Kartik Narayan has joined Apna, the Indian early talent hiring and jobs platform, as chief executive officer (CEO). He moves from TeamLease Services where he served as CEO-staffing from 2022 to 2025.
An alumnus of Symbiosis Institute of Digital & Telecom Management (SIDTM), Pune, Narayan began his professional journey as a business development manager with Sify Technologies, in 2001. Less than two years later, he moved to Airtel, where he spent almost a decade essaying various leadership roles, working out of Chennai, Bengaluru, Gurugram and San Francisco, from March of 2003 to December of 2012.
Narayan’s next stop was Riverbed Technology where he served as director-sales, South India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. From 2014 to 2015 he was associated with Cisco, working out of Greater Chennai area.
He then served Vodafone Idea as executive vice president-enterprise business, for over seven years.
It was in September of 2022 that he took on the role of CEO-staffing at TeamLease Services. In March of 2024 he became a board member of the Indian Staffing Federation for about a year and a half.
Now, in his latest assignment as CEO, Apna.co, he will be expected to help the platform empower the country’s leading organisations, equip India’s workforce and transform the job scenario by offering new and scalable digital solutions. He will concentrate on increasing the pace of Apna’s growth and ensure significant impact across diverse sectors.
Nirmit Parikh, founder and group CEO, Apna, is looking forward to working with Narayan and says, “Together, we aim to create lasting impact – empowering millions of job seekers and lakhs of companies who rely on Apna to find and hire great talent.”
Kartik Narayan himself is excited to see “how thousands of companies are now building and deploying their own AI recruiting agents on Apna’s platform — automating hiring conversations and finding the right candidates faster than ever before. With AI reshaping the world around us, productivity across recruiters, employers, and candidates will become the new currency of competitiveness. Our opportunity is not just to keep pace with this shift, but to lead it.”
HRKatha congratulates Kartik Narayan on his appointment and hopes that his passion for solving problems, simplifying complexity, and helping teams find clarity and momentum will prove to be an asset to Apna.
