The challenge
Findigs ran its entire underwriting operation from one team in one country, the Philippines. After a Series C, that concentration became a risk: a whole function in a single location, supporting a business that was now scaling faster. India was the fix. The ask was specific — 60 underwriters in four months.
The harder part was the bar. Findigs already had a strong India head in place, so we weren’t setting a standard, we were hiring to one that already existed in the building. Sixty hires in four months is a volume problem on its own. Sixty that all clear a bar someone else already holds, in a role where a weak underwriter is an expensive mistake, is a harder one. Throughput had to go up without the bar moving.
What we did
We calibrated to the India head’s bar before sourcing anyone. The first job was to understand exactly what separated an underwriter the head would keep from one who only looked right on paper. We turned that into one fixed screen, and it didn’t change for four months.
We ran pipelines in parallel, not in sequence. Sixty in four months does not come out of one funnel worked end to end. We ran multiple sourcing threads at once, all feeding the same screen, so throughput scaled with the number of threads while the bar stayed exactly where the head had set it. Volume came from parallelism, not from loosening the filter.
We pushed on both inbound and outbound to widen the top of the funnel. Two intake channels into one screen kept the top of the funnel wide enough to sustain the pace without reaching for candidates who didn’t clear it.
At fifteen hires, we turned on referrals. By then we had enough of the right people on the ground to reach into their networks, and strong underwriters tend to know other strong underwriters. Past fifteen, a real share of the pipeline came from people the team already trusted.
The result
Findigs added 60 underwriters in India in four months, moving off a single-country base without slowing the business to do it.
The Philippines team kept running. The India team came online at the bar the company’s own head had set, at the pace the Series C was there to fund. The last hire cleared the same screen as the first.
