In Conversation With Nimit Bheda: Why India’s New Hiring Reality Demands Smarter Background Verification

As India’s hiring landscape evolves, with remote and hybrid work becoming mainstream, global capability centres (GCCs) expanding rapidly, and concerns such as moonlighting and credential fraud entering boardroom discussions, employers have started to re-examine how they check candidates’ credentials at the point of hiring.

In an exclusive interview to Outlook Business, Nimit Bheda, Founder and CEO of Credentia—a deep-tech SaaS innovator that makes background verification smooth and fast—reflected on how the new hiring landscape is exposing the limits of traditional background verification practices.

He also explains why fragmented verification workflows increases business risk, and why technology-led coordination is emerging as a necessity rather than a luxury. Excerpts from the interview:

Q1. Given the fact that many employers prefer the conventional method of hiring—sans background verification, do employers realise the need for a platform like yours?

We have come across some large employers who still do not adopt background verification to verify employee credentials and thereby risk hiring candidates who are misfits for the company, the role, or the culture of the organization. The cost and time of rehiring, the wasted cost of training, cultural damage, loss of productivity, and even compromise on the business secrecy are outcomes that entities face when they do not deploy background verification as a risk management tool.

Having said that, there is set of large employers who do adopt background verification but are still facing challenges in the entire background verification management process that stems from lack of automation & integration; lack of standardization amongst multiple background verification (BV) agencies that they work with, absence of real time reports on candidates case status, to name a few. This results in high turnaround time, high operational costs, and chaos. Our product CredCorp tackles these problems and hence these entities realize the imminent need for deploying our product and fixing these gaps.

Q2. As a tech platform, how do you smoothen the process of background verification for employers and agencies?

Our platform CredCorp streamlines, automates, and integrates the entire background verification workflow between employers, candidates and BV agencies, thereby ensuring that candidate BV time is reduced by half, BV costs are reduced by a third, besides improving security, surety, and strengthening audit trails. This ensures that candidates are onboarded faster, trained faster, and become productive faster. Hence, using CredCorp leads to faster business impact.

Q3. Have you tested the platform for efficacy in real world conditions?

We have undertaken pilot project with a large IT player to test the platform in real conditions. The pilot was initiated to address multiple key challenges the client faces; one of them is managing, comparing, and monitoring performance across more than 15 background verification partners.

This involved extensive manual effort to analyze turnaround times, compute billing summaries, apply penalties for delays, assess vendor rankings by type of check, and review the quality of verification reports. CredCorp enables all of this to be tracked and analyzed in real time through a single platform, making these insights available instantly.

The pilot also focused on improving candidate experience by introducing OCR-based data and document capture, which reduces manual data entry, improves accuracy, and saves time for both candidates and HR teams. In addition, CredCorp automated the quality assessment of background verification reports; another process that was previously manual and time-intensive.

The pilot was awarded after the client recognized the platform’s potential value. Given the complexity of replacing existing tools in enterprise environments, the pilot served as a controlled validation step before organization-wide rollout, allowing us to demonstrate measurable impact, usability, and operational efficiency in a live setting.

Due to the proven efficacy of the platform, we have received interest from a number of large employers from different sectors as well as some large recruitment & staffing agencies for initial testing and deployment. We are in advanced stages of discussion with them for the same.

Q4. What’s the total market size of background verification industry in India?

Different research reports peg the industry market size at USD1 billion plus by 2030. The number is impressive and the industry holds a lot of promise. The importance of background verification is felt much more than before due to factors like rise of remote work & gig economy; increase in share of fabricated resumes; talent crunch; the Indian growth story that drives higher employment; advent of GCC's and foreign entities in India; high attrition levels; and mandates from clients requiring verified candidates.

It is pertinent to note here that we are not a background verification agency ourselves. We are that part of the BV ecosystem that addresses the core problem of the industry—fragmented workflows. Our platform CredCorp streamlines the BV workflow to enable faster turnaround.

Q5. What is your target share in this industry?

Like I mentioned in my answer to the previous question, we are not a background verification agency but somebody who streamlines how the background verification is carried out. And, we are the first and the only player doing it. CredCorp is the only platform for managing background verification workflow and we are focusing on all large employers with 3000+ employees, both listed and unlisted, across industries.

Q6. Are you present in the international market also or do you plan to launch your platform internationally?

At present, we are focused on the Indian market. We intend to look at specific geographies like the MENA region after addressing the Indian market.

Q7. Considering that some of the data shared on the platform may be confidential in nature, how do you ensure data remains protected at all times?

Our platforms are duly certified for data security in accordance with applicable guidelines like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was enacted by the European Union, and Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act), enacted by India.

As a technology platform that acts as a data processor, CredCorp is designed to be compliant with GDPR principles such as data minimization, purpose limitation, lawful processing, access control, auditability, and secure handling of personal information during transit and while at rest.

In the Indian context, the DPDP Act emphasizes consent-based processing, data security safeguards, breach reporting, and accountability of data processors. CredCorp aligns with these requirements by implementing strong access controls, encryption, audit trails, and deployment models where sensitive data can also remain entirely within the client’s own cloud infrastructure.

Together, compliance with GDPR and the DPDP Act ensures that confidential data on the platform remains protected, governed, and compliant with both global and Indian data protection standards.

I want to re-emphasise the fact that CredCorp is available as an enterprise model, which ensures that all confidential data resides on the client's cloud infrastructure.