Smithaa Gudagie

I have been a strategic partner to the founders and the leadership team in building and scaling teams across Engineering, design, and product functions across 3 product lines within Unacademy from 0-1 by translating recruitment initiatives and metric insights into actionable strategies.

I have been a strategic partner to the founders and the leadership teams within Unacademy in building and scaling teams across Engineering, design, and the product functions across 3 product lines within Unacademic from 0-1 by translating recruitment initiatives and metric insights into actionable strategies.

Leading and taking overall responsibility for the TA function, meeting the organization’s talent strategy and overall agenda, and ensuring its smooth functioning. Highlights: - Hired over 60+ candidates from 2018-2020 with over 60% joiners 10% of the hires through GitHub. <5% or no vendor usage for the financial year 2018- March 2020. - Extensively worked towards hiring and increasing diversity of candidates. - Introduced new initiatives like employee Sourcing bash to encourage employee referrals and introductions across various teams. - Optimized and regulated employee payout system for the organization to ensure clarity and communication between recruiting and Finance along with relevant business partners across teams. - Have been instrumental in solving recruiting problems like interview process, candidate experience, sourcing strategy, time-to-fill, and stakeholder management to name a few. - Instrumental in introducing data-driven hiring and regular reporting and partnering with various business leaders. Other initiatives: Instrumental in planning and leading projects like diversity hiring and Job description clean-up [Guidelines for creating job descriptions that are clean, Gender neutral, and inclusive] at an organizational level during downtime from April 2020 - June 2020

Leading and taking overall responsibility for the TA function, meeting the organization’s talent strategy and overall agenda, and ensuring its smooth functioning.

-TA -Human Resource Partner & Operations -Branding & Resource Management Collective is now the Visto hub! Visto’s purpose is to provide enterprises with agnostic solutions & services to connect their programmatic stack, bringing openness and interoperability to the digital media ecosystem providing flexibility and scale while reducing operational inefficiency and bringing much-needed clarity to mitigate unnecessary tech taxes while increasing working media. Role: Worked closely with the co-founder and the managing director to scale both tech and non-tech functions single-handedly by introducing various matrices and driving data-driven frameworks to execute, engage & acquire talent. Highlights: - Instrumental in defining and building hiring processes & growing the Collective team from 45 to 100+, with over 60% hires through Direct and referrals. - Reduced cost by almost 50% with a source mix of over 60% of direct hires and referrals against agency hires. - Reduced joining period and decline ratio to over 80% from 20%. Business Partnering, Operations, and Branding: - Implemented Longevity and reward programs for retention and employee Engagement. Attrition Management- Achieved the lowest % of attrition with a corrective plan of performance reward linked to performance, derived based on the market parameters, cost, and time to hire new resources and critical roles. Implemented Succession planning to move resources into new roles to break the monotony. - Introduced continuous employee engagement to increase employee inclusivity by including them in branding activities for hiring both on internal and external sources via various forums. Initiated the senior management and the employees to participate in the branding activities via various technology forums to improve branding. - New joiner and Onboarding: Implemented the new joiner kit and the concept of a buddy system globally.

Worked closely with the co-founder and the managing director to scale both tech and non-tech functions single-handedly by introducing various matrices and driving data- driven frameworks to execute, engage & acquire talent. Compensation & Benefits, Salary benchmarking, talent assessments, benefits and rewards, referral programs, vendor selection, and external relationship building were key responsibilities.

Recruitment/Staffing/Human Resources for Microsoft India Development Centre(IDC), Sales and Marketing (SMSG) and Global Delivery (GD) -Talent Acquisition - Vendor Management -Resource Management I was part of the pilot process for a new function (Microsoft GD) via Randstad and have been instrumental in setting up policies and processes and being a talent adviser to senior management on all significant talent acquisition, and recruitment initiatives. Highlights: - Instrumental in growing the Bangalore MGST team from 30 to over 100 with little or no pre-defined processes. - Strategized and reduced hiring time from 1 Month to 2 weeks to hire 20 candidates with 100% joiners. - Recognized for the most number of Direct Hires (85%) and reduced cost by over 70% with a 12.8% diversity hire ratio. -Highest CSAT Score of 8.2 % (Both External and Internal).

I was part of the pilot process for a new function (Microsoft GD) and have been instrumental in setting up policies and processes and being a strategic talent adviser to senior management on all significant talent acquisition, and recruitment initiatives.

-Talent Acquisition - Stakeholder Management -Team Management I managed a team of 4 technology recruiters and have been responsible for owning and improving the overall recruiting process by introducing recruiting goals and strategies via various recruitment matrices. Cultivated long-term relationships through a focused effort on stakeholders’ unique needs and finding the best solutions.

I managed a team of 4 technology recruiters and have been responsible for owning and improving the overall recruiting process by introducing recruiting goals and strategies via various recruitment matrices. Cultivated long-term relationships through a focused effort on stakeholders’ unique needs and finding the best solutions.

-Talent Acquisition - Business Development I led and managed a team of 8 driving a high level of performance against hiring plans in an R.P.O setup and was responsible for billing and overall hiring for MindTree. Highlights: - As a business Lead- handled a team of 10 to generate the highest billing of 30 Lakhs in the month of March 2008=2.5 Times the actual target. - Was instrumental to hire 480 and 360 candidates across skills for the financial year 2007-08 and 2008-09.

I led and managed a team of 8, driving a high level of performance against hiring plans in an R.P.O setup and was responsible for billing and overall hiring for MindTree.