Findex is one of Australia’s leading financial service companies, offering integrated accounting, business advisory, and wealth management. The company recently set out to reimagine how it hires early talent – aiming to make their process not only faster, but also fairer and more effective at scale. With over 100 office locations across Australia and New Zealand and a lean early careers team, shortlisting alone could take up to 2 weeks, and hiring campaigns often stretched up to 90 days. Regional offices faced even greater challenges with limited local supply of talent making it harder to attract suitable candidates.
So, they made a bold move. Findex partnered with Vervoe to flip their graduate hiring process on its head, swapping out time-consuming resume reviews for tailored, skills-based assessments that actually reflected the work grads would be doing. For the first time, Findex had a more efficient way to connect with high-potential candidates in every corner of the country, including places they’d struggled to reach before.
The traditional approach wasn’t cutting it
Graduate recruitment at Findex had become a slow, manual process that was becoming increasingly hard to scale. With candidate screening split between internal teams and external partners, the experience felt disjointed, too much time was spent reviewing the wrong applicants, and too many promising candidates were being missed altogether. Shortlisting dragged on, timelines blew out, and it became harder to deliver the quality and consistency needed across locations. It wasn’t just inefficient, it was holding the team back. It was time for a faster, fairer way to hire.
Shifting the lens to skills
In FY25, Findex made the leap to a skills-first model, replacing traditional resume screening with tailored, role-based assessments delivered through Vervoe.
Instead of filtering for only GPA, degree types and specific degree disciplines or backgrounds, candidates were evaluated on real capabilities needed to succeed in the role. Each assessment mirrored job-relevant tasks, allowing applicants to showcase their skills in a way that felt authentic, not performative. This shift wasn’t just operationally effective, it struck a chord with the next generation of talent.
Research shows that 60% of Gen Z candidates abandon job applications that feel outdated or overly complex (Barker Ross) and 86% say purpose and meaning are essential when choosing where to work (Cake). They expect hiring processes to be fair, fast, and relevant and they’re quick to disengage when they’re not. By replacing resumes with real world, role-based assessments, Findex delivered exactly what this generation values: transparency, skill recognition and a chance to be seen for what they can do, not just what’s on paper.
“Unlike any assessment I’ve done, it was so refreshing to get a real sense of what I’d actually be doing.”
Findex Graduate Candidate
“Fun – didn’t feel like an assessment at all!”
Findex Graduate Candidate
The numbers backed it up
Breaking barriers, opening doors
With Vervoe, Findex didn’t just move faster, they moved better. Skills-first hiring helped broaden the early talent pipeline and drive meaningful diversity gains.
- 60% of hires were women, nearly doubling from 32%
- 13 hires came from non-traditional degree backgrounds
- 6 trainees placed in regional areas with historically low graduate supply
”Vervoe enables us to assess candidates at scale through job-relevant, skills-based assessments. It helps us identify top talent faster, reduce time-to-hire, improve candidate experience, and make more objective hiring decisions – all while supporting higher campaign fill and offer conversion rates in a competitive graduate market.”
Tania Edwards-Young, Early Careers Program Lead at Findex
Tailored assessments also helped fill critical roles across the business, matching high-potential candidates to the areas where they were needed most. In some cases, graduate positions were filled entirely with top-tier applicants whose skills and backgrounds were an exceptional fit. Across the board, the uplift was clear with the overall fill rate jumping from a campaign average of 57% to 77%, with five service lines reaching 100%. A seriously strong result in historically hard-to-fill areas.
All of this, delivered by a small early careers team with less manual effort and more confidence in every decision.
A smarter, fairer future
“Vervoe assisted us to view talent differently, focusing on potential and real job scenarios to better predict on-the-job performance. It’s been a game-changer for how we hire, who we hire, and how quickly we can move.”
Tania Edwards-Young, Early Careers Program Lead at Findex
By removing resumes from the equation, Findex redefined what early talent looks like. The result? More equity, more efficiency, and a standout candidate experience, all while strengthening their reputation as an employer of choice.
Because when you stop hiring for the past, you start hiring for potential. To learn more about skills based hiring for graduate recruitment, schedule a demo today!
