Head Of Human Resources

Cotton & Clay Collective · Candidate-facing

Cotton & Clay Collective

Location: Chandigarh, India

Function: People & Culture

Reporting to: Managing Director & CEO

Level: Leadership

Cotton & Clay Collective is building a digital-first fashion and lifestyle business for the Indian market. Our ambition is to create well-made, well-priced clothing that customers genuinely want to wear, supported by disciplined sourcing, strong product quality, a distinctive brand identity, technology-led operations and an exceptional digital customer experience.

We are building the business for scale from the outset. That means every leadership and specialist role is expected to operate across functions, use data intelligently, protect commercial economics and help create repeatable operating capability rather than simply execute a narrow job description.

The HR Lead owns the people operating system from workforce planning and role architecture through recruitment, offers, onboarding, performance, development, employee relations, policy and offboarding. In a scaling entrepreneurial company, the role must combine strong judgement and confidentiality with the practical ability to build systems from scratch.

The mandate is clear: Build the organisation Cotton & Clay needs before growth exposes capability gaps; attract and select high-quality people; create fair, disciplined people processes; and ensure every material employee decision is documented, governed and connected to business priorities.

• Translate strategy into required roles, timing and people cost.
• · Maintain approved organisation structure, job architecture and workforce plan.
• · Link planned positions to business priorities, budgets and target start dates.
• · Challenge premature hiring and identify capability gaps before they become execution constraints.
• · Maintain succession and contingency planning for critical roles.

• Ensure every role is defined before recruitment begins.
• · Maintain detailed candidate-facing JDs with clear mandate, accountabilities, scorecards and experience requirements.
• · Partner with hiring managers to calibrate role scope and decision rights.
• · Version-control JDs and keep them aligned with Admin role architecture.
• · Prevent generic or inflated job descriptions from entering the hiring market.

• Build a disciplined evidence-based hiring process.
• · Own requisition governance, sourcing strategy, candidate pipeline and recruitment SLAs.
• · Select appropriate direct, referral, LinkedIn and agency sourcing channels.
• · Build structured screening and shortlist criteria.
• · Maintain candidate communication standards that protect employer reputation.

• Improve quality of hire and reduce bias.
• · Design interview stages, competency questions and scorecards.
• · Ensure hiring managers record evidence-based comments and recommendations.
• · Coordinate reference and pre-employment checks proportionate to role risk.
• · Challenge weak or inconsistent selection logic before offers are prepared.

• Ensure offers are competitive, internally coherent and approved.
• · Maintain salary ranges, offer structures and compensation history with appropriate confidentiality.
• · Coordinate Finance approval for people cost and budget alignment.
• · Enforce maker-checker approval before offer issuance.
• · Track offer acceptance, decline reasons and time-to-close.

• Convert accepted offers into productive employees quickly.
• · Build role-specific onboarding plans with owners and due dates.
• · Coordinate equipment, access, policy, payroll and business induction readiness.
• · Track probation objectives and review milestones.
• · Escalate onboarding failures that risk early attrition or productivity.

• Create clarity on outcomes, feedback and accountability.
• · Design review cycles linked to role scorecards and company priorities.
• · Coach managers on objective setting and evidence-based feedback.
• · Track development actions and performance-improvement commitments.
• · Ensure performance decisions are documented consistently and fairly.

• Build capability deliberately as the business scales.
• · Maintain skills and capability inventory and identify critical gaps.
• · Create targeted development plans rather than generic training calendars.
• · Track learning investment and business outcomes.
• · Maintain succession options for high-risk roles.

• Protect fairness, confidentiality and organisational risk.
• · Maintain employment policies, acknowledgements and document versions.
• · Manage sensitive employee-relations matters within restricted access.
• · Coordinate specialist legal advice where appropriate.
• · Track compliance obligations and ensure required employment records are retained securely.

• Create reliable people records and workflow discipline.
• · Maintain employee master data, documents, leave and lifecycle records.
• · Protect sensitive personal and compensation information through least-privilege access.
• · Use HR analytics to identify hiring, retention, performance and capability trends.
• · Maintain audit evidence for material HR actions.

• Use external people partners where they improve outcomes.
• · Identify and evaluate recruitment agencies, assessment providers and specialist HR partners.
• · Negotiate fees, replacement clauses, service levels and ownership of candidate data.
• · Measure agencies on candidate quality, speed, conversion and economics.
• · Build internal sourcing capability where repeated external spend is inefficient.

• Help leaders build the culture through everyday management.
• · Translate company values into observable management behaviours.
• · Coach managers on feedback, conflict, performance and people decisions.
• · Monitor employee signals without creating performative engagement programmes.
• · Surface organisational friction and recommend practical interventions.

The role will be assessed primarily on outcomes, operating quality and sustained business impact rather than activity.

Talent Acquisition

• · Time to shortlist and time to hire
• · Offer acceptance rate
• · Quality-of-hire and probation outcomes
• · Agency cost and source productivity

People Operations

• · Onboarding completion and time to productivity
• · Performance-review completion and quality
• · Policy acknowledgement and compliance
• · HR data completeness and audit exceptions

Organisation Health

• · Critical-role coverage and succession depth
• · Regretted attrition
• · Capability-gap closure
• · People cost versus approved plan

• · HR leader with strong judgement, discretion and practical operating orientation.
• · Able to challenge hiring managers constructively when role design or selection quality is weak.
• · Understands the commercial consequence of headcount and compensation decisions.
• · Strong interviewer and evaluator of evidence.
• · Comfortable with HR technology, workflow and data governance.
• · Capable of handling sensitive employee matters calmly and confidentially.
• · Able to build policy without importing unnecessary bureaucracy.
• · Strong written communication and documentation discipline.

• · Broad HR generalist or people-operations leadership, ideally in a scaling entrepreneurial business.
• · Meaningful recruitment ownership across leadership and specialist hiring.
• · Experience designing performance, onboarding and policy processes.
• · Strong working knowledge of Indian employment practices with specialist legal matters supported externally where appropriate.
• · Experience with compensation benchmarking and offer governance.
• · Experience managing recruitment agencies and external partners.
• · HRIS or ATS implementation or operation experience.
• · Exposure to organisational design and workforce planning.

• · Discreet — protects confidential information absolutely.
• · Fair — applies standards consistently.
• · Commercial — understands people cost and productivity.
• · Evidence-led — distinguishes opinion from documented performance.
• · Pragmatic — builds proportionate people processes.
• · Courageous — challenges poor hiring or management decisions.
• · Organised — closes lifecycle actions and records.
• · Human — communicates difficult decisions with clarity and respect.

• Every active role has a credible detailed JD, approved headcount logic and an accountable hiring manager before recruitment starts.
• Hiring decisions are faster and higher quality because interviews, feedback, references and offers operate through a consistent evidence-based workflow.
• New employees arrive to a ready organisation, understand expectations quickly and have measurable probation objectives.
• The company can scale headcount without losing control of people cost, employee records, performance accountability, confidentiality or culture.
• Cotton & Clay Collective · Version 2 · approved