Honey Dev, Head of People and Culture at Edvoy, Chennai
Eighteen years in HR. I started in recruitment, learned the business through hiring, then kept moving closer to the problems behind the hire. Eventually I started building the machinery I wished somebody had already built.
What I am looking for. A recruitment leadership or senior People role in a business growing faster than its infrastructure. Give me a blank page and something worth building. I care as much about the culture that grows around it.
Hiring is the fastest way to learn a business, because you cannot brief a good candidate on a job you do not understand.
I like the pace of it. The judgement. The fact that you are dealing with a person on one of the more consequential days of their year, whichever way it goes. I have never thought of recruitment as filling an empty seat. It is working out what the business actually needs, finding the person who can do it, then building an experience that makes them want to say yes.
That last part is where most hiring quietly falls apart. It is the part I have spent the most time fixing.
A brief written from a job description tends to describe the last person who did the role. I want to know what has to be true in twelve months for this hire to have worked.
Source of hire is not a reporting line item. It tells you which channels deserve your time next quarter, which is the difference between a pipeline you own and a pipeline you rent.
Keyword matching filters out the career changers, the self taught people, the ones who did the work under a different title. Some of the best hires I have made would not survive a strict filter.
Structured, consistent, respectful of their time. When the interview quality depends on which manager a candidate draws, you are not measuring candidates. You are measuring your own inconsistency.
Most offers are lost in the silence between stages rather than at the offer itself. Speed is a candidate experience feature before it is an efficiency one.
The first ninety days decide whether the hire worked. Everything you said during the process is now a thing you either honour or quietly walk back.
A successful hire is not someone who joins. It is someone who becomes better because they worked with you.
I want the person I hire to leave, whenever that day comes, with more capability, more confidence, more perspective than they arrived with. That is the standard I hold my own team to as well.
Most of my career has been spent in businesses whose ambition ran ahead of their people infrastructure. That is not a complaint. It is the reason I know how to do this.
You cannot hire your way out of a broken manager, a performance framework nobody believes in or a payroll that gets it wrong twice a year. Once I could see that, the job widened. Teams, policies, performance, HR operations, analytics, culture and the technology holding it together.
At Edvoy I built the people function from forty people to more than four hundred and fifty across India, the United Kingdom, Bangladesh, the Middle East and Africa. One function, not twelve. I treat HR as something you engineer rather than something you administer, which is the only way one function covers twelve countries without falling apart.
I am a culture builder. Everything I build eventually comes back to one question. How do people feel about working here?
Talent acquisition, leadership hiring, funnel design and the candidate experience wrapped around every decision.
Culture, engagement, employer brand, retention. It starts well before someone's first day.
Business partnering models, performance frameworks, reward, policy and the operating rhythm underneath them.
Workforce planning, hiring funnels, attrition, quality of hire and the dashboards that make people decisions visible.
Operations, payroll, compliance and process design across multiple countries, with less manual work and clearer ownership.
Workflows and tools built from problems I ran into myself, including HireMatch and Ellie.
Each of these follows the same shape, because it is the shape I use every time. Find out what the business believes, check it against the data, change the system rather than the target, then say honestly what I would do differently now.
Case one, recruitment
Roughly one in three people we chose, who had also chosen us, were not turning up.
Case two, retention
One business unit was losing more than a third of its people a year while the rest of the company sat well below that.
Case three, scale
Edvoy went from forty people to more than four hundred and fifty. The function had to grow without becoming twelve separate functions.
Both of these started as problems I hit from the inside. I designed around the problem first then reached for the technology second.
Hiring software, live at hirematch.in
A hiring workspace built around what recruiters actually spend their day on. Writing the brief, finding people, reading CVs, preparing for interviews, keeping decisions moving.
Employee listening, live demo
Employee listening built around the journey rather than the calendar. Ellie checks in at the moments that actually matter, lets people raise things safely, then turns what it hears into something a manager can act on.
Three things I hold to, then three occasions where holding to them cost me something.
Start with the business problem. The HR symptom is almost never the whole story. It is often not even the right story.
If the right system does not exist, I would rather design it than write a paper about why we need it.
Including about myself. I will tell you where I am weak before you find out the hard way.
Being right about the hire was never the point.
I was once asked to hire someone I did not believe was right for us. I raised my concerns and explained exactly why I thought the fit was wrong. I was overruled. The business wanted to move ahead.
So I did what I think a good HR leader does. I supported the decision, then gave him a genuinely fair run at it. Not a grudging one.
Three months later we let him go. The concerns I had raised had largely played out.
I could have said I told you so. I did not. I helped him find his next role instead.
Being right about the hire was never the point. Doing right by the person after it fell apart was.
Culture does not start on day one. It starts the first time somebody hears from us.
I do not outsource candidate experience to a survey. I pick candidates at random, people we rejected as well as people we shortlisted, then ask them what it was actually like dealing with our recruiters and our hiring managers.
Three questions. Did we communicate clearly. Did the interview feel respectful. Would you apply here again.
The third one is the honest one, because it costs them nothing to answer truthfully and it tells me everything.
Sometimes what comes back is uncomfortable. That is precisely why I ask. It is also why I ask personally rather than through a form that lets everyone stay polite.
Culture is not built on day one. It starts the day you first speak to a candidate, including the ones you turn down.
The number is the signal. Finding the reason is the actual job.
I look past the count of roles filled. Time to fill, cost per hire, source of hire, offer acceptance, recruiter productivity and offer to join tell me where the system works and where it leaks.
But a metric on its own invites the wrong fix. Offer acceptance falls, so the instinct is to push recruiters to close harder. That treats the number as the problem.
Moving offer to join from 68 to 88 per cent had almost nothing to do with closing technique. It came from understanding why people were drifting away, then repairing the experience around the decision.
The metric is the signal. The real job is finding the reason behind it, then changing the system rather than the target.
Eighteen years across education technology, classifieds, software, media and services.
Head of People and Culture
Built the people function from scratch as the business went from 40 people to more than 450 across 12 countries. HRBP model, talent acquisition, performance, reward, compliance, analytics. Designed and shipped HireMatch and Ellie alongside the role.
Talent Acquisition Partner, leadership hiring
Worked directly with the CEO on leadership hiring across tech and product. A short tenure, cut off by COVID.
Human Resources Senior Manager
A dual HRBP and talent acquisition role supporting 600 people in the corporate division. Scaled the design team from 6 to 20 in sixty days, which became the niche hiring playbook other units copied. Hiring efficiency up 40 per cent through ATS adoption. Attrition down 15 per cent.
Human Resources Deputy Manager
Leadership hiring including CTO, Head of HR and product roles, partnering with the CEO and function heads. Introduced structured onboarding and new hire feedback, which cut early attrition risk.
Early career, recruitment and HR
Large scale recruitment for global clients across India, the US and Singapore. This is where the range came from. It is also where I learned to run a funnel properly.
