Mitigating the predicted talent crunch in Fintech Ecosystem

Congratulations to each and every contributor to the fintech sector for outstanding performance in the first quarter of 2022. The industry did exceedingly well globally with a stunning 182% boost in growth. But this outstanding success also brings its own set of challenges, and the biggest among them is the talent shortage that the industry is predicted to face. As per The Fintech Times (Fintech Times article), the global tech talent shortage could reach an unrealistic output of $449.70 billion by 2030. It also suggests that Baltic countries could be the answer to this shortage.

This suggestion could make sense to European & US-based companies but is it feasible for Indian fintech companies? How is the fintech sector of India planning to mitigate this crisis? As much as there isn’t a definite answer to this question, one thing is for sure Indian companies now need to look beyond traditional hiring processes and solutions at every level be it early talent acquisition, mid-level or senior level. With my experience of working with a few thousand youths across various segments and of being a hiring manager who has dealt with talent crunch quite a bit, I would particularly touch upon the crisis of unproductive, disengaged & demotivated early talent issues that most companies are dealing with globally and across sectors, with fintech being no exception.

Everyone knows despite being considered inexperienced early talent is critical to a company’s success. Hence, if the companies are able to hire the right fits in terms of early talent, then along with visionary leadership they can create wonders. Given talent acquisition and retention is as critical as client acquisition it’s high time that senior leaders dive deep and introspect on a few questions. A few crucial ones would be, how are your HR teams or hiring managers doing in terms of finding the right fit? Is the same age-old method of a few tests and a few rounds of interviews enough? Based on interviews with over 100 hiring managers in small, medium, and large companies, we heard that finding early talent isn’t hard but finding motivated talent with the right attitude is. Are you facing the same problem?

If so, how are you adapting your hiring process for this? Are tests and interviews getting you there?

The majority of the companies are able to figure out upto 80% of the technical capabilities of early talent, but are performing very poorly when it comes to figuring out the soft skills of the candidate that is the backbone of employee success. A few rounds of interviews are definitely not sufficient to understand the real-world problem-solving abilities, collaboration abilities and growth mindset of a candidate. Many managers we spoke with have said that these interviews are rather a waste of time for mid & senior-level managers.

We need to equip these managers with better tools to assess. But when it comes to soft skills, interviews rarely help us learn about more than superficial communication skills. The situation is even worse when it comes to figuring out the motivation level of the early talent, how do we figure out who is really motivated when every candidate is saying “you’re my first choice” to every company they talk to? I hear almost every day from CXOs of various startups & senior managers of big corporations that they are never sure if the candidates will actually show up to work on the day of joining. Mid-level managers keep complaining to me about the attrition and the pressure they face to retain early talent.

There are tons of articles regularly published on how to engage early talent better through emotional intelligence, better work environment, better communication etc…the list can go on. But I hardly see a new suggestion on how to find the right talent or rather the right-fit. HRkatha, one of the leading HR magazines in India has definitely covered this topic a few times but overall the insights available on this are very few. Weren’t internships designed to do exactly this around a century ago? But instead of helping now these internships have become a burden for the managers. The managers mostly are running free tuition classes to ensure interns understand how to work and companies are doing charity in the name of stipends. The cost of figuring out the right fit is quite exorbitant if we add up the manager’s time spent per intern along with the stipends paid off to unproductive interns.

On average, managers are spending 5-7 hours per intern per week.

Is giving tuition classes what you want your manager to spend 7/ 14/ 21 hours this week?

How about we re-imagine internships and make them a tool to observe talent while they work on real-world projects? Assess talents for the right fit based on their performance on these real-world projects. And what if this process could be outsourced so that the company’s focus remains on its core deliverables?

With 35+ years of combined corporate & youth development experience in the team, at RaiseToPi we have re-imagined and re-invented this process. We help companies discover high potential hidden talent by outsourcing their non-critical projects to us. This opens up a huge pool of hidden talent from all over the country for companies and increases their probability of finding the right fit by tenfold. As per research conducted by Harvard Business School & Accenture companies that hire non-traditional hidden talent are 44% less likely to face talent shortage (HBS article). RaiseToPi also provides customized insights and recommendations for the right early talent that saves the HR teams the trouble of visiting multiple colleges for talent scouting and helps in creating cost-efficient talent scouting systems.

For more information visit us at www.raisetopi.com or email us at

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