Senior Manager - Human Resources - eCommerce

Senior Manager - Human Resources Location: Chennai Experience: 8 - 12 years Preferred Background: MBA / PGDM in HR from a top-tier B-school Industry Preference: Ecommerce / D2C / Consumer / High-growth startup Employment Type: Full-time About the Role: We are looking for a Senior Manager - Human Resources who can help build a high-performance, high-trust organization as The Indus Valley scales. This is a hands-on HR leadership role covering talent acquisition, performance management, culture, organization development, employee relations, compensation and HR operations. You should have experience working in a fast-paced ecommerce, D2C or consumer business and be comfortable partnering closely with leadership while also driving execution on the ground. You should be comfortable with analytics and take number-based decisions. You should be able to build simple dashboards for key metrics and build solid business use cases. You must manage P&L for people metrics. Most importantly, we are looking for someone with high integrity, maturity, sound judgement and the ability to build trust across the organization. What You'll Do: Talent & Workforce Planning: - Own hiring across leadership, managerial and critical functional roles. - Build strong talent pipelines and improve quality and speed of hiring. - Drive manpower planning and workforce budgeting with business leaders. - Track hiring metrics including time to hire, offer acceptance and recruitment funnel effectiveness. - Partner with functional leaders to identify capability and organization needs ahead of growth. Performance Management: - Drive the company-wide OKR and performance management process. - Ensure company goals translate into clear individual and team objectives. - Lead appraisal cycles, feedback discussions and Performance Improvement Plans. - Build fair, transparent and measurable performance systems linked to career progression and rewards. - Coach managers on goal setting, feedback and difficult performance conversations. Culture & Organization Development: - Play a key role in defining, communicating and reinforcing company culture. - Ensure our values are reflected in who we hire, reward, promote and retain. - Build initiatives that strengthen ownership, accountability, transparency and collaboration. - Support organization design, role clarity, career paths, competency frameworks and succession planning. - Lead change-management initiatives as the organization grows and evolves. - Build meaningful employee engagement and retention programs. HR Operations, Compliance & Employee Relations: - Ensure HR policies and processes are practical, scalable and compliant. - Partner with internal and external teams to ensure adherence to employment and labour regulations. - Manage employee grievances and sensitive people matters fairly and confidentially. - Build strong HR SOPs and governance without unnecessary bureaucracy. - Support HR requirements across corporate, warehouse and operational teams. - Where relevant, oversee contract manpower, attendance, productivity and manpower partners. Compensation & People Analytics: - Support compensation benchmarking, salary structures, increments and retention decisions. - Ensure rewards are aligned with performance and market benchmarks. - Use HR metrics and dashboards to identify people trends and drive better decisions. - Track hiring, attrition, attendance, performance, manpower cost and other key people metrics. - You must manage P&L for people metrics. Build the HR Team: - Lead, coach and develop the HR team. - Set clear priorities, ownership and operating rhythms. - Build an HR function that is responsive, credible and strongly connected to the business. What We're Looking For: - 8 - 12 years of progressive HR experience, preferably in ecommerce, D2C, consumer internet or a high-growth company. - Strong experience in talent acquisition, PMS, culture building and HR business partnering. - Exposure to organization development, compensation, employee relations and HR operations. - Experience working with leadership teams and managing multiple stakeholders. - Strong understanding of people metrics and comfort working with data. - Ability to create structure without slowing down a fast-moving organization. - Strong communication, influencing and conflict-resolution skills. - Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, high-ownership and evolving environment. - High levels of integrity, confidentiality, fairness and personal credibility. - Strong execution orientation and willingness to remain hands-on. You'll Do Well Here If: - You believe HR should help both people and the business perform better. - You understand that culture is not an HR event. It is reflected every day in who we hire, how we behave, what we reward and what we do not tolerate. - You can be empathetic without avoiding difficult decisions. - You can move between a senior leadership discussion, a hiring review, an employee conversation and a performance dashboard comfortably. - You are willing to challenge leaders when required and equally willing to hold employees accountable fairly. - You build processes because they solve a problem - not because HR is expected to have a process. - Most importantly, people trust you because you are consistent, fair and high on integrity.