructuring and evolving organisational structures as the business grows.
- Help define roles, responsibilities, reporting structures, and capability requirements.
- Design and implement people and operational workflows that improve clarity, accountability, and efficiency.
- Work with leadership to identify organisational bottlenecks and people-related risks.
- Support change management and communication during organisational transitions.
- Administrative &
- Operational Suppor
- Maintain accurate people documentation, trackers, and records.
- Ensure timely execution of recurring People Operations processes.

What We Are Looking For

- 5-6 years Experience in Talent Management, Talent Acquisition, People &
- Culture, or Organisational Development in the advertisement/marketing industry.
- Strong understanding of talent strategy and the ability to connect people's decisions to business priorities.
- Experience in hiring and building talent pipelines across different functions and seniority levels.
- Robust stakeholder management skills and the ability to work closely with founders, leaders, and hiring managers.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
- Strong judgement, discretion, and maturity when handling employee and organisational matters.
- A structured yet highly adaptable approach to problem-solving.

The Ideal Mindset We Are Looking For Someone Who Thinks Beyond "How do we fill this role?"

And Asks

"What talent do we need to build this organisation over the next 12–24 months, where will we find it, how do we assess it, how do we develop it, and how do we create an environment where it can do its best work?"

This role is ideal for someone who wants to build people systems, talent ecosystems, and organisational capability, rather than simply manage HR processes.

Skills: talent acquisition and management,l&d; strategy,onboarding,hiring,hr management,talent acquisition,hr operations

📌 People & Culture – Talent Strategist & Operations (Mumbai)
🏢 Hotcult India
📍 Mumbai