Why HR is Not a Support Function with Priyaranjan Kumar
10
"If you consider HR a support function or a corporate function, I'm not the right person for your organization."
That's the line Priyaranjan Kumar says he's used in interviews for over a decade — and it's the filter that shaped a 33-year HR career across Tata, Dr. Reddy's, RPG Group, Hikal, Navin Fluorine and Welspun Corp.
In this episode of Swipe Right for Talent, CBREX Co-Founder & COO Sanjeev Punwani sits down with Priyaranjan — now Founder & CEO of AILS (Attitude & Intelligence Learning Systems) — for a rare, unscripted walk through three decades of HR: from personnel management in the DOS-command era to AI doing the coding it once took institutes to teach.
They get into:
→ Why HR should never see itself as a support function
→ How a 2,800-employee company was still running payroll on Excel, errors and all
→ Why job-hopping in the first 5 years quietly caps a career (the "dig one well" story)
→ What global hiring taught him about culture, privacy, and reading people right
→ Why he started AILS after overhearing a coffee shop conversation in 2011
→ The sabbatical India still isn't ready for
This episode is hosted by Sanjeev Punwani, Co-Founder & COO of CBREX — Swipe Right for Talent continues its new format featuring conversations led by CBREX's leadership team.
