Kalyan Krishnamurthy who became chief executive officer of Flipkart in January this year, has now taken over the human resource department of the company. All key portfolios of the HR department as well as of finance are under his overview, with CFO Sriram Venkataraman now also directly reporting to him.
Other teams such as category design management which was headed by Krishnamurthy before becoming CEO, private labels, and customer shopping and marketing still report to him directly. Additionally, the engineering team headed by Ravi Garikapati is also under his command.
Before Krishnamurthy, it was Nitin Seth who handled HR. He joined Flipkart as chief people officer in March 2016 from Fidelity International. He handled the HR department even after he was promoted to chief administrative officer and then chief operating officer. In addition, he also headed Ekart — the logistics department of Flipkart, customer experience, strategy-to-execution capabilities and corporate functions.
The company is now looking for a HR head who can report to Krishnamurthy. According to a Flipkart spokesperson,
Driving the people agenda and further enhancing Flipkart’s winning organisation culture has always been one of our top priorities. Towards this end, the people function will roll up to Kalyan. Meanwhile, we are looking to hire a head of HR, who will report to Kalyan and take full time responsibility for the function
This move comes with Flipkart currently in talks with Jasper Infotech, the owner of Snapdeal. This discussion is on fine tuning details of an upcoming acquisition which includes a redistribution of the team as well as a round of funding from Softbank.
Earlier this year, several top executives of Flipkart departed from the company including head of Ekart Saikiran Krishnamurthy, senior-vice president of product management Surojit Chatterjee and chief marketing officer Samardeep Subandh as Krishnamurthy took over as CEO. The company also tried to get ex-Flipsters to become heads of new categories and is still working upon its management strategies.
