Head of People & Culture Full Time NEW

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Our client is a proudly Indian hospitality company. Over the last decade, they have built a family of restaurants and food brands that people across the city have come to genuinely love.

The brands are distinct. The soul is the same. And that soul lives in the people who show up every day, across kitchens, dining rooms, and offices, and choose to bring warmth and care to everything they do.

The company recently closed a significant round of funding and is growing fast, across brands and cities. The leadership team understands, with some clarity, that the only way to scale what has been built without losing what makes it worth building is to get the people side of this right.

That is why this role exists.

THE ROLE

The company is at an inflection point that most organisations only cross once. The people challenges of the next three years will look very different from the ones of the last three. The person in this role needs to be able to see that coming: to read the signals early, to recognise patterns from having been through growth before, and to start building for problems the business has not yet named.

The Head of People will be the most senior dedicated people leader the company has had. This person will own the full people function: strategy, structure, culture, learning, development, and operations. They will sit at the leadership table, working directly with the founding team.

This is not a role for someone who wants to run a well-oiled HR department. What exists today is a company that has grown quickly, a team deeply committed to doing right by its people, and a genuine belief that learning and development are not HR initiatives but the actual way the business grows.

The person who steps into this role will help build the infrastructure that matches the company’s ambition, without losing the warmth that got it here.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

Learning & Development

Learning is not a sub-function here; it is central to how the company thinks about people. If L&D is not what gets you out of bed in the morning, this is probably not the right role.

• Build a learning architecture that works for a diverse workforce, from kitchen teams and service staff to managers and corporate functions
• Design and own a capability framework: what good looks like at every level, what the growth path is, and how people are developed to get there
• Create structured programmes for onboarding, functional skills, hospitality standards, and leadership readiness, not off-the-shelf content but things built for how the organisation works
• Own the learning budget, learning tools or platform, and the measurement of whether any of it is actually working
• Build a culture where people are curious, where asking questions is encouraged, and where learning is a daily habit rather than an annual event

Organisation Development

The company is changing shape: new brands, new cities, more people, more complexity. OD is the work that ensures growth does not hollow out what has been built.

• Lead org design work across the group: how teams are structured, roles defined, career pathways built, and clarity created as the company scales
• Own the change management capability, helping the organisation move through transitions without losing people along the way
• Run organisational diagnostics: spot where teams are under-resourced, roles are unclear, or structure is getting in the way of performance
• Build a job architecture and competency framework that gives people a real sense of where they are and where they can go
• Partner with brand and functional leaders on team effectiveness, whether a new team is being set up or an existing one needs a reset

People Strategy & Workforce Planning

• Define and own the people strategy for the next two to three years, in close partnership with the founders and business heads
• Lead workforce planning across the group: who is needed, when, at what level, and what it will take to bring them in or develop them internally
• Build a view on where capability gaps exist today and what the plan is to close them
• Ensure the people strategy is not a document that sits in a folder but something that is live, reviewed, and connected to how the business is actually running

Leadership Development & Succession

• Build and run a leadership development programme that identifies high-potential people early and invests in them deliberately
• Create a succession pipeline for key roles across the group, so the organisation is not scrambling every time someone moves on
• Coach and support business leaders on how they manage, develop, and retain their teams
• Help the founding team and senior leaders grow into the kind of leaders the next phase of the company needs

Culture & Employee Experience

• Own culture as something real and measurable, not a set of values written on a wall
• Design and run engagement initiatives that make people feel part of something, especially across a workforce that spans multiple brands and multiple locations
• Set up feedback mechanisms that actually work: regular check-ins, engagement surveys, exit conversations, and a genuine commitment to act on what comes out of them
• Protect the warmth and two-way nature of team engagement as the company gets bigger

Talent Acquisition & Employer Brand

• Own hiring across all levels, including senior and leadership roles
• Build a structured, consistent hiring process that works at volume without sacrificing quality or cultural fit
• Develop the employer brand so that the best people in hospitality, and beyond, know who this company is and want to work here

Performance Management

• Build a performance framework that is honest, useful, and actually used by managers
• Ensure performance conversations happen regularly and not just within a review cycle
• Create meaningful differentiation in how performance is recognised and rewarded

Compensation, Benefits & People Operations

• Develop a compensation philosophy that is competitive, fair, and clearly explainable to teams
• Own payroll integrity, HRIS, statutory compliance, and all people operations across locations
• Ensure the basics are solid so the team can spend its energy on the work that actually moves people

IDEAL CANDIDATE PROFILE

Experience

• 12 to 16 years of progressive HR experience, with at least 4 years in a senior leadership role such as Head of HR, VP People, or equivalent
• Significant hands-on experience in L&D and OD, not as a side project but as a core part of what has been built and owned
• Experience in a multi-brand, multi-location, or high-growth consumer-facing organisation is a strong advantage
• Hospitality, F&B, or retail experience is not mandatory but will help in understanding the workforce context
• Demonstrated track record of building people practices from scratch or rebuilding them significantly
• Experience managing workforces that include frontline and operational staff alongside corporate and management teams

What the Right Person Is Good At

• Reading a scaling organisation and anticipating what it will need before it asks for it: spotting the cultural drift before it becomes a retention problem, the role ambiguity before it becomes a performance issue, the leadership gap before it becomes a crisis
• Designing learning experiences that stick, not just programmes that get completed
• Org design and the ability to see how structure either enables or gets in the way of people doing good work
• Building relationships with senior leaders and earning the kind of trust where they come before decisions are made, not after
• Translating a vision into a plan and a plan into something that actually gets done
• Using data to understand what is happening with people and communicating it in a way that makes business leaders want to act on it
• Holding difficult conversations directly and with care

How They Work

• Comfortable in environments where not everything is defined, and where part of the job is to define it
• Able to lead strategy and handle execution, sometimes in the same week
• Genuinely curious about people, about the business, about what is working and what is not
• Takes the work seriously without taking themselves too seriously
• Says what they think, including upward, and does it in a way people can hear
• Understands that in a hospitality company, everything, including how the organisation treats its own people, is an expression of culture

WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE AT THE END OF YEAR ONE

• There is a shared language around growth and performance that did not exist before. People across the group can articulate what good looks like at their level, what the path forward is, and feel that the company has a real view on their development.
• Managers are having different conversations with their teams: more honest, more forward-looking, more useful. Not because they were told to, but because someone invested in helping them become better people leaders.
• The company can absorb new brands, new geographies, and new people without the culture thinning out. Growth feels managed rather than chaotic, and the warmth that defines the organisation is still visible in how people are treated day to day.
• People who joined in the last year can articulate what this company stands for and feel it in how they are onboarded, developed, and led. The experience of joining has become a reflection of the culture, not a gap in it.
• Business leaders across the group treat the People function as a real partner, not a service desk

WHY THIS ROLE

This is a company that has spent ten years building something many said could not be built: restaurants that people genuinely love, a team culture that people speak about long after they have moved on, a way of working that is warm and rigorous at the same time.

The next ten years require doing that at a different scale, across more brands and more cities. The person in this role will have a direct hand in whether that is managed well or not.

It is a significant job. It will be hard. And if getting people right in a company you genuinely respect sounds like the kind of work you want to do, this is worth a conversation.