TATA Consulting Services Announces Sudeep Kunnumal Design for CHRO

TATA Consulting Services Limited (TCS) has appointed Sudeep Kunnumal to appoint its Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) on Thursday to eventually replace Milind Lakkad, who retires this year.

Kunnumal has worked for the Mumbai-based company for nearly 25 years and is expected to be a CHRO design starting March 14. TCS has not announced when it will eventually take over as CHRO.

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Since joining TCS in 2000, Kunnumal has led various human resources roles at the country’s largest information technology (IT) service company. He has been the head of human resources for TCS Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance, a position he held since 2019.

His appointment was a break with TCS’s past practices as the company has been heading the HR practices as the business unit. Outgoing HR head Lakkad oversees the business of manufacturing customers before becoming the HR Authority in 2019.

Lakkad’s former Ajoyendra Mukherjee also led the business unit before starting HR head for 11 years in 2008.

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Lakkad is 60 years old, which is the retirement age for TCS employees. According to Lakkad’s watch, TCS became the first IT services company to link quarterly variable salaries to employee attendance in April last year, with employees with less than 60% attendance rates not eligible for quarterly bonuses.

TCS is also the only company in the country’s top five software service providers to conduct wage hiking during the April-June 2024 period, even as macroeconomic uncertainty forces peers to push for wage hiking to employees.

“His achievements in talent acquisition are transformative, including leading the game-based recruitment approach, not only identifying high-potential candidates, but also increasing candidate engagement. “This innovative approach ultimately achieved landmark achievements, setting the Guinness World Record through the Global Programming Competition (Codevita), a groundbreaking initiative that transformed campus recruitment practices,” TCS said in a March 13 press release. ”

This is the fifth high-end exit of the country’s largest IT services company since K. Krithivasan took over as CEO of TCS in June 2023. Less than eight months after Lakkad’s retirement, Suresh Muthuswamy, head of TCS’s North American business, has been less than eight months old.

But these are not the only exits for TCS. To be sure, at least two other executives retired last year.

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Dinanath Kholkar, head of TCS partner ecosystems and alliances, resigned late last year. In October, Chief Technology Officer Ananth Krishnan retired. In May, the company’s chief operating officer, Natarajan Ganapathy Subramaniam, retired after reaching the company’s mandatory retirement age.

TCS ended last year with $29.1 billion in revenue, up 4.1% per year. Although the number of employees was cut in the last fiscal year, the first nine months of the current fiscal are optimistic in terms of the number of employees. The company added 5,808 employees between April and December 2024, ending with 607,354 employees.