Vignesh Vijayakumar Email & Phone Number

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

My primary goal is to optimize our talent acquisition tools, technology, and processes to deliver exceptional hiring experiences.- In this role, I focus on streamlining our operations to ensure a seamless journey for both candidates and hiring team members. Leveraging data and analytics, I drive operational excellence within the TA function.- Part of my responsibilities is to help with implementation and enhancements of state-of-the-art tools and tech which we use in our TA practices. - I also collaborate with other cross-functional stakeholders and align with them on interconnected processes to maximize efficiency. My role is to translate the processes and implement it into the products which we use.- My day to day work involves partnering with cross-functional teams such as HR Ops, HRBPs, Total Rewards, FP&A, Sales and Revenue Ops and IT to understand their needs and provide solutions.

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

In early 2022, our hiring volumes had significantly increased and with the shifting focus to hiring more seasoned and mid-level talent, the concept of an Early Careers team was out of place. The recruiters on my team moved into the respective functional TA teams they were supporting, and I decided to take a more IC role - focused on running different Programs within TA, such as enhancing our candidate experience, reimagining our careers portal, DEI initiatives such as our Career Restart program for women and our Software Academy for students from low income families who are unable to afford conventional college education, among others.My primary focus was on HR tech implementation - working with HR and IT teams to build out process maps for the entire candidate lifecycle, gathering requirements from internal teams, evaluating different products to pick the ATS and HCM which would help us deliver on our CX (candidate experience) and EX (employee experience) goals, and finally implementing the products of choice - building custom integrations wherever required to solve for organizational complexity in the recruitment process.

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Having hired hundreds of freshers over the years, I wanted to transform the way we approached volume hiring. I began piloting experiments in looking at junior level lateral hiring with the same lens as hiring on campus and tweaking the process to suit the needs of lateral candidates.I started out with two roles which we've hired the most - Software Engineering and Customer Support. In the initial year, we were able to contribute to 17% of the total offers made in the year. This model found its sweet spot in hiring for GTM roles, and we aimed for continued optimization in our hiring process.I set up the Early Careers TA team which would complement the functional lateral TA teams. This team expanded to support all the functions which hired in volumes and I added recruiters to my team who would be dedicated TA partners for different functions such as Sales, Business Development, Presales, Customer Support and Customer Success.In the second year, with a lean team of 4 - we were able to deliver the largest share of recruitment accounting for over 35% of the offers with a gender diversity goal of 50%. In addition to this, we were able to accomplish the highest offers to joiners conversion at 92% and the highest CSAT rating at 91%.

Chennai Area, India

What my friends think I do: walking, talking, poster-boy for Freshworks.What my family thinks I do: creative marketing guy in some startup.What society thinks I do: software company employee.What my company thinks I do: catch-all guy for exception handling.What I think I do: enjoy my work.What I really do: whatever that needs to be done.

Chennai Area, India

"You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." - Jamie ZawinskiI work with different teams across the company, putting the spotlight on the people, with the mission statement of making people out there want to work with us for the right reasons. My primary goal is to take our internal stories out to the world and talk about the first kind: people who have helped shape Freshworks into what it is today.My biggest strength has been in scouting and nurturing talent while in college - and as an extension of that, I also take care of hiring from colleges, internship programs and campus events. My mission is to look for passionate students, make them feel a sense of pride and belonging in the organization, and enable them to reach greater heights and make an impact.I set up the campus hiring program within Freshworks, and helped hire freshers across different teams: Software Engineering, Sales and Business Development, Presales and Solution Engineering, Customer Support and Success, Content and Digital Marketing, Network and Security Operations, Machine Learning and Data Science, Sales and Revenue Operations, Product and Visual Design, Application Support and Business Intelligence, Finance and Legal.I have also partnered with the Talent Management team to hire Management Trainees across various functions within various groups - Product Management, Marketing, GTM and HR organizations.Over the past seven years, I've hired ~150 freshers per batch into these roles. As part of our fresher recruitment, we have had a healthy mix of campus hires (50%) vs. off-campus hires (30%) along with a subset of internship conversions (20%).

Chennai Area, India

Having worked closely to showcase the company brand of Freshworks and the inside stories of what happens within the company and its culture and running major events for the company, I gravitated towards the people of the organization more than the products. When the company was still Freshdesk, there was always a product-y feel to the company because of the close association with the product. Once all the products were unified under the Freshworks brand, it's now all about the people - the people who work here, and the people whose lives we want to make better. Being a natural people's person, I decided to move to our PeopleOps/HR team.Working closely with our Chief People Officer, the focus of my work involves crafting the best experiences for the people involved Freshworks - both in front of it, and the ones behind it.

Chennai Area, India

In mid 2015, I picked up additional responsibilities of handling media and press relations, and running events for the company. The marketing team was growing in size, especially since Freshdesk meant both the product as well as the company. To resolve this challenge, we created a new Corporate Marketing team which would handle PR, branding and events for the company.As the first member of the Corporate Marketing team, I worked closely with our CEO and the leadership team across our global offices on the company branding and events.Primarily involved in media relations, worked with journalists and media houses in India and handled PR for the company. Worked with our global team and different PR agencies for our global offices to help them. Helped organize various editions of Freshdesk's flagship event, the Customer Happiness Tour across the world.Mentored a team of 4 to help them in their activities. As a team, we collaborated on multiple activities such as brand campaigns, blog posts about the company and organizing events from end to end to generate organic traffic to our website and generate leads for our multiple products.Worked closely with the MD of our European office and helped set up our fifth global office in Berlin and organize Customer Happiness Tour: Berlin in mid 2016.Led a team of 50 volunteers from within the company, across different teams, in organizing Save the Hacker.Part of the core team that worked on Freshdesk's rebrand to Freshworks. Worked closely with the web, design and different product teams to create a unified brand, Freshworks, for all the products and worked on the launch of the new website from end to end.

Chennai Area, India

I joined Freshdesk right in the middle of its growth spurt - July of 2014. When I joined, Freshdesk had two teams under marketing: Digital (Inorganic) Marketing and Product (Organic) Marketing. I joined the latter, and at that time, the Freshdesk brand was synonymous with the product.Coming from a video design background, my primary focus was video production. Worked in collaboration with our video design team to set up and establish our YouTube channel as well as a process to streamline and ensure regular streams of three kinds of videos:- Customer testimonial videos, which would put the spotlight on the brands which use Freshdesk and what they have to say about it.- Product tutorial videos, to explain various features and modules within Freshdesk.- Promotional videos to showcase the company brand.Worked closely with the web and design teams to revamp the careers section of the company website.Wrote blogs on inside stories about the work and culture at Freshdesk for our Medium publication.Helped create comprehensive training material for the product based on personas (admin/agent).Collaborated with the Product Management teams for the chat, mobile and knowledge base modules inside Freshdesk to create marketing collateral - landing pages, solution articles, tutorials, promotional animations and brochures.Helped organize Save the Hacker, Freshdesk's flagship hackathon in 2015.

Master Of Arts (M.A.), Journalism And Mass Communication

Post Graduate Diploma, Animation Production

Bachelor Of Technology (B.Tech.), Computer Science

Activities and Societies: English Literary Society, SASTRA Cultural Team, Team Kuruksastra

Computer Science

Activities and Societies: PS Cultural Team, Mystique Newsletter Team