IndiGo hires Amazon’s HR executive Rajagopalan Raghavan

New Delhi: Low-fare airline IndiGo Wednesday named Amazon executive Rajagopalan Raghavan as its senior vice-president for human resources.

The board of InterGlobe Aviation Ltd which runs IndiGo has approved the selection, president Aditya Ghosh said in an email to employees. Raghavan will report to Ghosh.

“Raj will bring with him not only deep functional expertise in the area of human resources and talent management but also learnings of best practices from world class companies that we all admire,” Ghosh wrote in the email, seen by Mint.

Raghavan, who joined Amazon in early 2011 as its India HR head, is currently Amazon’s Asia Pacific director of HR. Earlier, he was head of HR for GE’s Global Research and India Technology Centers. He has also worked at Hindustan Unilever, Ford Motor Company and HSBC.

IndiGo did not respond to an email seeking comments.

Sukhjit S. Pasricha, IndiGo HR and administration vice president recently left the airline after five years.

On Tuesday, IndiGo had named Wolfgang Prock-Schauer as the chief operating officer, as it starts planning its long-haul international operations.

Prock-Schauer will be responsible for operational aspects of IndiGo such as flight operations, maintenance and engineering and inflight services directly as well as airport operations and operations control centre.

IndiGo, which currently flies to West Asia and South-east Asia, last week said it will seek rights to fly long-haul international flights, even as it has expressed interest in acquiring the international operations of Air India, the state-run airline that is in the process of being privatized.

The Rahul Bhatia and Rakesh Gangwal-promoted IndiGo controls 39.6% share of the domestic market, with 153 planes and over 1,000 daily flights to 49 cities.