Director - Global Talent Management

Freshworks is rethinking how we develop, evaluate, and listen to our people — and this role is at the center of that transformation. As Director of Performance Management & Employee Listening, you will lead two of our most strategically important people practices: a comprehensive redesign of how we approach performance management, and a shift to a modern, continuous approach to employee listening. This is a role for someone who thinks systemically, designs with the business in mind, and cares about execution as much as strategy. Ultimately, you are helping us build something lasting: a sustainable culture of high performance and an employee experience that is genuinely differentiated. You will work as part of a small, senior Workforce Strategy & Org Development team — owning your domain with a high degree of autonomy and leading through influence across a matrixed organization. You will not manage a large team, but you will need to move a lot of work through people who don't report to you. Based at our San Mateo headquarters, you will work alongside senior leaders and represent the People team in high-visibility conversations at the VP and executive level. We need someone who commands a room, earns trust quickly, and brings both creative thinking and rigorous follow-through to everything they own. Critically, you know that even the best-designed programs fail without deliberate change management — and you build enablement, communication, and adoption into your work from the start.

Responsibilities

Lead a meaningful transformation of how Freshworks approaches performance management — moving from a process-heavy, subjective model to a streamlined, AI-assisted approach that is easier for managers, more consistent in its outputs, and more tightly connected to business outcomes; Design and own the end-to-end performance system: the methodology, the tools, the calibration approach, and the employee and manager experience; Coordinate across HR, Total Rewards, HR Technology, and business partners to deliver an integrated solution that actually works in practice; Build and maintain executive alignment; Lead the change management and enablement strategy for the performance transformation — developing communications, training, and leader readiness plans that drive understanding and adoption across the organization; Hold the bar on quality and detail at every stage; Own employee listening strategy and programs, including our continuous listening platform, pulse approach, and how we translate signals into leadership action; Drive the shift from periodic survey cycles to an always-on listening culture — designing and executing the change management strategy that moves leaders from passive recipients of survey results to active owners of the employee feedback loop; Build leader-facing tools, frameworks, and communications that make listening data accessible and useful, not just reportable; Track program health, participation trends, and sentiment over time; surface risks and opportunities and bring forward clear recommendations; Stand up and lead a cross-functional employee experience working group; Continuously improve our approach as AI capabilities and listening methodologies evolve; Own the change management and enablement strategy across both performance and listening; Apply behavioral science principles to the design of change interventions; Design and deliver leader enablement programs that translate program changes into concrete behaviors; Build a communication and engagement framework that keeps employees, managers, and senior leaders informed, aligned, and bought in throughout multi-year transformation cycles; Serve as the connective tissue between program design and organizational readiness — ensuring that what we build in the design room actually lands in the field; Measure adoption and enablement effectiveness; use data to identify where uptake is lagging and adjust approach accordingly

Requirements

8–12 years of progressive experience in HR, people strategy, organizational effectiveness, or a related field; Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional transformation initiatives from design through execution in a fast-paced environment; Deep expertise in performance management design — you’ve built or significantly redesigned performance systems before and understand how to make them fair, scalable, and defensible; Meaningful experience in organizational design and development — you can help leaders think through structure and effectiveness, and you know how to turn those conversations into action; Strong change management and enablement skills — you know how to bring people along through transformation, build leader capability, and design adoption strategies that actually stick; An AI-first mindset — you’re curious about what AI makes possible in people practices and you bring that perspective to how you design programs and solve problems; Exceptional executive presence — you’re comfortable presenting to C-suite leaders, you communicate with clarity and confidence, and you can hold your own in high-stakes rooms; High attention to detail — you care deeply about getting things right and you’ll get into the weeds to make sure they are; Strong cross-functional instincts — you build trust with Finance, Strategy, and Operations partners and you design solutions that work for the business, not just for HR; Excellent written and verbal communication skills; you can translate complexity into clarity for any audience

Nice to have

Familiarity with continuous listening platforms and methodology; experience driving leader adoption of listening tools

Benefits

dental, medical, vision, disability, and life insurance; Equity + ESPP; flexible PTO; flexible spending; commuter benefits; wellness benefits; adoption and parental leave benefits; target bonus