Alibaba snags Flipkart’s HR director, while RentoMojo hires a product mentor- HR updates which shook the world of startups
The week kicked off with one of the biggest and much-awaited appointments. Social media was abuzz with the announcement of Urjit Patel succeeding Raghuram Rajan as the 24th Reserve Bank Governor.
But, what really happened in the world of startup hiring? Apparently, a lot.
The following headlines caught our attention this week:
Alibaba snags Flipkart’s HR director Priya Cherian
The news first confirmed on The Economic Times states that Alibaba has roped in Flipkart’s director for human resources, Priya Cherian to head its talent acquisition as the Chinese giant sets up its India operations.
Prior to joining Flipkart, Priya was the HR director at Yahoo for close to seven years.
The Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba is all set to start its consumer online business by early next year.
Industrybuying gets a HR head
From one e-commerce firm to the other, B2B e-commerce platform Industrybuying announced the appointment of Manvinder Kaur as its Vice President for Human Resources.
She was earlier leading the HR function of Gap and BT Global Services. As a part of her new role, she is expected to drive core functions such as talent management, employee engagement and corporate trainings in the company.
LendingKart Group rejigs its senior leadership
FinTech startup LendingKart on Monday announced that it had made two senior level appointments.
It brought on board former Amazon India executive Vishal Chopra as the Chief Revenue Officer. Being one of the first hires for the Amazon India team, he also led teams to launch media categories including books, movie and music for the e-commerce giant. Prior to joining LendingKart, Vishal was the Regional Director for Arab e-commerce site Souq.com.
LendingKart also hired Nihit Nirmal as senior VP-products. Before coming on board at LendingKart, Nihit was heading Product Management at PayUMonyey.
Netflix gets ex-YouTube executive to spearhead Asia operations
In the first week of August, Gaurav Pradhan, who was previously leading YouTube’s product partnerships in India and Southeast Asia, was appointed as the Asia head for American multinational company Netflix.
In his new job, Gaurav will oversee business development in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
mycity4kids has a new Chief Technology Officer
Content platforms for moms, mycity4kids roped in Paritosh Gupta as the new CTO. In the past, Paritosh has worked with companies like Wipro, Samsung, Crayon Data and even started up with his venture Flygrades.
Having experience in recommendation engines and data-driven education platforms, Paritosh’s key mandate would be to make mycity4kids a technology-driven company with data science forming the core of everything.
Vamsi Krishna Wuppalapati joins RentoMojo as Vice President-CX
Coach and mentor for product and marketing strategies, Vamsi Krishna Wuppalapati joined online rental solution startup RentoMojo as Vice President-CX.
Vamsi was the Founder Inferatics Consulting Labs’, a product management consulting firm for startups. He has also held a product leadership role at South Asia’s e-commerce player Lazada. The e-commerce firm is now acquired by Alibaba.
With experience of developing products across enterprise, mobile and web platforms, Vamsi is all set to handle strategic initiatives for marketing, operations, logistics and product including payments for the startup.
Amongst the corporate hires:
Lenovo appoints head of Small and Medium Business vertical
Small and Medium Business (SMB) business group, newly minted at Lenovo, has appointed Pankaj Harjai as the head. Also taking charge of Lenovo’s commercial channel business, Pankaj in his new role will lead sales, product, and go-to-market strategy for the SMB vertical as well as grow the partner base for the commercial channel segment.
Having close to a decade of experience, Pankaj has been a part of Lenovo since August 2012.
Looking at the international hires, there was Seattle-based Tableau Software which hired Adam Selipsky as its new CEO. And another software company Pegasystems appointed Tom Libretto as its new Chief Marketing Officer.
Although these executive hires might seem to be booming, talent acquisition company Belong in one if its reports stated that consumer-focussed hiring segment has seen a drop. The report states that the number of joinees in e-commerce companies reduced by 61 percent between November 2015 and April 2016.
However, B2B ventures are witnessing a contrary trend with a rise in hiring activity to almost 800 in June. This is actively blamed on the funding slowdown and the brash hiring pattern of labour-intensive consumer businesses, which seems to be now correcting.