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Company Background
Axis Finance Limited (AFL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Axis Bank, is one of India’s fastest-growing non-banking financial companies (NBFCs). Established in 2013 and headquartered in Mumbai, AFL provides tailored financial solutions across wholesale, retail, and MSME verticals. With revenues exceeding ₹3013.94 Cr. As of December 2024 and a workforce of more than 1,500 employees, the company has built a customer-centric franchise known for its strength in growth, asset quality, and service delivery. As the financial services sector in India experienced rapid digital transformation, Axis Finance realized that the competitiveness of its recruitment strategy would directly determine its ability to attract, engage, and retain top talent in highly specialized roles such as analytics, risk management, and digital finance.
Navigating the Shift in Recruitment Strategies
The recruitment landscape at Axis Finance before transformation was dominated by manual and time-intensive processes. Recruiters spent countless hours sorting through resumes, scheduling interviews, and maintaining records on spreadsheets. High application volumes often overwhelmed the team, reducing the ability to review candidates thoroughly and causing delays that negatively impacted hiring outcomes. Reliance on emails and Excel-based trackers made data fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to analyze. This not only slowed decision-making but also prevented talent acquisition from providing timely insights to the business.
Candidate experience was uneven across roles and business units, with some candidates receiving prompt feedback while others waited days or weeks. Hiring managers took nearly five days to submit evaluations, leaving candidates disengaged and increasing the risk of dropouts. Offer rollouts required almost four days, often dampening candidate enthusiasm. In a highly regulated financial sector, manual compliance checks and documentation created additional friction. These challenges collectively limited Axis Finance’s ability to compete effectively for top-tier talent in a market where speed, transparency, and candidate respect were becoming critical differentiators.
Integrating Systems Thinking and Technology
Axis Finance approached its transformation with systems thinking, seeking not to solve isolated problems but to redesign the entire candidate journey. The organization’s strategy focused on ensuring efficiency, effectiveness, and experience at every stage of the hiring lifecycle. By adopting a digital-first philosophy, Axis Finance committed to eliminating manual interventions, accelerating processes, and creating an ecosystem where technology and human touch coexisted seamlessly.
This meant ensuring proactive communication so that candidates felt valued and informed throughout, re-engineering processes to balance automation with empathy, and positioning every candidate interaction as a reflection of Axis Finance’s employer brand. To achieve this vision, Axis Finance partnered with RippleHire and implemented its High-Performance ATS. The solution provided a foundation to digitize recruitment end-to-end, integrate with existing HR systems, and deliver analytics that enabled the business to continuously refine its approach.
Axis Finance’s Innovative Four-Stage Candidate Experience Process
Stage 1: Requisition and Demand Planning
What once took multiple days to initiate could now be accomplished within minutes. Job requisition workflows were digitized, approvals streamlined, and the reliance on individual recruiters reduced. This created transparency across the organization and gave hiring teams a clear line of sight into open positions.
Stage 2: Sourcing and Screening
Sourcing, which previously required posting jobs on multiple platforms and manually consolidating applications, was redefined. RippleHire integrated Axis Finance’s career site, referrals, agencies, and job portals into a single pipeline. Automated shortlisting and advanced filters enabled recruiters to manage volumes with precision. AI-enabled tools further accelerated CV matching, reducing screening efforts significantly.
Stage 3: Assessment and Interviewing
Interview coordination was transformed through digital scheduling, reminders, and structured feedback mechanisms. Hiring managers could now provide evaluations immediately after interviews, reducing turnaround from nearly five days to just ten minutes. Timely feedback improved candidate engagement and strengthened trust in Axis Finance’s hiring process. Structured assessments ensured consistency, while digital updates kept candidates informed at each step, turning the process into a transparent and positive experience.
Stage 4: Offer and Onboarding
The final stage, once riddled with delays, became a seamless experience. RippleHire’s Dream Offer module enabled Axis Finance to issue offers within a day — often in just thirty minutes — compared to the previous four-day cycle. Personalized messages and branded templates made the offer memorable for candidates. Document collection and verification, previously requiring four days, were reduced to one hour. Candidates entered onboarding with clarity and confidence, while compliance checks were automated to meet regulatory standards effortlessly.
Axis Finance’s dedication to transforming candidate experience
4.86/5
Candidate feedback rating
30 Minutes
Time to roll out offers
10 Minutes
Time for hiring manager feedback
7 Minutes
Time to schedule interviews
1 Hour
Time for post-offer document collection
Real Time
Candidate & vendor status updates
RippleHire AI ATS Drives Remarkable Efficiency and Candidate Satisfaction
The transformation achieved by Axis Finance has been profound. Candidate experience ratings, once unmeasured, now consistently average 4.86 out of 5. Interview scheduling, which previously required a full day, is completed in seven minutes. Feedback from hiring managers is captured within ten minutes rather than five days. Offer rollouts take less than half an hour compared to four days in the old system. Documentation collection that once delayed onboarding by nearly a week is now completed within an hour. Real-time status updates for vendors and candidates alike have eliminated the four-day lag that was common before.
These outcomes elevated the talent acquisition function from being a back-office process to becoming a strategic partner in business growth. Faster hiring cycles improved the quality of hires, while enhanced candidate experience boosted employer branding and offer acceptance rates. In a sector where reputation and speed define competitiveness, Axis Finance turned recruitment into a true differentiator.
Road Ahead
Axis Finance recognizes that its transformation is not an endpoint but a foundation for continuous improvement. Looking ahead, the company plans to leverage AI to personalize candidate journeys, using predictive analytics to identify candidates most likely to succeed in key roles. Internal mobility will be strengthened through a talent marketplace approach, enabling employees to navigate career progression seamlessly. Integration with learning, performance, and workforce planning systems will create a holistic ecosystem where recruitment is deeply aligned with business strategy.
Axis Finance also intends to invest in building hiring manager capabilities, ensuring interviews are structured, fair, and aligned with organizational values. With dedicated programs for continuous process optimization and talent community engagement, Axis Finance is poised to evolve its recruitment into a future-ready model that balances technology with human connection.
Conclusion
Axis Finance’s journey from a manual, fragmented recruitment model to a streamlined, candidate-first experience reflects the power of vision, systems thinking, and advanced technology. By reducing process times from days to minutes and achieving a candidate satisfaction rating of 4.86 out of 5, the company has not only solved its operational challenges but also created a benchmark for excellence in financial services recruitment. This Brandon Hall award-winning transformation demonstrates that when candidates are placed at the center, recruitment becomes more than a process — it becomes a competitive advantage.
