India’s leading fintech startup, Khatabook, will continue to strengthen its talent base in 2022 by accelerating hiring across engineering, design, product, and data teams. The startup has experienced 3x growth in headcount in 2021 and currently stands at an employee strength of 320. Founded in January 2019, Khatabook is used by 10Mn+ monthly active users today from almost every district in India and offers a range of software solutions to MSMEs in India for their business needs. The startup’s organization has scaled to support this unprecedented growth by hiring efficiently and establishing people practices that are focused on holistic employee experience and well-being. Khatabook’s employee retention rates are amongst the 90th percentile of startups.
With India’s technology talent landscape witnessing a significant transformation in a post-pandemic world, Khatabook is setting new standards by offering a superior employee value proposition. The company introduced a string of employee best practices in 2021 to build an organization of the future. It aims to be the hotbed of ‘innovating for Bharat’ philosophy while nurturing a conducive, progressive, and employee-friendly culture to facilitate the best-in-class learning and development experience for talent.
Ravish Naresh, CEO, and Co-founder, Khatabook, said, “Khatabook was born from the idea of uplifting India’s MSME ecosystem. While product innovation is at the core of what we do every day, we believe transformation should begin from ‘within.’ Khatabook is a customer-first organization where employees build the base for that philosophy. Employees’ well-being will always be our top priority. While hiring right is important, we are on a mission to set new standards in employee experience in India’s startup ecosystem.”
Khatabook has introduced a host of best-in-class employee initiatives to be a champion of employee wellness where people thrive and build a truly meaningful career:
Unlimited Leaves: The company has introduced an unlimited leaves policy since its inception in January 2019. There is no cap on the number of leaves an employee can avail. Khatabook has set a few guidelines to manage employee leaves without causing work stress for their co-workers. Fundamentally, the startup believes that employees are empathic and intelligent to efficiently manage their absence from work and should be given total freedom to decide the time off they need.
ESOP Buyback: Khatabook rolled out its first ESOP buyback worth $10 million to acknowledge and reward employees, ex-employees, and early investors who contributed to its growth.
Primary and Secondary Caregiver Policy: Regardless of gender or sexuality, this policy applies to all new Primary and secondary Caregivers who are full-time employees. While primary caregivers are entitled to fully paid-time-off of up to 26 weeks for childbirth, adoption, or surrogacy, Khatabook also supports secondary caregivers by extending leaves of up to 4 weeks, regardless of their gender.
Employee well-being Time-offs and other practices: Khatabook believes in offering mental health breaks at regular intervals. The startup has teamed up with Kaha-mind for mental health, permitting staff to schedule personal therapy sessions as and when needed. The additional benefits like no meetings Wednesdays, referral bonuses, internet, and home office expense claims, virtual team feasts covering, vaccine drives for employees, and virtual team cultural events contribute towards building a culture.
Khatabook Grants Program: We have introduced Khatabook Grant programs for employees and ex-employees of Khatabook looking to start their own entrepreneurial journey in Fintech and MSME tech SaaS-based solutions. The Startups will selectively receive equity investment in the range of 50K to 100K USD through this program.
Engineering is going to be the main hiring focus for Khatabook in 2022. Since Series C funding in August 2021, Khatabook has been ramping up its products and service offerings, including building financial services.
Gaurav Lahoti, VP Engineering, Khatabook, said, “We have been very mindful of our tech talent requirements. We are hiring for building and scaling a quality tech platform for India’s MSME. So far, the tech teams have done exceptionally well in successfully deploying Offline support, Compute analytics on large data on the user device, Clean Architecture, advanced AI-enabled risk models, and more. We are hiring skill sets to seamlessly re-architect services to support more users and build multi-tenant platforms that work with all our products as we grow. Besides tech mindset, team collaboration capabilities along with capability to introspect and problem-solving are essential.”
