She came in to recruit. Five years later she runs HR for India.

How she knew

Rekha came to Backbase already knowing it. Not from the website or a job ad - from the people she'd hired into a client organisation that was running on Backbase technology. Those hires talked about the platform, the culture, the pace of growth. She listened.

So when a recruiter reached out about a role, she didn't need much convincing. She'd already heard the case made by people with no reason to oversell it. She applied.

"I wanted to be in a good place to work. The people I'd hired told me Backbase was that place."

Day one as the only one

Rekha arrived as the first and only recruiter in India. There was no local team to shadow, no colleague down the hall to ask a quick question. The onboarding gave her a map - she knew where to look and who to reach when she got stuck. But day-to-day, the immediate support came from EMEA colleagues who pulled her into their rhythm and got her moving before she'd had time to feel the weight of going it alone.

That coordination - cross-regional, cross-timezone, unsolicited - left a mark. Not because it was extraordinary. Because it was just how things worked.

"I got to know the importance of doing together. That's what made the difference."

Building the function

The processes, the candidate pipeline, the way hiring worked across the region - Rekha built all of it. Over five years she made approximately 200 hires spanning India, Vietnam, and Australia, across Services, Business Functions, and Ecosystems. That breadth required understanding every part of the business, not just the roles she was filling.

As Recruitment Team Lead she led a team of two and took on campus hiring across India - opening a pipeline that hadn't existed before and running it from the ground up. The bar she set was specific: every hire had to be able to deliver on Backbase's goals and live its culture. Hitting that bar 200 times, across three countries and multiple functions, is what the numbers represent.

"I measure my work by one thing: whether the people I bring in can actually deliver. That bar doesn't change regardless of the role or the region."

The move into HR

In August 2025, Rekha moved into an HR Business Partner role. The shift wasn't a departure from what she'd built - it was a broadening of it. Where recruitment meant understanding the business well enough to hire for it, HRBP means understanding it well enough to shape it: org design, workforce planning, performance, culture, employee relations.

The India entity she helped staff is now the entity she helps run. That's not a common trajectory. It's what happens when someone builds something real and earns the right to own more of it.

Two hundred hires. One standard.

Two hundred hires across three countries. A campus pipeline built from scratch. A hiring function that didn't exist before she arrived. And now the HR function for the India entity she spent five years building out.

Every engineer, every salesperson, every operations hire Rekha placed is now working on a platform that runs inside 120+ of the world's biggest banks. The standard she held on every hire - can this person actually deliver - is directly connected to what those banks are able to build. That's not an abstraction. That's the work.