MongoDB appoints, former VP HR of Unilever Harsha Jalihal as Chief People Officer
NASDAQ listed, MongoDB Inc. the leading, modern general-purpose database platform, announced the appointment of Harsha Jalihal as Chief People Officer.
In her new role, Jalihal will oversee the company’s human resources operations globally, supporting 2,100+ people in 29 countries. She will lead workforce strategy, talent acquisition and development, diversity and inclusion, total rewards, and employee engagement, and will join MongoDB’s executive leadership team.
Jalihal joins MongoDB with more than two decades of experience. Most recently, Jalihal was Vice President of HR at Unilever and was responsible for delivering the end-to-end HR strategy and operations for the US business. She co-created Unilever’s strategy to build a sustainable future of work across its multinational business in partnership with the Global CHRO. Jalihal was also on a part-time secondment to the World Economic Forum (WEF) where she contributed to their thought leadership on the future of work and co-authored HR 4.0, a framework for shaping people strategies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Prior to that, she worked at Cognizant where she designed and operationalized strategy to drive early career hiring, led a Center of Excellence focused on HR expertise in strategic outsourcing deals and acquisitions, and ran operations for the CFO & COO. She was also a business partner to a number of teams through Cognizant’s hyper-growth phase, laying the early foundations of Cognizant’s approach to talent acquisition, talent management, reward management, employee relations, and more.
“At MongoDB, we recognize that our success is directly tied to our ability to attract the very best people in the industry, and to give them many opportunities to develop and grow,” said Dev Ittycheria, MongoDB President & CEO. “In order to meet the needs of our rapidly expanding employee base, we needed a Chief People Officer with the operational ability to help us scale rapidly and the intellectual heft to bring new, imaginative thinking to drive strong performance while retaining the core elements of our culture and values that make this company so special. After a long and thorough search, I’m excited that we have found these things in Harsha.”
“To oversee and shape the future of HR for a knowledge-based company that is growing as quickly as MongoDB is an exciting challenge,” said Harsha Jalihal, MongoDB’s Chief People Officer. “I’m looking forward to working with Dev and the leadership team to develop a people and culture strategy that is in service of MongoDB’s business strategy, and to ensure the culture that makes this company wonderful continues to evolve to attract and retain the very best people in the industry.”
