Bengaluru Startup Cuts Hiring Time with AI Interviews

Recruiters are drowning in applications, and most of them don't even match the job.

By the time someone manually sorts through hundreds of resumes, the best candidates have already accepted other offers. It's a problem that keeps getting worse as automated job applications flood inboxes with even more noise.

Jayanth Neelakanta saw this frustration firsthand and built a solution. His Bengaluru startup Equip uses AI to screen resumes, test skills, and even conduct live interviews, compressing weeks of hiring work into days.

The platform started in 2020 as Auto Proctor, an online exam monitoring tool that unexpectedly attracted 700,000 users in just three months. Companies began asking if they could use similar technology for hiring, and Neelakanta pivoted.

Today, over 820 companies use Equip, including major names like Wipro and Delhivery. The platform can process 100 resumes in under seven minutes and run 10,000 skill assessments at the same time, making it particularly useful for campus hiring in India where thousands apply at once.

Here's how it works. Recruiters set their requirements, and candidates apply through LinkedIn or directly. The AI assigns each person a Job Fit Score between 10% and 95%, comparing them against everyone else who applied and explaining why they match or don't.

For interviews, Google's Gemini powers real-time conversations that mimic human recruiters. The system evaluates only what candidates say, ignoring tone, appearance, or delivery style to reduce bias.

Privacy protections are built into every layer. The platform processes video locally and only stores footage if a violation is detected during assessments. Candidate data isn't used to train AI models, and proctoring data gets deleted after three months.

The newest feature lets recruiters search a database of 220,000 pre-assessed candidates, complete with salary expectations and availability. If a recruiter introduces someone, that person stays out of the general pool for three months to protect relationships.

The Ripple Effect

Equip raised $400,000 in pre-seed funding in 2022 and now operates in a market projected to nearly double from $1.2 billion to $2.4 billion by 2034. The company competes with established players like iMocha and HackerEarth but stands out by combining multiple hiring steps into one platform.

What makes this genuinely hopeful is how it addresses a problem on both sides. Recruiters stop wasting time on mismatched applications, and qualified candidates don't get buried under piles of automated spam.

The shift from monitoring exams to transforming hiring shows how fast innovation can solve real frustrations when someone actually listens to what people need.