About Us

Dr. Saundarya Rajesh is one of India’s earliest voices to speak on Gender Diversity & Inclusion of Women. She has won a slew of awards – a few of which are listed here – The Standard Chartered SCOPE Woman Exemplar Award 2006, The Yuvashakthi woman entrepreneur award 2007, the CavinKare Chinnikrishnan Innovation Award 2011 and the TiE Stree Shakti Entrepreneur of the year award 2011. For her work in building and creating India’s first women’s careers service she was awarded the Swadeshi Jagran Manch Woman Entrepreneur Award, the FICCI FLO Woman Entrepreneur of the year award, the Naturals Extraordinary Woman 2014 and the Jeppiaar Icon Award 2016. In Jan 2016, she won the highly prestigious #100Women Achievers of India award in a public voting selection process and had lunch with the President of India! Recently, she was named to the United Nation’s List of “25 Women Transforming India” developed by the NITI Aayog. Founder-President of AVTAR Group, Dr. Saundarya leads tripartite (community-organization-individual) engagements in Women’s workforce participation. She has pioneered the concept of Career Intentionality and has trained several thousand women professionals on this. Her latest initiative is to skill 10,000 Corporation school girls to become career intentional via Project PUTHRI

Umasanker Kandaswamy holds a Masters in Public Administration from the University of Madras, is an Electronics & Communication Engineer and has done an MDP from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. With 20 years of experience in Recruitment Consulting, Umasanker is a prolific headhunter, with over 1700 closures in his career, comprising of top management, senior management and reporting-to-board positions. One of the founder members of AVTAR and also the senior most member in the team, heading the business for AVTAR Career Creators with multiple branches across India with his team helping him achieve the desired results. Umasanker has spearheaded large mandate recruitment projects for a variety of industries. Sourcing of any kind comes naturally to Umasanker – he manages IT sourcing with as much versatility as Non-IT. Every year, Umasanker has, as a personal goal, been training young generation in the path of Leadership and has been invited by many colleges to be the Chief Guest to address the young graduates & post graduates. His passion for people is equaled only by his passion for music and cricket - Umasanker is a great singer and is a fast bowler. He is an active Rotarian and has been recommended for a Director Elect for the forthcoming year to manage Vocational Services and recently he got the Voice of District Award in Chennai.

Karthik Ekambaram has completed several seminal projects in Diversity and Inclusion for multiple organizations. An MBA with over 15 years of experience in business analysis, talent strategy and workforce diversity consulting, Karthik began his career in web designing and dot com. Karthik moved into HR consulting, later, specialising in Diversity and Inclusion as well as flexible working methods. As a strategist, who has devised flexible working policies and diversity-ready workplaces for several fortune 500 organizations, Karthik brings with him a rich experience of managing a wide range of requirements for creating a futuristic workplace. Managing Diversity recruitment and formulating second career programs are some of Karthik’s recent achievements. As one of India’s pioneering workers in the field of Second Career programs, Karthik has been a key architect in the re-entry of women into the workplace. He has worked on projects which utilize Diversity & Inclusion as a business driver for organizations by employing it as a talent, CSR and business strategy tools. He has carried out Job Analysis, Time and Motion studies at several client sites for the purpose of Flexidizing and Unbundling of jobs to create flexi-career tracks in organizations interested in implementing flexible working options for their employees. Karthik has worked on many research studies on Diversity & Inclusion, Second career women, Generations in the workforce, Flexible working and Work-life balance. He has also conducted Diversity & Inclusion audits for a number of organisations. A Marathon enthusiast, he has participated in all the recent marathons in the City.

Priya, one of the founder members of AVTAR, is a sociology graduate with over 13 years of experience. She has donned various roles in her career - Recruiter, Management Representative - ISO, Team Leader and Head of Practice. Her multifarious experience has synthesized her skills in Process Quality and Business Intelligence, serving to make Priya a very astute Talent Strategy Consultant. Making a comeback after a brief sabbatical, Priya is now focusing on the Organizational Development and HR activities for AVTAR. An avid reader of both Tamil and English fiction, her favorite hobby is the translation of English articles, poetry and themes into chaste Tamil - her love for vintage Tamil film music makes her unbeatable in this genre!

Roy is a Public Administration Graduate from University of Madras and he has finished his schooling in Pondicherry. Coming from an IT background, Roy joined AVTAR as a trainee consultant and has now grown to lead a 70 member team. With close to a decade of experience in recruitment, Roy is a dedicated head-hunter, often working shoulder-to-shoulder with his teammates and challenging them to close the search before he does! The IT/ITES/BPO industry is naturally his first love, but Roy is proud of the fact that he does not have any boundaries with regard to managing a search. Identifying the right candidate for the mandate and ensuring that the search is closed successfully is Roy’s biggest thrill. Constantly on the look-out for knowledge in new industries and verticals, Roy loves an engaging search. Turn-key projects from clients for large mandate recruitment are a favorite of his. He takes pride in placing candidates across levels and many of his closures are in positions such as Director, VP, AVP and in middle management levels too in functions such as IT Software, ITES – Operations, Finance & Accounts, Sales & Marketing, HR, Banking Operations, BPO, Supply Chain Management, Engineering, Infrastructure, Manufacturing, etc. Having closed several global positions, Roy’s Linked-In list reads like a who’s-who of industry!

Roy loves playing cricket and he is an avid gymmer, working out at least thrice a week to maintain his physique. He is Captain of the AVTAR cricket team and rain or shine, every weekend, the beach on east coast road will find him and his team playing an involved cricket match!

Eswar is a Management Post Graduate in Finance & HR from Anna University, with over 13+ years of work experience. With well-honed expertise in industries like Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, KPO's, BPO's, Retail, Telecom and Power & Energy Sectors, Eswar has managed AVTAR's Bangalore Branch close to 2+ years and later moved to Chennai as Senior Manager- Client Services. After establishing the BFSI & Retail Practice for AVTAR within the last 8 years, he has now taken a new avatar internally as Head - Outreach Program for AVTAR Human Capital Trust. Eswar’s specialty is that he has managed a range of Banking / ITES / Telecom /Retail / Non IT related positions in varied levels and has closed some exclusive assignments for key banking accounts in Business Intelligence - a rare and much sought after skill, consecutively, for the past twelve years. He is equally well-versed in managing senior leadership and Top Management level positions - has placed some critical positions like Head of Anti Money Laundering Operations, Head of Financial Operations, VP/AVP- Retail/ Corporate Credit and Unit Head- CMS Operations /VP-Financial & Regulatory Reporting for some of our top notch clients. He enjoys playing chess, and is a Tambourine player who also loves to sing bhajans. His favourite hobby is to spend time with children, offer free coaching classes for the needy and indulge in community service.

FLEXI Careers India (FLEXI), a social enterprise from AVTAR, works extensively in the area of Diversity & Inclusion, with a special focus on gender diversity. FLEXI enables high-growth organizations to focus sharply on an inclusive talent strategy to make the workplace more welcoming for women. FLEXI also provides placement services for diversity recruitment, workshops and training programs, creating flexi-career tracks through Flexi career solutions and Flexi-working methods.

‘AVTAR I-WIN’ is a service from FLEXI Careers India for creating sustainable careers for women professionals who are intent on making a career comeback. More than 40,000 women professionals are registered members on the portal, which is designed exclusively for the creation and fulfilment of work-life integrated careers for women. More than 15000 women have been placed on part-time/flexi-time/full-time jobs with organizations across India. This includes organizations from IT, BPO, FMCG, Banking & Financial services, Retail and other industries.

FLEXI conducts workshops and training on Appreciating & Leveraging D&I, Gender Diversity, Gender Sensitization & Awareness, Work-life balance, Women and Leadership Development programs. Using a combination of methodologies, all programs conducted by FLEXI are eminently effective in their reach and absorption.

For details, please visit www.flexicareersindia.com and www.avtariwin.com.

The AVTAR Human Capital Trust (AHCT) is a charitable, public and social trust which was established in 2008 with the objective of providing services to people belonging to diverse segments of the society. Amongst the many initiatives the trust has undertaken are the funding of education of women belonging to BPL families, that of deserving, meritorious students from economically backward families, organizing social drives and championing the cause of women careers by promoting the cause of institutionalizing Flexible Working.

The primary objective of AHCT is to bring significant and impactful differences to the society with special focus on education and employment. To this end, the trust provides financial assistance to needy and meritorious students from underprivileged backgrounds to empower and enable their aspirations. Apart from funding education, the trust also aims to provide financial support to underprivileged youngsters who are embarking upon a career to help improve their living conditions and / or enable them to equip themselves with relevant tools/infrastructure towards performing better in their career. Through this initiative AHCT intends to improve the preparedness of these students of high caliber but modest backgrounds, to face the greater challenges of career and life.

Project PUTHRI is the flagship project of the AHCT, which turns the spotlight on India’s daughters studying in Government Schools between the age group of 12-18 years. It seeks to redesign the destinies of these girls from the lower economic backgrounds right from their childhood into their adulthood as young working women, by providing them education and the required support system throughout their development.

AVTAR is one of India’s leading Talent Strategy Consulting firm providing Human Resources and Recruitment Consulting Services to the top Corporates in various sectors across the Country. Founded by Dr. Saundarya Rajesh, one of India’s top HR Consultants, a Celebrity speaker at various global forums and an SME in Diversity & Inclusion, AVTAR focuses on mobilising non-traditional talent pools. From being a HR outsourcing platform, to an 80-member strong, full-fledged talent strategy consulting, the team has come a long way. With offices in Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore and Coimbatore, the AVTAR brand is one of the most sought after in the Human Resources space. AVTAR has been built on the pillars of these four core values - Excellence, Team Work, Innovation and Customer Focus – which have helped the organization build its way from strength to strength in the area of Human Resources.