As the race to hire top talent in Information Technology (IT) and other skilled sectors heats up, it is also helping companies hire quicker. And document verification has an important role to play in the hiring process, which requires more time.
Former Nestaway co-founder Deepak Dhar’s talent management startup is helping companies speed up the background verification process while also keeping a tab on competing offers the candidate might be pursuing and other HR-related services.
Founded in 2019 by Deepak and Sandesh Chidanand, former Chief Operating Officer at Chaipoint, the Bengaluru-based startup uses a private permissioned blockchain to maintain an audit trail, consents, payables, and receivables.
Apart from document verification, the platform, called Repute.net, offers services such as looking for the right talent on its network, helping companies roll out offers faster, pre-onboarding and onboarding services for applicants, among others.
At present, Repute.net is in various stages of deployment with seven Human Resource Management System (HRMS) partners and is adding more. Most of these HRMS are currently piloting the Repute.net feature with their customers, which will be a paid service going ahead.
Snapshot of Repute
How does it work?
A candidate’s documents are all maintained within a company’s (HRMS), a suite of software products used by companies to maintain their internal HR functions.
Any company on one of the partner HRMS can initiate a background verification for a potential candidate on the platform. If readily available, Repute surfaces the documents by connecting with the HRMS of the candidate’s current employer.
“Our primary focus is talent management. Our background verification service is a part of it. If the candidate is actively pursuing an offer in a competing company, which uses one of our partner HRMS, we will be able to alert the company where the candidate has already accepted the offer,” says Deepak.
He adds the startup is not focused on generating revenue as much as growing the usage for now.
USP and competition
At present, the background verification is carried out manually by the potential employers by sending out an email to the previous employer of the candidate after they have been hired. Employers might also choose to hire a background verification agency, which checks the authenticity of the candidate’s documents, apart from checking their legal background. This costs a potential employer close to Rs 4,000 per candidate.
“The Repute.net network enables cross-company and cross-network flow of information. It saves turnaround time for hiring and post-hiring activities and the overheads also come down by nearly 25-50 percent, depending on the volume,” says Sayeed Anjum, Co-founder at Greytip Software, which owns and operates payroll and HR software, .
The company has been working with Repute.net for over a year and half, and plans to roll it out to 10,000 customers. Close to 50 percent of GreytHR’s customers are in the IT and ITeS space, where talent management is even more crucial.
Repute.net offers its services at 50 percent less than a background verification agency, depending on the number of tenures the candidate has had. Also, the verification process, which would take anywhere between four to six weeks, comes down to a few minutes.
“Apart from the HRMS service, we are also partnering with different apps for digital lending targeted at employees on the systems such as neo-banking platform , personal loan platform , and advance salary app , among others,” Deepak tells YS.
Repute partially competes with background verification companies like and , which work in the field of employee verification. However, the startup also plans on expanding its services to the healthcare sector by helping hospital and medical facilities with patient on-boarding. This will aid identity verification for insurance claims as well.
The market
The company has raised $1.84 million so far in a seed round from 3one4 Capital, Global Founders Capital, and angel investors. The round was announced in August 2020.
Given remote hiring and work from home across industries, services similar to Repute.net are becoming increasingly relevant.
Repute.net’s customers are companies and enterprises using its network of HRMS. The company can choose to enable the offering for background verification and other services for candidate onboarding. The company pays Repute.net a certain fee for document verification and other services per candidate. The digital lending play is offered to the employees on the HRMS directly, with the partnering apps paying a commission to Repute.net for each transaction.
According to a study by consulting and auditing firm EY published in June 2021, the pandemic has made the use of technology tools for employee background checks a priority. The India-focussed report says that 96 percent of the companies that participated in the study reported a 10 percent discrepancy in background checks carried out for new employees.
With this, the use of technology to verify candidates is only going to go up, as will the need for faster turnaround time to fill the vacancies.
