In today’s competitive real estate market, speed and precision in hiring can make the difference between capturing market opportunities and losing them to faster-moving competitors.
For Home Locator, a rapidly expanding real estate technology platform, the challenge wasn’t just finding talent; it was finding the right talent, fast enough to fuel their aggressive growth trajectory.
This case study highlights how Home Locator’s partnership with Northstarz.Ai revolutionized their hiring process, enabling remarkable efficiency gains while maintaining the cultural fit and performance standards that drive their success.
Executive Summary
Home Locator, a Bangalore-based real estate technology startup founded in 2018, transformed its summer 2025 campus hiring drive by partnering with Northstarz.Ai.
Key results:
• 75+ candidates assessed and 25+ interviews conducted in 2 days
• 10 roles closed within one week
• 3:1 applicant-to-interview conversion ratio
• 40% interview-to-shortlist conversion rate
• 10+ recruiter hours saved
By embedding AI seamlessly into its process, Home Locator not only accelerated hiring but elevated its employer brand in competitive campus recruitment.
Background & Market Context
India’s real estate technology sector is rapidly expanding, with numerous companies vying for the same entry-level talent. This competition makes offering a differentiated hiring experience a “strategic advantage”.
Home Locator, operating in this fast-paced environment, aimed to build a team characterized by adaptability, customer focus, and collaborative problem-solving skills. However, they faced the common challenges associated with rapid expansion: specifically, balancing speed, scale, and quality.
While looking to ensure high standards of quality and cultural alignment during their recent campus hiring drive, the company needed a solution that balanced these factors without overwhelming its internal HR team and available resources.
With numerous real estate tech startups competing for the same campus talent pool, Home Locator recognized that hiring speed and candidate experience could become their competitive differentiator, not just another operational necessity.
The Hiring Challenge: Speed + Scale + Quality
Home Locator‘s recruitment team faced a complex challenge that’s become increasingly common in high-growth companies. Traditional hiring methods weren’t keeping up with business demands, requiring evaluation of candidates for both technical skills and behavioral traits essential for success in dynamic environments.
Key Pain Points
- Volume Overwhelm: Processing 100s of applications for multiple positions across departments created bottlenecks that slowed time-to-hire significantly.
- Consistency Gaps: Standardizing evaluation criteria for candidate screening across different stakeholders was challenging, resulting in inconsistent hiring decisions.
- Skills vs. Traits Assessment: The existing mechanisms assessed technical skills well, but fell short in identifying candidates with the required behavioural traits for culture fitment.
- Time-to-Offer Pressure: In competitive talent markets, lengthy hiring processes often mean losing top candidates to faster-moving competitors.
The traditional approach of manual resume screening followed by multiple interview rounds created a hiring funnel that didn’t support Home Locator‘s growth ambitions. Recruiters spent excessive time on administrative tasks rather than strategic talent evaluation and candidate engagement.
The Northstarz.Ai Solution: AI-Powered Talent Intelligence
Home Locator‘s partnership with Northstarz.Ai represented a strategic shift from traditional hiring to “skills-first hiring”, focusing on what candidates can do rather than just their credentials. Northstarz‘s AI-powered platform offered a comprehensive solution that addressed Home Locator‘s core challenges.
Platform Capabilities Deployed
- Contextual AI-Resume Screening: Our AI assessed applicants’ backgrounds, projects, and experiences to identify those who align with Home Locator’s values of clarity, curiosity, and commitment.
- AI Video Interviews: Automated 15-minute video assessments evaluated behavioral competencies with industry-leading accuracy, replacing initial phone screening.
- Voice Analytics and Confidence Scoring: Our AI evaluated candidates’ responses on attributes such as communication clarity, confidence, and relevance through advanced voice analytics to reveal insights into their functional fitment.
- Standardized Evaluation Framework: Consistent AI-driven assessment across competencies, ensured fairness, objectivity, and comparability among applicants, mitigating the risk of human biases and variability.
- Live Analytics Dashboard: Our platform delivered real-time candidate scorecards, enabling Home Locator‘s team to make data-driven shortlist decisions and move from application to offer at unprecedented speed.
Implementation and Process Transformation
Northstarz.Ai, designed for fast, frictionless adoption, empowered Home Locator’s lean HR team to transform their hiring process overnight, redirecting recruiters’ bandwidth exclusively to evaluating final shortlists and making strategic decisions.
- Seamless Integration: With a quick setup, Northstarz.Ai was integrated with Home Locator’s existing ATS, enabling a speedy rollout of AI-driven assessments with no technical delays.
- Minimal Training Required: Intuitive dashboards and turnkey workflows allowed recruiters to get started immediately, preserving startup agility.
- Automated Workflows: Interview scheduling, candidate communications, and progress tracking were fully automated, reducing manual effort from 30+ minutes to just a few clicks.
- Candidate Engagement: Automated reminders and updates kept candidates informed and engaged, minimizing drop-offs throughout the process.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Centralized visibility into candidate progress enabled recruiters and hiring managers to share feedback and make confident, data-driven decisions, together.
Measurable Results: Efficiency Meets Excellence
The partnership between Home Locator and Northstarz.Ai delivered notable improvements across key hiring metrics:
Key Metrics at a Glance
- 3:1 Applicant-to-Interview Conversion: AI-powered screening funneled only the most aligned candidates to interviews, dramatically improving interview quality and tripling funnel efficiency compared to manual methods.
- 25+ Interviews Completed in Just 2 Days: Automated video interviews eliminated scheduling delays, compressing what would have taken weeks into 48 hours and enabling true high-volume hiring agility.
- 10 Roles Closed Within 2 Days: Rapid shortlist-to-hire turnaround showcased the precision of AI-driven assessment, allowing Home Locator to secure top campus talent before competitors.
- 10+ Recruiter Hours Saved: Automated screening, scheduling, and candidate communications freed up significant recruiter time, enabling the team to focus on strategic hiring and candidate engagement.
- 40% Interview-to-Shortlist Conversion: By advancing only top-tier candidates, Home Locator doubled its shortlist quality, ensuring a stronger final talent pool and higher offer acceptance rates.
The Human Impact: Beyond Numbers
While the quantitative gains are clear, the qualitative impact of Northstarz.Ai on Home Locator’s hiring experience has proved just as transformative, elevating both candidate and recruiter journeys, and strengthening the company’s position in a crowded market.
- Employer Brand Differentiation: A modern, AI-enabled process signaled to campus talent that Home Locator values speed, clarity, and respect, setting them apart as an employer of choice.
- Enhanced Candidate Experience: Streamlined workflows, timely communications, and transparent feedback kept candidates engaged and informed, reducing drop-offs and boosting satisfaction. Candidate NPS scores rose by 20%, and satisfaction was consistently rated at least 4 out of 5 stars.
- Recruiter Empowerment: With manual tasks automated, recruiters shifted from administrative work to strategic talent advisory, focusing on relationship-building, cultural assessment, and workforce planning.
- Quality Assurance: AI-driven detection of coached or inauthentic responses ensured genuine candidate evaluation, addressing concerns about interview gaming and maintaining hiring integrity.
- Future-Ready Hiring: Skills-first, data-driven assessments enabled Home Locator to confidently scale hiring for new roles and markets without compromising cultural fit or candidate quality.
“Northstarz.Ai made our hiring experience seamless, enabling us to focus on what matters most: the people. Their thoughtful integration brought structure and clarity to every step and helped us welcome new team members, in the span of less than a week, who embody the clarity, curiosity, and commitment we value deeply.”
— Babli Gupta, HR Manager, Home Locator
Conclusion
Home Locator’s collaboration with Northstarz.Ai exemplifies how young companies can leverage AI to transform hiring from a bottleneck into a strategic differentiator. By seamlessly infusing AI into its hiring strategy, Home Locator not only accelerated the recruitment timeline but also significantly enhanced its employer brand in a competitive real estate landscape and set a new benchmark for recruitment agility in the real estate tech sector.
