Nikhil Kukkamalla

Built scalable recruitment systems, led end-to-end hiring across Engineering, Product, GTM, Legal, and Leadership functions, and co-developed a Recruitment Operations Platform later commercialized as a SaaS product.

Talent

Acquisition and Talent Operations professional with 3+ years of experience in recruitment leadership, ATS implementation, recruitment analytics, process automation, and stakeholder management

Talent Acquisition Manager at NxtWave Technologies (2025-06 – 2025-12)

• Led end-to-end hiring across Engineering, Product, Legal, Operations, Strategic Partnerships, Customer Relations and Technical Training, delivering 30+ hires across two quarters.
• Led recruiter coaching through sourcing strategy reviews, Boolean search training, interview calibration, negotiation guidance, and one-on-one mentoring, improving recruiter productivity and hiring consistency
• Closed 6+ leadership and niche positions while maintaining an average of 4–5 roles per month.
• Designed competency-based interview frameworks, scorecards and recruitment SOPs.
• Redesigned sourcing strategies using Boolean search, referrals and community sourcing.
• Tracked TAT (30–40 days), offer acceptance (70%+), joining ratio (80%+) and hiring funnel metrics through dashboards.
• Recommended Darwinbox workflow improvements to enhance transparency and reporting.
• Strengthened employer branding by improving recruiter messaging, candidate experience, LinkedIn engagement, and hiring campaigns.

Talent Acquisition Consultant (Freelance) at Transcom (2024-04 – 2025-04)

• Partnered with startup founders to solve niche hiring challenges across GTM and Engineering functions.
• Built targeted sourcing strategies using Boolean Search, referrals, and talent mapping.
• Managed end-to-end recruitment including stakeholder consulting, compensation benchmarking, and offer negotiations.

Recruitment Manager at HireTale (2022-05 – 2024-04)

• Co-designed a Recruitment Operations Platform with the Co-Founder, automating resume parsing, candidate tracking, interview scheduling, recruiter KPIs, and communication. This platform evolved into a commercial SaaS product for recruitment agencies.
• Delivered 50+ hires across Engineering, Product, HR and Finance for startup and enterprise clients.
• Partnered with founders and CEOs on hiring strategy, workforce planning and compensation benchmarking.
• Closed Director and VP Engineering roles, including an international Director hire sourced from China, Taiwan and South Korea.
• Led organization-wide Ceipal ATS implementation, workflow configuration, recruiter training and data migration.
• Designed executive recruitment dashboards tracking hiring funnel conversion, recruiter productivity, recruiter revenue, sourcing effectiveness, Time-to-Fill, pipeline aging, and business performance to support workforce planning and hiring decisions.
• Automated workflows using WATI, Calendly and spreadsheet automation.
• Generated agency recruitment billings exceeding 3× employment cost through successful delivery of client hiring mandates.

MBA in HR – IIM Tiruchirappalli (2020-08 – 2022-05)

B.Tech in Mechanical – IIT (ISM) Dhanbad (2014-07 – 2019-08)