People Lead (Talent Acquisition & HR)

OpenKrill; United States; On-site; USD 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Weekday is seeking to appoint a hands-on Head of People who will own both hiring and people operations for a growing team. You will partner with the founders on hiring plans, run senior hires, and also design HR policies, compensation bands, engagement, and compliance for a 50–70 person team.

You will implement performance reviews, onboarding, retention initiatives, and data-informed people decisions while maintaining direct communication with leadership and a culture of accountability.

Qualifications

• 2–5 years across talent acquisition and HR.
• Youve recruited hands-on and closed senior hires yourself.
• You have strong judgment on people.
• Youre a builder, not a policy-keeper.
• You communicate directly with founders.
• You know Indian labour law and payroll basics well enough to keep us compliant.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and a Monday-Saturday pace.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with founders to plan hiring, prioritise roles, and set hiring bars.
• Run senior and hard-to-fill hires, sourcing on the Weekday platform, pitching, and closing.
• Design and run the hiring machine: scorecards, interview loops, and candidate experience.
• Design and run performance reviews, goal-setting, and feedback cycles.
• Build the basics: policies, compensation bands, leave, payroll, and labour-law compliance.
• Own onboarding, engagement, and retention; read attrition data honestly.
• Be the trusted person for hard conversations with the team.

Skills

Talent acquisition

HR

Interviewing

People judgment

Direct communication

Indian labour law

Ambiguity tolerance

Tools

Airtable

Slack

Notion

HRMS

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)

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