Talent Acquisition: My experience
My early experience in talent acquisition involved supporting end-to-end hiring across roles in both business and technology.
At Piramal Swasthya and Fillip Technologies, I worked across:
Sourcing through platforms like LinkedIn, Naukri, and Resdex
Resume screening and initial candidate evaluation
Interview coordination with hiring managers
Candidate communication and offer rollout
A key takeaway for me was that recruitment is not just about filling roles, but about:
Creating clarity for hiring managers
Ensuring consistency in evaluation
Maintaining a smooth and professional candidate experience
Recruitment Strategy: Over time, my work in talent acquisition evolved from supporting hiring processes to working on more strategic aspects of workforce planning and recruitment design.
One of the key areas I worked on was analyzing an Engineering Trainee program, which involved hiring over 1,000 candidates annually. I worked on a deep-dive analysis across five years of hiring data, looking at attrition patterns, college pipelines, and retention trends. The objective was to understand which sources of talent were actually sustaining performance and retention over time. These insights helped sharpen the hiring strategy and improve how pipelines were evaluated.
Onboarding
While hiring brings people in, onboarding determines how quickly and effectively they become productive. I worked extensively on onboarding for Large graduate cohorts (~1,200 employees annually).
Designing a Structured Onboarding Journey: One of the key shifts in my approach was viewing onboarding not as a one-day event, but as a journey.
Month 1: Orientation and cultural integration
Month 2: Contribution and learning
Month 3: Ownership and performance alignment
Pre-Onboarding: Setting the Foundation
A significant part of onboarding happens before Day 1.The goal here was to remove uncertainty and create clarity. This included:
Documentation and compliance (contracts, background checks, payroll setup)
IT readiness (HRIS entry, system access, laptops, IDs)
Structured communication (welcome emails, schedules, points of contact)
Buddy/mentor allocation
For large graduate cohorts, this also involved:
Designing centralized induction structures
Managing logistics across sites
Ensuring infrastructure readiness for large-scale sessions
Cohort vs Lateral Onboarding
One of the key things I learned is that onboarding is not one-size-fits-all.
Graduate cohorts need:
Structured programs
Strong cultural messaging
Peer networking
Lateral hires need:
Role clarity
Faster integration into teams
Immediate contribution
Designing onboarding journeys with this distinction in mind significantly improves effectiveness.
Campus Strategy and Employer Branding
I was also involved in anchoring campus engagement initiatives as part of the organization’s broader employer branding efforts. This included engaging with premier institutions, supporting campus hiring programs, and strengthening the organization’s presence among early talent. The focus was not just on hiring, but on building a sustainable and high-quality talent pipeline aligned to long-term workforce needs.
What I Learned
Working across talent acquisition and onboarding gave me a much more holistic understanding of the employee lifecycle. It showed me that hiring and onboarding are deeply connected, what you hire for and how you bring people in need to be aligned. I also learned the importance of structure and consistency, especially when operating at scale, while still leaving room for flexibility based on role and context.
At the same time, being involved in more strategic initiatives helped me see talent acquisition beyond just execution. I understood how elements like job architecture, competency frameworks, and attrition trends directly influence hiring quality and long-term workforce outcomes. It reinforced the importance of using data to inform decisions, whether it is evaluating talent pipelines, improving onboarding effectiveness, or identifying workforce risks. Overall, it highlighted that effective talent acquisition is not just about filling roles, but about building a sustainable talent pipeline—where hiring, onboarding, and workforce planning are all closely connected.
