India ranks 116 of 130 countries on Unesco’s Gender Parity Index. Other data suggests that under a fifth of women are present in mid-level management and of these at least half will drop out. Vexed human resources chiefs have wondered how to deal with this sharp gender skew for years. Sairee Chahal, founder of Sheroes, an almost two-year-old online career platform for women (one million and counting), may have some solutions.The platform provides women — from Chhapra to Chennai — a dedicated career management resource to navigate their work life, from locating jobs (in various forms, ranging from micro entrepreneurship to remote working opportunities), building a peer support network and offering expert mentorship to members. About 20,000 companies of various sizes and shapes have signed on to be part of Sheroes to, for example, deploy remote work offerings and to deploy a big team of trained women in quick time.A raft of ambitious ventures such as Sheroes are trying to breathe fresh life into the world of HR , once considered a dusty support function ridden with slow-to-move paperwork and saddled with outdated technology. While early ventures struggled to get the attention of customers and investors — primarily because it was considered difficult to monetise a business focused on squeezing revenues out of a support function — the tide is turning, as startups look to uproot old ways of doing business and shake up entrenched incumbents.“Multiple choice questions were possibly the last big innovation in HR,” says Karan Kapoor, cofounder of Mettl, a talent assessment company. “There is a need for breakthrough innovations, but HR is a tough segment to build a business, since there have been few success stories and investors are wary of backing the unknown.”Some of these elements may be changing. “HR startups have historically struggled to gain investor attention and backing,” admits Utkarsh Joshi, founder, HR Fund, a dedicated investor in this space. While HR Fund has made five such early-stage investments (including Chahal’s Sheroes), it hopes to close a couple more soon.What's more, investors such as Lumis, IDG Ventures and Mayfield and HR giants such as Temp Holdings Co. Ltd., Randstad and Aon Hewitt have shown a growing appetite to back or buy fledglings in this market. Temp Holdings Co. Ltd that announced a JV with Kelly Services to include all of Asia Pacific set up the Temp Innovation Fund to invest in HR startups earlier this year. This fund will focus its investments on companies providing solutions on the areas of employee productivity , recruitment, HR information systems, learning management, assessments, onboarding, employee analytics and engagement, and payroll, ET reported in August this year.To try to reinvent this market, startups will need to show that they can add value to processes and payments set in stone. Elsewhere, ventures are looking to tap hidden opportunities. For example, talent assessment venture Mettl’s founders claim that 70% of their business is from companies that have never enlisted such a firm before. Similarly, Talview, a video interviewing venture in Bengaluru, sees a significant chunk of its business from first-timers. On the contrary, young job seekers at Aasaanjobs, a recruitment solutions venture, are looking for help after trying conventional job sites, and being deluged by irrelevant data.In August this year, Aon Hewitt acquired an assessment firm called Co-Cubes to signal its intent in the market, and company officials say there may be more to come. “We are not buying companies for local market needs alone,” says Nitin Sethi, partner and chief commercial officer, Aon Hewitt Consulting.“We want to deploy solutions anywhere else in the world.”Other investors are also placing bets. For example, Aspada Advisors, IDG Ventures and Inventus Capital have backed Aasaanjobs; New Enterprise Associates and Blume Ventures have backed GreyTip (now renamed GreytHR); Mayfield has backed Talview; and Better Place has been backed by Unitus Seed Fund.But most of these investments don’t exceed $5 million. Given the plans touted by these ventures, larger funds, in the form of private equity, may have to be raised. “There’s a lot of interest from investors in adding to our kitty,” says Joshi of HR Fund. “There has been a perceptible shift towards startups trying to solve old HR headaches.”For a sector starved of standout examples of success, a couple of key developments have helped highlight the potential for innovation and entrepreneurship. First, in July 2016, Quess Corp, an HR solutions provider, went public. It listed at Rs 500, compared with its issue price of Rs 317, and is currently trading around Rs 600.Second, the prolonged chase and successful acquisition of CoCubes by Aon Hewitt (in that time it went from 300,000 job seekers and fresh hires annually to two million), proved that large corporations wanted a piece of this action. “HR is one of the last fields to adopt new technology and innovation,” says Harpreet S Grover, cofounder, CoCubes. “People are tired of the same old ways of doing business and aggressively adapting to new products.”Despite this newfound enthusiasm, the pace of growth in this sector hasn’t quite been lightning quick. Consider Mettl. Founded in mid-2010, it took years for the company to gain traction and eventually investor attention. When the firm was founded, areas such as measurement of skills and leadership traits were just evolving.However, as companies have focused more sharply on training and retaining their best talent, assessments have gone mainstream — Mettl conducts some seven million of them annually. “This market is definitely not about rocketship-like business-to-consumer startups,” says cofounder Kapoor. “Even so, we are growing two and a half times year-on-year and we are profitable.” Today, the assessments market in India is pegged at around Rs 3,000 crore and Mettl wants to make a mark. “We want to win the India market.”This bullishness may have also come about because of changes in the way HR is being managed. From a paper-heavy and heavily bureaucratic set of processes, companies are today embracing newer technologies to manage their talent. “The rise of cloud computing and software as a service has allowed us to target small businesses and foray deep into India’s hinterland,” says GreytHR’s cofounder Girish Rowjee. A provider of payroll processing tools for small enterprises, it leans on the ability to remotely deliver its software to customers to grow.Other entrepreneurs agree. “Technology improvements have drastically reduced the cost of using tech across HR departments,” says Sanjoe Tom Jose, cofounder of Talview. Other companies such as Asaanjobs, a recruitment solutions venture, leverage technology to disrupt the market by finding the best fit two-three times faster than legacy rivals, says CEO Dinesh Goel.Asaanjobs wants to recast the way recruitment is conducted. While there are many jobs platforms out there, most of them provide a technology platform and access to jobs, especially at the entry level. As access to technology has improved, candidates and employers have begun to hunt for newer and better ways for job placements.According to some estimates, there are over a million small businesses in India and most of them either have rudimentary technology or none. GreytHR’s tools can cost as little as Rs 10 per employee compared with Rs 100-120 for software from larger rivals.As India Inc deepens its war for talent, startups such as GreytHR are focusing on three key areas to stay ahead in a cut-throat market. They want to improve the quality of hire, bring down the time taken for it and finally reduce the cost of recruitment. The use of new technology may offer some solutions.Meanwhile, Talview helps some 60-plus enterprises hasten their hiring with a video tool that helps in assessing the cognitive and technical knowledge of candidates. Rather than a drawn-out, multi-phase screening process, Talview’s software helps gauge and grade candidate responses, providing employers with a speedier way to meet their hiring goals.At Aasaanjobs, the founders have built an assisted hiring ecosystem, first for blue-collar entry level job seekers, to be subsequently expanded across the market. “We are trying to integrate the entire recruitment funnel — from sourcing to signing up candidates,” says CEO Goel. In a little over three years of operation, Aasaanjobs has signed up 3,000 recruiters and 700,000 job seekers.The shift of some 400 million people over the next five years, from unorganised to organized employment, provides a daunting challenge for employers. Not just in sheer numbers, but also in terms of being able to verify their antecedents. So far, this process has been a slow crawl, filled with realms of paper and often taking weeks, if not months to complete.Pravin Agarwala, who spent the better part of two decades with the German software giant SAP, is looking for new ways to solve this old problem. “We want to create a disruptive platform to build profiles of trusted people faster and at one-fifth of current costs,” he says.By using available data, the firm hopes to sharply reduce the time and money spent on verification process. His company, Better Place, has gone from reviewing some 200 profiles in September 2015 to over 50,000 profiles in October this year. This sharp scale-up is expected to continue, as Agarwala ambitiously hopes to review one crore profiles monthly in a couple of years.Career banker Vinay Bagri was used to dealing with salaried professionals and their bank accounts. Over the past decade, he has seen little change. Typically, employees need to deal with around 22 deductions (their own and employers’) and keeping tabs on these can be nightmarish for most.To try to provide employees a way out, his company offers a pre-configured card with spends automatically tied to specific categories such as fuel, meal allowances and so on (if you are entitled to a Rs 100 meal entitlement a day, it disappears if unused, for instance). “Only a small fraction of employees completely utilise their employee benefits,” says Bagri, cofounder of Niyo Solutions. If India has about 35 million tax payers, he contends that under 10% fully utilise these benefits.To get more of them to use these benefits — and to allow employers to track it — Niyo’s software is tied into the HR management systems of its clients and a mobile app allows for bills to be generated on the fly. In just five months, Bagi and his team have signed up over 50 companies, covering some 10,000 employees. Thanks to a tie-up with Yes Bank , it hopes to accelerate the adoption of its solution.As startups gain a firmer foothold, they are unveiling ambitious plans for their ventures. “We have put women’s aspirations on the map and want to build a differentiated global offering for this demographic,” says Chahal of Sheroes. Over the next three or four years, she hopes to have 10-15 million members on the platform and evolve Sheroes into a global platform. “There’s no reason why we can’t build on our success in India and take it to other markets.”Jose of Talview also has global ambitions. Having got early backing from Mayfield Ventures, the company has since expanded to Singapore, where it now has about 10 clients and is already looking beyond. “India has been our test bed,” says Jose. “We plan a much broader geographic expansion, including a foray into the US, the largest market, for such software.”In the close to $1 billion HR services industry in India, the plans of CoCubes perhaps point to the potential. According to Sethi of Aon Hewitt, 12-13 million people annually enter the workforce in India. While that’s a large opportunity for CoCubes, Aon Hewitt thinks its platform can be extended far beyond — first, to similar emerging markets such as China, Malaysia and several countries in Africa and then more critically to crack lucrative developed markets.Left to these impatient startups, the musty world of HR may never look the same again.