Naresh K Matta Senior HR & Business Advisor

Selected work

Built, fixed and defended.

Engagements are described by sector rather than named. That is normal practice in this work, and client references are available on request once a conversation is serious.

1,000+ professionals hired, junior to senior
10,000+ manhours of training delivered
10–30% reduction in people-management cost
7 industries worked in directly

Cable manufacturing — hi-tension & optical fibre

Building a training function from zero at a greenfield plant

Greenfield project stage

A new manufacturing plant coming online with no training infrastructure of any kind — no needs analysis, no calendar, no budget, no trainers, and a workforce that had to be productive on unfamiliar equipment from commissioning.

What I did

  • Mapped required capability against the plant's actual roles using a skill matrix and competency mapping
  • Conducted training needs identification rather than assuming a standard curriculum
  • Built the training manual, annual calendar and budget from a blank sheet
  • Identified and developed internal trainers alongside external providers, so the capability stayed in-house
  • Established individual learning plans for identified key resources

IT / ITeS

Cutting recruitment cycle time with a Six Sigma project

Enterprise recruitment operation

Recruitment cycle time was too long and largely unmeasured. Roles stayed open, candidates dropped out mid-process, and hiring managers had no visibility into where requisitions were stalling.

What I did

  • Ran a Six Sigma Green Belt project specifically on cycle-time reduction in recruitment and selection
  • Measured the process end to end to find where time was actually being lost, rather than where it was assumed to be
  • Spearheaded in-house development of an online recruitment management system with the internal IT team
  • Established recruitment metrics so the pipeline could be managed on evidence rather than impression

Cable & MSO — signal transmission

Running HR across a fifty-branch distributed operation

50+ branches, 50,000+ sq ft of facilities

A distributed operation spanning more than fifty branches, points of deployment, warehouses and regional offices, with a workforce spread thinly across all of them and no possibility of managing HR through proximity.

What I did

  • Built regional HR and administration structure covering the full branch network
  • Standardised the HR processes that had to work identically at every location — onboarding, attendance, discipline, exits
  • Handled statutory compliance across the network — PF, ESI, minimum wages, bonus
  • Carried facilities and administration alongside HR, including site selection, leave and licence agreements and vendor management
  • Ran employee communication models to hold a distributed workforce together — weekly reviews, open houses, skip-level meetings

Legal / professional services

Establishing the HR function at a law firm

Established Indian law firm

A professional services firm needing a real HR function — one built for a partnership structure, a billable environment, and a confidentiality culture, rather than a corporate HR model imported wholesale.

What I did

  • Crafted and executed an HR intervention plan for the firm
  • Developed a comprehensive manpower blueprint against the firm's practice areas and growth plan
  • Managed end-to-end recruitment across levels
  • Established employee lifecycle management from onboarding through to exit

Multi-industry

Manpower rationalisation alongside global consulting firms

Territory realignment, restructuring and merger activity

Organisation restructuring, territory realignment and merger-related activity requiring workforce rationalisation — the category of work where getting the process wrong produces disputes that outlast the restructuring itself.

What I did

  • Partnered with business leaders on the annual manpower planning exercise against the operating plan
  • Worked alongside McKinsey and Hay Group on territory alignment, restructuring and merger activity
  • Applied organisation structuring and workforce planning discipline to the rationalisation
  • Acted as change management SPOC for the organisational and functional changes

Multiple — across engagements

Reducing people-management cost through targeted intervention

Multiple organisations

Organisations carrying people costs higher than their structure justified, without a clear view of which costs were structural and which were the result of drift.

What I did

  • Restructured salary break-ups and ran compensation benchmarking to establish positional parity
  • Targeted HR interventions and productivity programmes at the specific drivers rather than applying uniform cuts
  • Rebuilt organisation structure, span of control and workforce planning against the actual operating requirement

References

Ask, and I will connect you.

Named references from past employers and consulting clients are available once a conversation is serious enough to warrant taking up someone else's time.

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