People & Culture Associate (Founding Role)

ColoredCow; Gurgaon; Hybrid; INR 400,000 - 600,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Ownership of a complete function

Direct exposure to CEO

Opportunity to navigate AI transition

Job summary

A growing software company in Gurgaon is seeking a People & Culture Associate to build and manage a people function. This role involves coordinating hiring pipelines, managing onboarding processes, and maintaining team documentation with a focus on AI tools. The company offers unique exposure to leadership and the opportunity to own the People & Culture function. Ideal candidates will have a background in humanities, psychology, or social sciences, and a genuine curiosity for organizational dynamics.

Qualifications

• Background in humanities, psychology, or social science or equivalent curiosity.
• Instinct to ask ‘why is this done this way?’ before accepting processes.
• Willingness to engage with AI tools as a natural part of work.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate the hiring pipeline across university channels and direct hires.
• Manage onboarding checklist with AI tools setup for new hires.
• Maintain documentation of the team health pulse and system evolution.

Skills

Sharp written and verbal communication

Curiosity about organization and processes

Comfort with AI tools

Education

Degree in humanities, psychology, or social sciences

Job description

People & Culture Associate (Founding Role)

People Operations

If you studied psychology, humanities, or social science and want to build a people function from scratch — at a company navigating the AI transition — instead of screening resumes at a corporation, this might be the most interesting first job you'll find.

What You're Walking Into

ColoredCow is a 30‑person bootstrapped software company. Offices in Gurgaon, Tehri, and Dwarahat. 11 years old. No HR department — ever.

AI is rewriting the rules of our entire industry. Tasks that took developers days now take hours. The value of writing code is declining. The value of understanding problems, exercising judgment, and working with people is increasing. This changes everything about who we hire, how we develop people, and what roles look like 12 months from now.

Over the past 90 days, the founder has built a People & Culture system from scratch — not a plan, but an actual working system: a five‑lens framework for analyzing every team member (applied to seven people so far), 40 responsibility areas mapped across five team members, a hiring manual with a problem‑first university pipeline where students get real problems and AI tool access instead of lectures, documented culture patterns from real observations, and an appraisal process tested through the hardest conversations this company has ever had.

The system exists. We need someone sharp to help run it and grow into owning it.

What You'd Actually Do (From Week One)

Coordinate the hiring pipeline across university channels and direct hires — including evaluating how candidates think with AI, not just about AI. Track the status of every open role and flag when things stall. Help prepare candidate assessments and interview summaries. Manage the onboarding checklist, including AI tools setup on day one for every new hire. Maintain the team health pulse — weekly submissions, monthly reviews. Keep the documentation alive as the system evolves. Travel to Tehri and Dwarahat regularly — because remote teams managed only by video are not managed. Use AI tools yourself, daily, as the default — because you can’t build an AI‑native people function if you’re not AI‑native yourself.

What this becomes

If you’re good, this grows into full ownership of the People & Culture function at a company doubling its revenue over the next two years — through one of the most significant industry shifts in a generation. You’d be building your career at the intersection of people and AI, in a company that takes both more seriously than companies ten times its size.

This Role Is Not For You If

You’re applying to every open HR position you can find — we want someone who read this posting and thought ‘this is different.’ You’re uncomfortable working directly with the CEO of a company — there’s no middle layer here. You need detailed instructions for every task — the system provides the framework, but you’ll figure out the daily rhythm yourself. You think AI tools are a fad or something you’ll ‘get to eventually’ — at ColoredCow, AI is how we work, starting your first day. You want a predictable 9‑to‑5 in one city — this role involves travel to hill offices and the pace of a company mid‑transformation. Or you studied HR because it seemed like an easy career path — this is the hardest version of this work you’ll find at any company this size.

What You Need (And What You Don’t)

What you need: a humanities, psychology, or social science background (or equivalent curiosity — we don’t filter by degree). Sharp written and verbal communication — you’ll be drafting assessments, maintaining documents, and communicating with candidates and team members daily. The instinct to ask ‘why is this done this way?’ before accepting how things are. Comfort with AI tools — not expertise, but genuine curiosity and willingness to make them part of how you work. An interest in startups and how organizations actually work — not the textbook version, the real version.

What you don’t need: HR experience, an MBA, or knowledge of HRIS platforms. We’ll teach you everything. We can’t teach you curiosity or judgment.

The Details

Experience: 0–1 year. We’re looking for sharpness, not seniority.

Location: Gurgaon, with regular travel to Tehri and Dwarahat. Our hill offices are not satellite offices — they are where a significant part of the team lives and works. Presence there matters.

Compensation: ₹4–6L. Early career, below what a large company would pay. What we offer instead: ownership of an entire function that no other company this size would trust a fresher with, direct exposure to the CEO, a documented system to learn from and build on, and a front‑row seat to what happens when a company navigates the AI transition honestly — not with slogans, but with real structural change.