Observation
The observation that started PeopleCap
Most financial services hiring decisions in India are made by people who do not work the domain.
That sentence is the entire problem.
A generalist recruiter sources a Salesforce engineer for a wealth platform without understanding that "Salesforce" at a wealth platform is a different role than "Salesforce" at a SaaS company. Different products, different compliance constraints, different definitions of what good looks like. A generalist HR consultancy advises a fintech founder on compensation bands using survey data that lumps payments engineers with general backend developers, missing that the financial services premium has shifted by 22% in the last 18 months and the survey is stale. A founder hiring their first head of risk relies on a recruiter who has placed exactly two such people in their career and is learning the regulatory environment on this mandate.
None of these failures are visible at the time of the decision. They surface 14 months later when the hire is wrong, the comp band has misaligned three other employees, or the regulator asks a question the firm cannot answer.
The pattern, once you see it, is everywhere. PeopleCap was built because the pattern is large enough, expensive enough, and ignored enough by the existing structure of HR services in India to deserve a firm built specifically against it.
Problem 1
Why financial services hiring fails
The dominant failure mode in financial services hiring is not sourcing. There are plenty of candidates. The failure is screening.
A generalist recruiter looking at a CV for a credit risk role at an NBFC sees the right job title, the right years of experience, and the right institutions. They cannot tell, because they don't know the domain, that the candidate's experience is in retail unsecured lending while the role requires secured commercial lending, that the candidate's regulatory familiarity is RBI-light because their previous employer kept compliance separate from the credit function, that the candidate has never built a portfolio under stress and will struggle when the firm enters its next downturn cycle.
The CV looks correct. The interview goes well. Generalist interviewers cannot probe the domain depth either. The offer is made, the candidate joins, and twelve months later everyone is wondering why the credit performance metrics are not where they should be. The cost of that wrong hire is conservatively three times annual salary in direct costs, plus the opportunity cost of a year spent missing the right hire, plus the downstream cost of decisions the wrong hire made while in seat.
The mistake was upstream. The mistake was using a generalist firm to make a specialist decision.
This pattern applies across financial services. The vocabulary, the regulatory landscape, the firm-by-firm cultural specifics, the difference between what "strong" looks like at a wealth platform versus an NBFC versus a fintech. None of this can be picked up by a recruiter who works across forty different industries and rotates through financial services mandates occasionally. It requires a firm that works only in financial services, repeatedly, building pattern recognition that compounds.
That is the firm PeopleCap is.
Problem 2
Why the mid-market is underserved
There are two structural gaps in India's HR services market, and both leave the mid-market firm without good options.
The large consulting firms (Aon, Mercer, Deloitte HR Advisory) are built for enterprise clients. Their engagement minimums, delivery models, and pricing structures assume a client with a thousand-person HR function and an executive committee that approves multi-crore engagements. A 200-person NBFC trying to hire a head of technology is not the buyer these firms are built for. The mid-market firm gets either an inappropriately scoped engagement at the wrong price, or no engagement at all.
The generalist recruitment firms (and there are hundreds of them in India) are built to serve everyone, which means they serve no one well. A recruiter who placed an enterprise sales rep at a SaaS company in the morning cannot meaningfully evaluate a credit risk analyst at an NBFC in the afternoon. The mid-market firm gets a service that does not match the specificity of what it is buying.
In between these two structural positions sits the firm that should exist but mostly does not: a specialist boutique that works exclusively in financial services, at engagement sizes appropriate for the mid-market, with delivery models that fit how mid-market firms actually operate.
This is the gap. The 50 to 400 employee financial services firm (growing fast, hiring deliberately, under regulatory scrutiny, with people decisions that compound) is too small for the first group and too sophisticated for the second.
PeopleCap exists for this firm.
Problem 3
Why AI does not solve this
The recruitment function has been changed by AI more in the last 24 months than in the previous 24 years. Sourcing is being automated. Resume parsing is being automated. First-pass screening for keyword matches is being automated. We use these tools ourselves. They are real and they work.
But the bottom of the recruitment funnel is not the part that fails.
The part that fails is judgment. Whether this candidate, in this role, at this stage of this company, with this team, in this regulatory environment, has the specific combination of skills and disposition that the situation calls for. That judgment requires understanding the candidate, understanding the role, and understanding the context they are entering, none of which can be reduced to keyword matching or pattern recognition over CV data.
The same is true above the recruitment funnel. Designing a hiring process for a 200-person fintech that does not yet exist at a 400-person fintech. Advising a CEO who has just lost their head of engineering for the second time in a year. Helping an NBFC build a compensation philosophy that holds together as the firm doubles in headcount. These are judgment problems, not data problems.
The firms that will survive in talent advisory over the next decade are the firms that move up the value chain: from sourcing to judgment, from execution to advice, from vendor to partner. The firms that try to win on volume and price at the sourcing layer will be eaten by AI within five years. The firms that build judgment, accountability, and relationship will not.
PeopleCap is built for the second category. It is the entire point.
Position
What PeopleCap argues for
We are committed to four positions. These shape every mandate we run and every retainer we sign.
One: people are capital, not cost. The mental model that puts the HR function in the cost column on the P&L is the same mental model that produces the wrong hires, the misaligned compensation, the strategic missteps that surface as people decisions and only get diagnosed as such after they have already done damage. We work with firms that treat people as the capital base of the business. Firms that treat people as a cost line do not buy what we sell.
Two: domain depth is the wedge. Every mandate we run, every benchmark we publish, every retainer we deliver is for a financial services firm. We do not hire for SaaS companies. We do not advise consumer technology firms on HR strategy. We do not run compensation benchmarks for industries we do not work in. The narrowness of focus is the entire reason we are useful. A firm that works across thirty industries cannot build the pattern recognition we have built across one.
Three: the mid-market is the right market. We work with financial services firms between 50 and 400 employees because that is where the gap in the market is real and the buyer is underserved. Larger firms have other options. Smaller firms have different problems. The mid-market is where PeopleCap's combination of specialisation, scope, and delivery model fits the buyer's actual situation.
Four: long engagements over high-volume vendoring. We work with a defined set of clients, take on mandates we are confident we can close, and measure our success by outcomes rather than activity. We refuse mandates that fall outside our domain. We cap recruiters at six active mandates instead of thirty. We do not bill on submission and disappear at offer-stage. The relationship is the product. Everything else is logistics.
Practice
What this means in practice
These four positions are not abstract. They show up in how we are organised and how we work.
We have four service lines (Talent Acquisition, Fractional HR, Talent Intelligence, and Hiring Effectiveness), each built around a specific buyer need within financial services mid-market firms. We deliver them as a connected practice, not as separate transactions, because the firms we work with rarely have one-dimensional people problems.
We turn down mandates that fall outside financial services. We do this even when the work is interesting and the relationship is warm. The refusal is the discipline. The discipline is what makes the work work.
We are a small practice by design. We are not trying to be the biggest. We are trying to be the firm that a CHRO at an NBFC or a founder at a fintech recommends to a peer because the work was substantive and the judgment was sound.
If you are running a financial services or fintech firm in India and any of this resonates with how you are thinking about your people decisions, we should talk. The first conversation has no obligation. We will tell you honestly whether what we do is the right fit for what you need.