Insights
Written for the person who has to fix it.
Practical notes on the things companies actually get wrong — POSH compliance, statutory thresholds, labour law procedure, and what happens when a foreign company starts hiring in India.
- 01 India Entry
Hiring your first employees in India: what foreign companies get wrong
Contractor misclassification, salary structuring, contracts and statutory thresholds: what overseas companies get wrong, and what it costs.
- 02 Startups
Six HR mistakes Indian startups make in their first fifty hires
Downloaded contracts, unnoticed compliance thresholds, ad-hoc pay and an HR hire made too junior: cheap to prevent, expensive to correct.
- 03 Compliance
POSH Act compliance: what Indian employers actually have to do
A practical checklist: Internal Committee, the external member, training, enquiry procedure and the annual report.
Insights vs guides
These are opinion pieces — arguments about how employers should approach a problem, written from having watched the alternatives fail. They take a position.
If you want the reference material instead — what the statute requires, what the thresholds are, how something is calculated or conducted — that sits in the guides. Those are written to be consulted rather than read, and they cover provident fund, ESI, gratuity, employment contracts and domestic enquiry procedure.
What gets written about
Broadly, the things that come up repeatedly in engagements and that almost nobody writes about honestly: the compliance thresholds companies cross without noticing, the salary structures that will not survive scrutiny, the disciplinary shortcuts that lose winnable cases, and what actually happens when a foreign company starts hiring in India.
If there is something you would find useful and it is not here, say so — the questions clients ask are where most of these start.
Why the argument matters
A great deal of HR writing avoids taking a position, because a position can be wrong. The result is advice that cannot be acted on: every option presented as equally valid, every trade-off left to the reader, nothing that would change what anyone does on Monday.
These take a view. Contractor classification in an early team is usually indefensible and should be fixed before the twentieth hire. Withholding a relieving letter to recover unserved notice is a poor idea and generates more disputes than it settles. A performance file full of satisfactory appraisals will defeat a performance dismissal, whatever everyone remembers. Where I think something is a bad idea, the piece says so.
That also means they can be argued with, which is the point. If your situation is genuinely different, the useful conversation starts from knowing where we disagree.
Who these are written for
The person who has to implement the thing — an HR manager who has been handed a problem without the authority to fix its cause, a founder who has just discovered a threshold they crossed eight months ago, or a finance director who has been asked a people question they cannot answer.
They are not written for other consultants, and they are not written to demonstrate expertise. Where the honest answer is that something is straightforward, they say so rather than manufacturing complexity. Where the honest answer is that a company has a genuine problem that will cost money to fix, they say that too.