Associate Director - Total Rewards

Zinnov; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 2,500,000 - 4,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Zinnov seeks a Total Rewards expert to lead end-to-end design, governance, and implementation of compensation and benefits for GCCs in India. You will work directly with senior leadership to align workforce economics with business strategy and implement robust pay models globally.

You will benchmark salaries, develop policy mappings, and drive governance across payroll, systems, and communications to ensure competitive, compliant outcomes.

Qualifications

• Hands-on Total Rewards expertise with design-to-implementation experience.
• Experience designing policies, systems, payroll mapping and governance.
• Ability to influence senior executives without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Diagnose: Understand the business strategy, GCC charter, workforce plan and talent segments.
• Benchmark: Define the right talent market by skill, function, level and geography; read Mercer, Aon, WTW, Radford data.
• Design pay: Base structures, variable plans, equity, join/retention awards, merit and budget rules.
• Fix parity: Address inequity, compression, outliers and legacy issues while maintaining India competitiveness.
• Model the economics: Multi-year scenarios balancing cost and talent.
• Implement: HRIS, payroll requirements, policy and communication for first comp cycle.
• Operate and improve: governance metrics like attrition, retention, promotions, take-up.

Skills

Total Rewards

Compensation design

Benchmarking

Policy governance

India GCC knowledge

Job description

About Zinnov

Zinnov is a global management consulting firm that helps organizations make decisions that actually get used — and deliver results that matter. For over two decades, we’ve partnered with leading enterprises, high-growth technology companies, and investors to answer some of the toughest questions they face:

• Where should we invest?

• How do we scale globally?

• What capabilities will win in the next decade?

Our work shapes market entry strategies, global operating models, M&A decisions, and long-term growth bets. We’re known for being data-led, execution-focused, and outcome-driven — not opinion-heavy slideware.

At Zinnov, how you work matters as much as what you deliver. We value independent thinking, crisp communication, and early ownership. With 450+ professionals across 10 global offices, we work across industries including Digital Services, ER&D, Enterprise Software, Semiconductors, Healthcare, BFSI, Automotive, Media & Telecom, and Private Equity.

Zinnov isn’t for everyone. It’s for people who want steep learning curves, honest feedback, and the chance to see their work influence real business decisions — not just presentations.

Why Globalization Excellence (GE)

Zinnov’s Globalization Excellence (GE) practice helps enterprises build and scale Global Capability Centers (GCCs) end-to-end — from Design & Discovery to Build, Scale, and Run.

In GE, youdon’twork in silos. You:

• Own complex, end-to-end client journeys
• Work across GCC advisory, managed services, and BOT / outsourcing models
• Influence leadership decisions that shape long-term talent and operating strategies

This is where strategy meets execution — and where talent plays a defining role.

About the role

Help global companies build and run a Total Rewards system that attracts the talent their GCC needs, holds together economically, keeps the right internal and global equity, and survives contact with scale.

You will own engagements end to end. You should be as comfortable arguing workforce economics with a CFO as designing a salary structure, settling a fitment exception, or making the model work after launch.

What You Will Do

• Diagnose : Understand the business strategy, GCC charter, workforce plan and talent segments. Set the rewards philosophy, the market position, and where the company should spend differently.
• Benchmark. Define the right talent market by skill, function, level and geography. Select and read Mercer, Aon, WTW and Radford data, and say what it does not tell you.
• Design or localize job families, levels, grades, career tracks, salary bands, promotion rules and India-to-global mapping.
• Design pay : Base structures, variable plans, equity, executive compensation, skill premiums, joining and retention awards for customer programs, fitment rules, overlap allowances, merit and bonus budgets.
• Design benefits. Medical and insurance, retirement and statutory, leave, parental, well-being, flexible benefits, transport, recognition.
• Fix parity: Address inequity, compression, outliers and legacy inconsistency while holding India competitiveness against global architecture.
• Model the economics: Multi-year scenarios that make the cost-versus-talent tradeoff explicit to Finance and the business.
• Implement: Employee mapping, policy, exception rules, HRIS and payroll requirements, manager guidance, employee communication, transition, testing, go-live, first comp cycle.
• Operate and improve: Governance plus the measures that matter: offer acceptance, comp-related declines, regrettable attrition, critical-skill retention, range penetration, compression, promotion velocity, benefit take-up, sentiment, labor-cost variance.
• Cover the lifecycle: Greenfield builds, rapid scale-up, EOR-to-entity transitions, global-to-India mapping, new capabilities and cities, M&A harmonization, restructuring, and the shift to product ownership.
• Build the capability: Reusable diagnostics, benchmark and cost models, templates, playbooks and dashboards that make the next engagement faster.

Experience

• Hands‑on Total Rewards expertise, with a record of personally designing material programs rather than administering them.
• Has carried designs into implementation and can say what changed in policy, systems, payroll, mapping, communication and governance.
• Influences senior executives without formal authority.
• Connects rewards decisions to hiring, retention, talent quality, experience and business economics.
• Uses numbers well and decides with incomplete data and real tradeoffs.
• Knows the India technology and GCC talent markets. Direct GCC experience helps; strong transferable judgment can substitute.
• High agency. Builds methods and tools while serving live customers; can identify future resourcing needs without assuming approved headcount.

What Success Looks Like

• Rewards strategy & pay architecture
• Job architecture, levelling & job evaluation
• Annual compensation cycle ownership & budget discipline
• Benchmarking methodology & market intelligence
• Variable pay, incentive & equity design
• Pay equity, internal parity & cost governance
• Benefits design, rationalization & harmonization
• Labour code compliance & risk mitigation
• Rewards analytics & executive reporting
• Executive stakeholder advisory & influence
• M&A, integration & transformation support

Zinnov is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive workplace. We welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds, communities, and experiences.