The Wonder Women of MENA: Property Finder’s Anuradha Challu
Anuradha Challu, Group Chief People and Culture Officer at Property Finder
Anu leads the People and Culture agenda at Property Finder. In her role, she is responsible for setting the strategic direction for Talent Pillar for the business. Anu has over two decades of experience in leading the human resources function as well as overseeing large teams. She spent the last several years devising and executing HR strategies to deliver business performance for PepsiCo and Motorola. Her previous experience includes consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers for clients in the media, manufacturing and service industries. Anu started her career at Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai. She has a doctoral degree in Human Resources Management from XLRI Jamshedpur in India. She has published a paper titled: ‘HRD in Mergers, Acquisitions and Joint Ventures’ in ‘Perspectives on Human Resources Development and Organizational Development in Indian Organisations’ – a book published by the Academy of HRD.
About Anu’s thoughts on the industry
In my current role, I am accountable for devising and executing Talent Strategy at Property Finder by implementing best practices to unlock the full potential of our talented team. As a senior female leader, I find our journey and my role to be incredibly purposeful, especially considering that the real estate industry has historically been dominated by men.
My leadership principle is to be the change you want to see. It is inspiring to work in an organization that allows me to translate this principle into a talent strategy.
As an HR leader and a corporate citizen, I firmly believe that creating a more diverse environment brings multidimensional benefits, extending beyond the organization to positively impact society as well. Our goal is to become a lighthouse in the region, where our approach to diversity goes beyond gender. Today, I am proud to share that we have colleagues from over 62 nationalities in our organization. Our workforce is characterized by a super young talent pool, with the average age of our team being 33 years and 40% of our workforce comprising women. There is intentionality behind this achievement. We have created a strong framework that allows us to recruit, develop and retain the right talent, no matter where they are. A testimony if this framework is evidenced in the transparency with which we drive our recruitment, development and rewards related practices. Diversity for us, is not a numeric tag to be achieved as corporate goal, it is front and centre of the way we do business.