Bhakti Shirke appointed as Director – Talent Acquisition, at Licious

Bhakti Shirke, whose recent past role was AVP – Human Resources at Axis Bank, wherein she was heading Talent Acquisition for multiple departments with a cumulative span of 13500+ employees; started her stint with Tech Hiring in their Digital Banking Team, including the M&A subsidiary Freecharge. After successfully building up a stellar technology & product team which has delivered mobile app of the finesse as great to help Axis Bank rank first in Asia, and within top-5 globally with regards to AppStore and PlayStore ratings; she was additionally entrusted with heading recruitment for Affluent Banking, Wholesale Banking Coverage, Products, Commercial Banking, Marketing, Treasury, Structured Assets Group, International Banking, and PR. Bhakti’s LinkedIn profile recommendations from her reporting team speak highly of such an inspiring Leader she has been!

Bhakti holds 2010-2012 batch post-graduate degree in International Business Management (Digital Marketing major) from Centennial College, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. While her graduation degree passing out from the 2006-2009 batch in Business Administration (HR Management major) is from the Academy for International Management & Engineering Studies, Vadodara, Gujarat, India.

In her total work experience of over a decade now, Bhakti has had the privilege to work for the following teams within the HR spectrum (in order of most to least exposure) –

• Talent Acquisition

• Employer Branding

• HR CoE & Tech Projects

• Employees Engagement

• HRBP & Talent Management

• L&D

Much before formally joining her career stints, Bhakti leveraged extensively on her hands-on learning journey in parallel with her academic tenure through Internships with SOTC Travels HQ at Mumbai, Maharashtra for 2 months in summer of 2007; with HDFC Standard Life Insurance at Vadodara, Gujarat from April 2008 to June 2010; followed by January 2011 to December 2011 at Silgan Plastics at Toronto, Canada.

Soon after completing post-graduation moved back to India in 2012, joining her first full-time job as a Management Trainee directly reporting to the CMO at Marlabs, Bengaluru, Karnataka as AM – Marketing. She took up project of setting up their corporate website as well as entire social media presence, looked after PR, and employer branding until 2014.

Had a brief retainer contract as Recruitment Associate with Wipro in 2014 itself where she was reporting to the TA Head, and as a HR project had put together the onboarding experience SOP. Her next stop was AMK Group of Companies in the same year, where she took up the role of HRBP, reporting directly to the Founder-CEO, she partnered with the leadership, to implement HR employee engagement priorities that directly support business, worked on executing best in class staffing strategies, and recruitment marketing processes for APAC Hiring. Subsequently from 2016 to 2017 she was with Accenture as Lead – HR Service Delivery, managing one of their prestigious clients with UK & EMEA Hiring.

In April 2017 she joined Apollo Munich Health Insurance (acquired by HDFC ERGO now) as the Early Careers Lead; this experience led her to cover 180+ Campus engagements PAN India, alongside an academia HTD program in collaboration with MaHE Bangalore.

From October 2018 to November 2020 Bhakti Shirke was undertaking the role of Manager – HR (Talent Acquisition & HRBP) at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, working out of Pune. On TA front she managed Leadership Hiring, and as HRBP led a span of 3000+ employees of their flagship product departments viz. Motor Insurance & Health Insurance. Additionally she also was a committee member and active participant in the CSR initiatives of entire Bajaj conglomerate named Beyond-CPBFI.

It was in December 2020 that her association with Axis Bank began initially as Senior Manager, eventually Bhakti accomplished a fast-track promotion for driving TA COE initiatives over & above her core deliverables. She’s an avid DEIB evangelist, and been instrumental in driving projects such as people experience during the M&A of Citibank India business, social media TA marketing & escalation management, Gig-resources lifecycle, advocacy of LinkedIn as a sourcing tool… to name a few!