Chairman's Profile
ARUN A MANSUKHANI
(Chairman & Managing Director)
Arun Mansukhani is probably one of India's highest profile HR professionals. In a corporate career that has spanned 18 years, he has held, at a young age, senior positions at the world's top companies that included Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited, Reuters (Now Thomson Reuters) and his last port of calling at Vodafone Essar Limited.
He is the promoter Managing Director of a group of companies under the name of Vanilla Sky Breakthroughs Pvt. Ltd. The Vanilla Sky Breakthroughs group is a focused HR services organisation, with the relevant capability and accreditations spanning across key markets with a special emphasis on the Indian diaspora.
The HR services offered by the group are focused to the following 2 specific areas delivered by 2 specialist group companies a)Placement Pundits & Recruitment Services Private Limited and b)Citadel HR Solutions Private Limited.
- a) Recruitment : Placement Pundits & Recruitment Services Private Limited.
- i) Domestic recruitment
- ii) International recruitment
- iii) Executive Search
- b) HR Consulting Services : Citadel HR Solutions Private Limited
Placement Pundits' flagship project is the supply of medical healthcare workers to Italy. This is a market which has never been done before in the history of both countries. Placement Pundits has made inroads into various global markets and become the foremost international staffing company from India. Placement Pundits now works actively in the Energy and Environment, Education, Healthcare, ICT and Infrastructure sectors having placed hundreds of individuals around the world including India.
Citadel HR Solutions Pvt. Ltd., the second company he represents in India is one of Singapore's fastest growing HR consulting and search firms. With a wide of array of development technologies, discovery and learning systems and HR platforms, this company aims to work closely with companies, foreign investors looking to enter the Indian market.
Career snapshot:
In his last corporate role, he worked as Associate Vice President, Human Resources at Vodafone Essar limited, which is nationally a US three billion dollar plus business, one of the top 4 telecom players in India, and was until 2007 a part of the Hutchison Whampoa Group, Hong Kong. With the acquisition by Vodafone complete, Vodafone Essar is one of the premier operating companies of the Vodafone group globally. As AVP HR the responsibilities involved managing a team of 30 staffers across HR, admin and security. The business size that his team supported is approximately USD 700 million and 1100 FTE, being the biggest telecom circle in the country.
Arun Mansukhani's career work focuses around recruitment, training, comp & benefits, with recruitment being the biggest part. On an average at the Vodafone role he was responsible for hiring about 400-500 executive staff FTE each year. He was also actively engaged with Vodafone's outsourced partners who cumulatively manage another 6000 odd staffers across functional specialisms.
Prior to his present assignment, he spent a long part of his career at Reuters India, where as the head of HR South Asia he managed a region of 3 countries towards a delivery of diverse and generalist HR challenges.
Education/Affiliations
By qualification he is a post graduate MBA alumnus of one of India's top 4 business schools, SIBM (The Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, India), where he was the recipient of the Valmiki Trophy for Academic Excellence in 1993. Reuters nominated him as one amongst the top 3% of global managers to attend the Leadership 3000 programme at the University of Michigan Ann Arbour in 2000.
He is also a lawyer by qualification having majored in Intellectual Property and Direct Taxation from the Government Law College, Bombay in 1999. He has been featured and quoted in various Indian business publications including the Economic Times, Business India (frontrunners), Times of India (Ascent), Business Today, on the cover story of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) HR Magazine's September 06 edition, and spoken at International Telecom Conferences.
Also, as part of the SIBM alumni publication he has featured in its "Red Carpet Leader" section as one of its youngest alumni achievers, an honour bestowed upon a very few. In March 2007 he was conferred with the title of "Alumnus of the year 2007" by SIBM. He considers this his best ever accolade since everyone who's ever done an MBA from SIBM since 1978 is considered for this award and for 2007 the board nominated him.
His primary education was conducted at one of India's most well know institutions in the form of Campion School ICSE and Sydenham College BCOM.
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