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. 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.  Employee Listening 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 Change Management & Enablement 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 d