- Current role
- Chief Human Resources Officer
- Company
- Trellis Digital
- Experience
- 16 years
- Industry
- Technology
- Based
- Mumbai
About
Farah Mistry is chief human resources officer at Trellis Digital, a commerce technology company of about 4,000 people. She joined in 2025 from a larger services firm, where she had run compensation and benefits.
Her focus has been compensation architecture rather than culture programming. Trellis had accumulated eleven separate salary bands through acquisition, with the effect that two engineers doing identical work could differ by a third in pay depending on which company had originally hired them. Mistry’s rebanding exercise in 2025 raised the company’s wage bill and, she has argued, was cheaper than the attrition it replaced.
She is a persistent internal critic of the phrase “culture fit” and has removed it from the company’s interview rubric.
Leadership perspective
- What did the rebanding cost?
- More than the budget and less than the attrition. We were paying for the inequity already — just through exit interviews and re-hiring, where it did not show up as a compensation line.
- Why remove “culture fit”?
- Because in practice it meant “reminds me of me”. I have never seen it written down as anything more precise, and if it cannot be written down it cannot be assessed.