People Lead (Talent Acquisition & HR)

Lever, Inc.; Bengaluru; Hybrid; INR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

Weekday in Bengaluru is seeking an experienced People Ops generalist to own both talent acquisition and HR for ~50–70 employees. You’ll partner with founders on hiring plans, lead senior hires, and shape policies, compensation, and compliance.

Expect a fast-paced, builder-friendly environment with high ownership of all people processes. You’ll develop and own onboarding, engagement, retention programs, and stakeholder communication, while ensuring labour-law compliance.

Qualifications

• 2–5 years across talent acquisition and HR.
• You have recruited hands-on and closed senior hires yourself.
• You have strong judgment on people and can tell a good hire from a good interviewer.
• You're a builder: write the process when there's none, and remove it when it stops helping.
• You communicate directly—no padding, no spin—and can say no to a founder when needed.
• Knowledge of Indian labour law and payroll basics to stay compliant without a consultant.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with founders to plan hiring: which roles, order, and bar for candidates.
• Run senior and hard-to-fill hires yourself, sourcing on Weekday platform, pitching, closing, negotiating.
• Set up the hiring machine: scorecards, interview loops, work trials, and a strong candidate experience.
• Design and run performance reviews, goal-setting, and feedback cycles that teams take seriously.
• Build the basics: policies, compensation bands, leave, payroll, and labour-law compliance.
• Own onboarding, engagement, and retention; read attrition data honestly, including ugly numbers.
• Be the trusted person for hard conversations: conflicts, underperformance, exits.

Skills

Talent acquisition

HR

Hiring

Payroll basics

Labour law

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

This is an internal role at Weekday. Not a role by a client.

• Role type: Full time
• Location: Remote and/or Bangalore
• Working days: Monday–Saturday
• Working with: Founders (mostly CEO & COO)

Weekday is an AI-native recruiting platform. We are backed by Y Combinator and Venture Highway (now General Catalyst). We have built the largest white-collar talent database in India and have built tools to run outbound recruiting campaigns to them.

About the role

We're a recruiting company. That means the bar for how we hire our own team is higher, not lower. If our own hiring is slow or sloppy, we have no business selling hiring to anyone else.

This role owns both halves of people at Weekday: bringing the right people in, and building the place they want to stay. Roughly half your time goes into talent acquisition — planning hiring with the founders, running pipelines, closing senior candidates. The other half goes into HR — policies, performance, compensation, engagement, compliance — for a team of around 50–70 people that keeps growing.

There is no HR department waiting for you. There is some process, some of it good, much of it built on the fly. You'll decide what to keep, what to fix, and what to build from scratch. You'll do the work yourself before you hire anyone to do it for you.

What you'll actually do

On any given day you might be:

• Working with the founders on the hiring plan and owning it: which roles, in what order, at what bar
• Running senior and hard-to-fill hires yourself — sourcing on the Weekday platform, pitching, closing, negotiating
• Setting up the hiring machine: scorecards, interview loops, work trials, and a candidate experience we'd be proud to show customers
• Designing and running performance reviews, goal-setting, and feedback cycles that people actually take seriously
• Building the basics properly: policies, compensation bands, leave, payroll, and labour-law compliance
• Owning onboarding, engagement, and retention — and reading attrition data honestly, including the ugly numbers
• Being the person the team trusts with hard conversations — conflicts, underperformance, exits

You'll be measured on whether things got done — well, and on time. Not on slides.

Who you are

• 2–5 years across talent acquisition and HR. You've been the first or second people hire somewhere, or you've built people ops at a startup that was scaling fast.
• You've recruited hands-on and closed senior hires yourself — not just managed agencies.
• You have strong judgment on people. You can tell a good hire from a good interviewer.
• You're a builder, not a policy-keeper. You write the process when there isn't one, and you cut it when it stops helping.
• You communicate directly — no padding, no spin — and you can say no to a founder when it's the right call.
• You know Indian labour law and payroll basics well enough to keep us compliant without a consultant on speed dial.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity and a Monday–Saturday pace.

Nice to have

• Experience at a recruiting, HR-tech, or staffing company
• Comfort with tools like Airtable, Slack, Notion, or an HRMS - and a habit of automating repetitive work

What you get

• Full ownership of people function at a profitable, venture-backed startup - the culture you build is the one that sticks
• Direct partnership with the founders on every hiring and people decision
• India's largest white-collar talent database and our outbound tools, for your own hiring
• A front-row seat to how a company scales, and the chance to build the team that does it