Rajesh Padmanabhan has been appointed as Director and Group CHRO of the Welspun Group. Rajesh has already joined the company on February 1. He confirmed his appointment to People Matters on Tuesday late night.

His tenure with Vedanta as President and Group CHRO ended in December 2015, and his resignation from Vedanta had come within 15 months of joining the metals to miner conglomerate. In August last year Vedanta employees were informed through email about his resignation. 

A double Masters in both HR and Finance from Mumbai University, Rajesh started his career with the ICICI group handling systems on mainframes and later on became the corporate banker. In 1997, he shifted to HR and managed HR start-ups within the group. By 1999, he became the Vice President, HR, at ICICI Infotech. His skills to converge HR and business got a boost in his role in Essel Propack where he was the first HR persons in India to globalise HR & took it to geographies like the US, Latin America, the UK, Germany, Egypt, China, South East Asia, Russia & Nepal.

As Group CHRO, Vedanta Resources (2014-2015), he created the platform for enabling businesses with cost-effective strategies, culture building, leadership effectiveness, driving people growth with a clear vision, capability development and get high engagement levels across the group. 

A Narsee Monjee alumnus, he won the prestigious UN Award as CHRO of Capgemini (2010-2014) for building diversity and inclusive practices. He was the Corporate Vice President and CHRO of the company where he used his global mindset, influencing skills and utilised technology to chart a new graph in HR.

Previous to Capgemini, he was the EVP and CHRO at Patni Computers (2007-2010), where he created customer-centric global HR models across geographies with world class learning skills, building frameworks and running complex yet efficient structures and creating customer & enterprise value. In 2004, he took over as EVP, Group CHRO and OCLD at the Oberoi group, and served until 2007. He ensured converging leadership development & skills building holistically for business value and excellence creation at the Oberoi.