Director - Global Talent Management

Freshworks · United States

Company Description Organizations everywhere struggle under the crushing costs and complexities of “solutions” that promise to simplify their lives. To create a better experience for their customers and employees. To help them grow. Software is a choice that can make or break a business. Create better or worse experiences. Propel or throttle growth. Business software has become a blocker instead of ways to get work done. There’s another option. Freshworks. With a fresh vision for how the world works. Freshworks Inc. builds uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional employee and customer experiences. Our people-first approach to AI eliminates friction, helping businesses reduce complexity, lower cost-to-serve, and deliver faster, more human support through enterprise-grade yet easy-to-use CX and IT solutions. Nearly 75,000 companies, including Bridgestone, New Balance, Nucor, S&P Global, and Sony Music, trust Freshworks to power their Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) operations. Job Description 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. What You’ll Do Performance Management Transformation

• 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. This work is visible to senior leadership, and you will present, defend, and iterate on it in real time.
• 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 our 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 — bringing together leaders from People Analytics, Employee Experience, and the HRBP community to build a cohesive, multi-lens view of the state of the employee experience. This group will be responsible for maturing how we aggregate and interpret employee signals, and for delivering a regular, centralized view of organizational health to senior leadership.
• Continuously improve our approach as AI capabilities and listening methodologies evolve

• Own the change management and enablement strategy across both performance and listening — from how we communicate program shifts to how we build leader capability and drive adoption at scale. The goal is not compliance with new programs; it is durable behavior change that builds a culture of high performance and an employee experience people can feel.
• Apply behavioral science principles to the design of change interventions — using what we know about habit formation, social norms, loss aversion, and motivation to design programs that shift behavior, not just awareness.
• Design and deliver leader enablement programs that translate program changes into concrete behaviors: what leaders need to know, do, and model differently as a result of each transformation.
• 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.

• 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. • Familiarity with continuous listening platforms and methodology; experience driving leader adoption of listening tools is a strong plus.
• 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.