After a two-year stint as head-HR, Quess Corp, Ritesh Agrawal, has decided to call it quits. Confirming the news to HRKatha, Agrawal says that he plans to take a short break to consider various options before deciding on the next step.
An alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur, Agrawal has over 20 years of diverse experience across FMCG, BFSI, IT and services sectors. Having begun his career with Essar Steel, as engineer- mechanical maintenance, Agrawal moved on to Arvind as management trainee in 1999. In the over two years that he spent there, he was exposed to HR processes and systems, and went on to become manager- C&B.
His next stop was Asian Paints, where he joined as plant personnel executive and was responsible for industrial relations and human resources-related activities for the Company’s Kasna plant. After a little over two years, he moved on to Dabur in 2003. There, he led HR for the Company’s East and South Zones, handling its consumer care, health care as well as foods divisions.
In 2005, Agrawal entered the insurance sector, as senior manager-sales HR, with Exide Life Insurance, where was tasked with building the sales HR team from scratch. By 2008, he had made his way up to the position of vice president-talent management.
From 2011 to 2014, Agrawal served as VP-HR at Microland, the leading IT infra and digital acceleration services company. He led corporate HR, leadership talent acquisition, learning and organisation development and global HR shared services.
Four years later, in 2018, business service provider, Quess Corp took Agrawal on as head-HR. He told HRKatha how during his “fulfilling two-year tenure” there, he was able to “build, nurture and strengthen meaningful, value accretive, yet low-cost HR practices and processes.” Under his guidance, the Company also received the ‘Great Place to Work’ certification in January 2020.
Agrawal, who is currently serving the notice period at Quess, will be moving out by end of October. He plans to relax for some time and “carefully consider different opportunities and take a call over the next few weeks.” Till then, he wishes to focus on publishing his first fiction (humour), which is titled, Tell me something about yourself.
