How Bengaluru startup Hunar is using AI to make large-scale hiring faster
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Hunar.AI, an AI-powered platform for frontline workforce management that recently launched an AI-based self-serving HR platform for small and medium businesses (SMBs), is leveraging AI to make large-scale hirings smoother and more reliable. Krishna Khandelwal, Co-founder and CEO of Hunar.ai, says the platform can cut hiring cycles by up to 75% and has delivered a 25% increase in overall workforce productivity.
Founded in 2022 by Shantanu Bhattacharyya and Krishna Khandelwal, Hunar.AI claims to have handled over 10 million candidate interactions through its AI-powered agents. The Bengaluru-based startup has raised $1.78 million in two rounds of funding, and currently commands a market valuation of over Rs 100 crore.
"The response to our self-serve Voice AI launch has been extremely encouraging. In just a short span, 100+ SMBs have already created 1000+ AI agents across a wide range of HR use cases. These agents are handling thousands of candidate engagements per day," Khandelwal tells Fortune India.
What's been most validating is the diversity of adoption, he said. "Our customers are using Conversational AI HRs for screening, interview scheduling, assessments (functional, behavioural, technical and language skills), frontline voice training, workforce reactivation, reducing absenteeism, exit interviews and even attrition reduction."
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Across customers, the company has seen 2x improvement in conversion rates, while the time taken to run a hiring, onboarding or engagement process has dropped by 90%. "This reinforces our belief that Voice AI can fundamentally change how large-scale hiring and frontline workforce engagement is done, making it faster, more human and far more scalable," adds Khandelwal.
CTO Shantanu Bhattacharyya, who's also the Co-founder at Hunar.AI, reveals to Fortune India that nearly 40% of all 'Voice AI' calls on Hunar happen in non-Hindi and non-English languages. "With 70%+ engagement rates on connected calls, our proprietary evaluation layer analyses sentiments, behavioural patterns, tonality and deeper personality signals, making large-scale hiring both faster and smarter."
Hunar.AI provides end-to-end frontline recruitment solutions, and helps businesses right from hiring, onboarding, managing, engaging and retaining employees using voice AI. The platform also offers multilingual support via channels like WhatsApp. This makes the platform accessible to a vast and diversified workforce.
Notably, the global market for training frontline workers was valued at about $22.3 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 16.8%, reaching around $66.8 billion by 2030.
India’s HR industry faces major issues like severe skills gaps and high retention costs, which contributes to low employee engagement. Many companies still rely on manual hiring processes, which slow down the recruitment exercise. This, in turn, adversely impacts business productivity.
Hunar.AI claims to have developed conversational agents that run on voice, WhatsApp and chat channels and speed up the process by boosting engagement to find the right talent. The agents speak over 20 languages, including Hindi, English, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati and Tamil, and they handle mid-dialogue code-switching.
The platform also focuses on production-grade voice capabilities, including acoustic robustness for noisy phones, accent adaptation, interruption handling, and contextual memory across turns, and reliable voice-activity detection.