| GUEST PROFILE Deepika Pundir, HR Manager at Bizdesire with 4+ years in HR at small and mid-size startups. Connect: LinkedIn |
This episode was hosted by Amrit Acharya, Co-Founder and COO of Xobin.
Table of Contents
TL;DR – Key Takeaways!
- India has the fastest-growing gig economy globally at 21% CAGR, with gig workers projected to reach 23.5 million by 2029-30 (NITI Aayog, cited by DemandSage). Startups that know how to tap this pool have a genuine talent advantage.
- Startup HR is a mental endurance challenge first. The candidates who ghost, the offers that get declined and the offers that get accepted and then not joined are not failures. They are the baseline.
- Online presence is the lowest-cost, highest-leverage tool a startup HR has. Candidates do not check your services page first. They check your Google reviews and your social media to understand your culture.
- Startups often overlook LinkedIn for finding freelancers. Most recruiters think of it as a full-time hire platform. Deepika closes the majority of her freelancer, contractor and full-time hires from it.
- Culture at a startup is built through proximity and recognition, not programs. Knowing each employee’s family situation, celebrating birthdays and marking work anniversaries creates belonging that large companies cannot replicate.
Most of the HR practitioners on this podcast have 15-25 years of experience and have worked at Fortune 500 companies. This episode is different.
Deepika Pundir is in her fourth year as an HR professional. Although she started with a BSc in Food Technology, she later entered HR through a traineeship. Since then, she has been building people’s functions from the ground up. At the startup, she manages hiring, workplace culture, compensation, and freelancer operations despite limited brand recognition and a restricted recruitment budget.
In this episode #10 of Xobin Talks, host Amrit Acharya sits down with Deepika for a ground-level view of startup HR. What does it actually look like? What breaks first, and what would she tell a fresher walking into their first HR role at a small company?
How Do You Break Into HR Without a Formal HR Degree?
An Accidental Start
Deepika’s path into HR was not planned. She was in her final semester of a BSc in Food Technology when family financial circumstances forced her to start earning immediately. Further study was off the table, so she looked for any available opening.
A startup was hiring freshers and trainees. She applied, got shortlisted, and spent the next few months learning everything on the job without any formal guidance or prior experience.
What Made Her Stay
The quality that made HR a natural fit for Deepika was not technical. It was interpersonal. She had always been extroverted, enjoyed public speaking and participated heavily in extracurricular activities through school and college, so roles with people involvement were a natural pull.
That instinct to read people and adapt communication for different audiences is, she argues, more foundational to HR success than any formal qualification. Four years in, she does not regret the switch.
The practical lesson for anyone considering a similar transition: non-HR degrees do not disqualify you. Industries, startups in particular, hire for instinct and learnability. If you can demonstrate that you understand people and learn quickly, the degree is a secondary filter.
What Are the Real Challenges of Hiring at a Small Startup?
Mental Preparation Is the First Skill
The most important thing a startup HR professional must build before anything else, Deepika argues, is mental resilience – not recruiting skills, not negotiation technique. Resilience first.
At a startup with no brand and a tight budget, a significant portion of every recruitment effort simply will not convert. Candidates ignore your LinkedIn messages, come for an interview and do not show up, or accept an offer and simply do not join.
This is not a reflection of process failure. This is the reality of recruiting for an unknown company while competing against well-branded players who offer more money and better perks. Recognizing it as the baseline, not as a broken process, is what separates HR professionals who improve from those who burn out.
What the Funnel Actually Looks Like
For every hundred candidates Deepika reaches out to, a majority will not respond. Of those who do engage, a meaningful proportion will drop out at various stages. The conversion rate from outreach to joining is low, and at a startup with no brand recognition, that is simply the baseline.
The investment required is at the top of the funnel: continuous sourcing, consistent follow-up and a clear value proposition that goes beyond salary.
The Sourcing Reality
Deepika does not use Naukri. She has never used Naukri, even after being rejected once for not having that experience listed on her profile. Her primary sourcing platform for all hiring, including full-time employees, contractors and freelancers, is LinkedIn.
She has built a network of over 45,000 connections on LinkedIn, and the majority of her hires in every category come from it. Her advice: build the network before you need it. Stay active. Make your profile reflect the company you are building, not just a job posting board.
How Does Online Presence Help a Startup Attract Candidates?
Candidates Check You Before You Check Them
When a candidate sees a job post from an unfamiliar company, they do not click Apply. They visit the website, check LinkedIn, and read Google reviews, especially the negative ones first.
Candidates want to see inside the company before committing their time. They look for what the team is like, whether the office is real, what current employees say about management and what ex-employees say.
Most small companies put all their social media effort into attracting clients and barely think about candidates. That is a significant missed opportunity.
What to Post Instead
Deepika’s recommendation is practical: a startup’s social media should give candidates something worth seeing. That means team photos, office culture clips, birthday posts and behind-the-scenes content – anything that shows what it is actually like to work there.
This kind of content does not require a budget, just intentionality. The company posting job vacancies and stock images is invisible to a candidate doing research. The company posting a team lunch photo or a short founder video gives candidates something concrete to judge. That is what converts curiosity into an application.
India’s gig economy is growing at 21% CAGR and the startup sector is one of the primary drivers of this demand (DemandSage, 2025). In that market, candidates have options. The startup that builds a visible, authentic online presence wins the attention of candidates who would otherwise scroll past.
How Do You Hire Freelancers and Manage Gig Workers Effectively?
Why Startups Should Hire Gig Workers
The gig economy is not a contingency plan. For startups with variable project pipelines and constrained budgets, it is a strategic tool.
Deepika outlines the practical advantages directly. Freelancers and contractors do not require the same benefits and perks as full-time employees. They do not need permanent seating or equipment. They bring specialized skills that a small team cannot maintain in-house on a full-time basis. For a three-month project that requires a specific capability, a contractor is more efficient than a full-time hire.
India’s freelance workforce is set to grow from 7.7 million to 23.5 million by 2029-30 – nearly 4% of the total workforce (NITI Aayog, cited by Mondaq). According to an Aon survey cited by IBEF, 65% of Indian companies plan to increase gig worker use over the next two to five years. Startups that understand how to work with this pool have access to talent that larger companies are also beginning to court.
The Real Challenges of Gig Hiring
The limitations are real too. Freelancers often work with multiple clients at once and may scope their next project before finishing yours. Communication is harder across flexible schedules, quality varies and finding someone who consistently delivers takes time.
Deepika does not recommend treating gig hiring as a quick fix. Finding someone who understands your context, wants a longer-term relationship and can work within your budget takes time. The people who stick are the ones who are genuinely interested in your profile, not just in the immediate project fee.
How to Screen and Source Freelancers
Her screening principle is transparency, so she shares the budget, scope and future collaboration possibilities upfront. Anyone who would disengage on discovering those constraints gets filtered out before things even begin.
On sourcing: LinkedIn, again. She finds the majority of her contractors and freelancers on LinkedIn, not on dedicated freelance platforms. The advantage is that LinkedIn profiles show professional context, work history and mutual connections that freelance platforms do not.
She can assess credibility before the first message.
How Do You Handle the Experience-versus-Budget Tension in Startup Hiring?
The Real Constraint Is Compensation, Not Age or Experience
When startups skip experienced candidates, it is not usually because of bias. It is because professionals with ten to fifteen years of experience command salaries that a startup’s budget cannot accommodate.
Deepika is clear about this distinction. When salary expectations fit the budget, she hires regardless of age or years of experience – she has brought in people with eight to nine years of experience when their expectations were in range. When the gap between what an experienced candidate needs and what the company can offer is unbridgeable, the hire simply does not happen.
The framing matters here. This is not ageism but a financial constraint with a clear mechanism: experienced professionals have earned their salary expectations, and startups have limited budgets. When those two realities align, the hire happens.
The Total Compensation Conversation
The tool Deepika uses to close that gap is total compensation framing. She does not lead with “this is our salary limit.” She leads with what the company offers alongside the salary.
Flexible hours, remote options and no-questions leave policies are not trivial to a candidate weighing offers. Neither is being in a workplace where people know you personally rather than disappearing into a crowd. For many candidates, these things end up being the deciding factor.
She uses flexibility and culture as an explicit selling point, and it has worked. Experienced professionals have joined at below-market salaries because the total package beat what larger companies were offering in practice.
How Do You Build a Work Culture at a Startup?
Culture Starts at Hiring
The first culture intervention is not a policy – it is a hiring decision. The people who join early set the tone for everyone who comes after. Even two people on a five-person team with a misaligned work ethic can create friction that scales badly.
Deepika’s approach is to hire people who will positively influence the environment around them, not just perform their function. This is assessed informally but consistently during the hiring process.
Open Communication and Transparency as Non-Negotiables
Two principles underpin the culture at Bizdesire, and the first is open communication. Employees must feel comfortable sharing ideas, concerns and problems without fear. When that psychological safety is absent, problems accumulate invisibly until they are too large to address.
The second is transparency on compensation and expectations. Deepika communicates the full compensation package clearly, including what is on offer and what the constraints are. Candidates who join knowing exactly what they are getting are far more likely to stay than those who discover gaps later.
Celebration as a Culture Tool
The detail that stands out most in Deepika’s description of culture-building is the simplest one. She knows each employee personally – their family situation, where they grew up, whether they are married and what their personal challenges look like.
Kensium closes its entire business for a foundation day of volunteering. Bizdesire does not have that scale, but it celebrates every birthday, every work anniversary and every personal milestone. In a feedback survey, what employees loved most was not the flexible hours or remote option. It was a personal connection. The fact that someone knew them and marked occasions that larger companies would never notice.
That intimacy is a structural advantage of being small and it cannot be manufactured at scale. Startups that recognize and leverage it, rather than apologizing for not matching large-company benefits, tend to retain people who genuinely value that kind of environment.
🎧 Watch the Full Episode
Xobin Talks – Episode 10 | Deepika Pundir, HR Manager, Bizdesire | Hosted by Amrit Acharya, Co-Founder and COO, Xobin.
▶ Play Episode #10 of Xobin Talks
About Deepika Pundir
Deepika Pundir is HR Manager at Bizdesire, a growing startup based in India. She has four-plus years of experience across recruitment, culture building, compensation management and freelancer sourcing at small and mid-size companies.
She started her career without a formal HR degree, joining a startup as a fresher with a BSc in Food Technology. She built her knowledge entirely through on-ground practice, developing a LinkedIn network of over 45,000 connections that serves as her primary sourcing channel across all hiring categories.
Her work covers full-time recruitment, freelancer and gig worker management, employer branding on a zero budget, and building the kind of intimate team culture that startups can offer but large companies cannot.
Connect with Deepika: LinkedIn Company: Bizdesire
Want more such insights from the podcast? Explore all Xobin Talks episodes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need a formal HR degree to build a career in HR?
Not necessarily. Deepika built her entire HR career from a BSc in Food Technology, and startups hire primarily for instinct, communication and learnability rather than credentials. A non-HR background does not disqualify you as long as you can demonstrate people’s understanding and the drive to learn.
What is the single most important skill for startup HR?
Mental resilience above all. At a startup with limited brand and budget, some candidates will ghost, others will decline and some simply will not show up on joining day. That is the baseline. HR professionals who prepare for it mentally perform better than those who treat every drop as evidence something is broken.
How should startups use social media for employer branding?
Post for your candidate audience, not just your clients, because candidates actively research your culture before applying. Team photos, office moments, birthday posts and founder content show candidates what it is like to work there. Job vacancy posts and stock images simply cannot do that.
Can LinkedIn be used to hire freelancers and contractors?
Yes. Deepika sources the majority of her full-time, contractor and freelancer hires from LinkedIn. The advantage over freelance platforms is that LinkedIn provides professional context, work history and mutual connections. She does not use Naukri at all.
How do you screen freelancers before committing to work with them?
Lead with transparency: share the budget, scope and future possibilities upfront so that people who would disengage on discovering the constraints drop out early. The right freelancer is genuinely interested in your context and company, not just the immediate gig fee.
How do you compete with larger companies on compensation as a startup?
Lead with total compensation, not just salary. Flexible hours, remote work options, a no-questions leave culture and personal recognition are factors that candidates weigh. For some, these matter more than a higher base at a company where they will be invisible. Be explicit about what you offer.
How do you build a work culture at a company with no budget for programs?
Start at hiring by bringing in people who will positively influence the environment, and build open communication as a daily norm. Celebrate every personal and professional milestone and know your employees personally. The intimacy of a small team is a structural advantage – use it deliberately rather than treating it as a limitation.
Is it ageism when startups skip experienced candidates?
Usually not. The primary filter is budget rather than bias. Professionals with ten to fifteen years of experience command salaries that startups often cannot match. But when expectations align with what the company can afford, experienced candidates do get hired. The constraint is financial, not demographic.
