
Avinash says, “Around 6.5 lakh people graduate every year, and 85 percent start looking for jobs. But when companies hire, they rarely find candidates who are prepared.”
This gap led to the NorthStarz.ai platform, owned by Novenue Technologies and founded by Saurabh Sisodia Singh, Avinash V Singh, and Rajiv Ranjan. It started off as an attempt to help students self-assess and improve their interview readiness, and later evolved into an enterprise product that automates early-stage candidate screening.
Based in Bengaluru, NorthStarz.ai now evaluates both technical and human-centric skills through AI-led interviews, helping companies identify fit with greater precision. The platform used by companies like Mahindra Logistics has processed over 60,000 candidate assessments, and has raised 250K in funding.
Shift from student upskilling to enterprise-focused screening
Avinash says, “The question eventually boiled down to why the failure rate of startups in India is so high, and it wasn't capital that was the problem anymore. What was missing was good human capital. Seven to ten years ago, the quality just wasn’t very innovative.”
Avinash explains, “Around 6.5 lakh people graduate every year, and 85 percent start looking for jobs. But when companies hire, they rarely find candidates who are prepared. With over 22 years in HR, we saw this problem repeatedly. So we thought, why not start there and build a platform for candidates to help them see where they stand?”
“When the platform did not work out with the students, we thought, why not flip the whole ecosystem? If candidates are not interested, let's go to companies because companies want to identify such skill sets in human beings when they're hiring.”
How NorthStarz AI turned soft skills into structured intelligence
NorthStarz.ai interviewed over 60,000 candidates to identify five core skills experts value most: critical thinking, growth mindset, active listening, communication, and teamwork. They arrived at these through conversations with psychologists, HR leaders, and long-time industry partners.
A parallel study of company value systems showed these five traits reflected what most organisations prioritised. These responses were scored, reviewed, and standardized. That data became the foundation for training the company’s AI models.
Avinash explains, “We also started researching on the kind of values that drive companies and what it is that most companies use amongst their cultural or you know, value system. And we found that while there are eight to 10 larger aspects, these five broadly capture almost 60 to 70% of every company's value system. And hence, we narrowed down to these five.”
“Once we did that, and it took a lot of time because we built our data, created our models, trained the system, we realised we had built something no company in the world had at the time”
AI-led screening system built for scale, flexibility, and recruiter relief
NorthStarz.ai allows recruiters to post jobs based on specific role requirements, after which candidates receive a unique interview link they can access at their convenience. The platform conducts the full interview, assessing both technical and human-centric skills aligned to the job description.
Built with compliance in mind, it follows India’s DPDPA and approved communication standards, including those for WhatsApp, ensuring a secure and flexible experience for candidates.
Avinash explains, “We did that by automating the entire communication flow on WhatsApp, and we eliminated the need for the recruiter to take the initial interview. This interview link can be, you know, used to take an interview anytime by the candidate, be it day, be it night, because a human is not conducting the interview, it is being conducted by the AI itself.”
NorthStarz.ai evaluates candidates across four key dimensions:
- Resume fitment
The platform checks how closely a candidate’s resume aligns with the requirements of the job description. - Employability skills
It assesses human-centric traits such as communication, critical thinking, and adaptability based on how candidates respond in interviews. - Technical fitment
Candidates are tested on their knowledge of relevant tools, technologies, and domain-specific skills needed for the role. - Confidence analysis
Through voice analysis, the system evaluates how confidently a candidate answers each question, adding a layer to the assessment.
“The fourth is something we built entirely in-house, and no other platform offers it today,” he says. “We can assess a candidate’s confidence on each answer by analysing their voice, things like pitch, volume, and filler words. It helps us understand how sure they are about what they’re saying.”
“NorthStarz.ai automates three key tasks that recruiters typically handle manually which rescreening resumes, evaluating candidate skills, and ranking applicants based on fit and since candidates use resume builders recruiters that had to call 20 people now tell us call 100 unsure who to shortlist and its reached a point where they say it feels less like hiring and more like working in a call center.”
“Our North Star metric is the number of candidates who complete an interview on our platform. That’s the only thing which is sort of the success factor, not just for me, but for my customer as well.”
Sector focus and volume-linked pricing structure
NorthStarz.ai primarily works with companies across ITES, BFSI, GCCs, and staffing or augmentation firms. These sectors form the bulk of its current user base. Within ITES, typical roles include software engineers, data engineers, back-end and front-end developers. In BFSI, the focus shifts to sales roles, field agents, business development executives, and operations or back-office staff.
In the staffing, augmentation, and BPO segments, the platform is used to assess candidates for customer care, support, and general operations roles. These companies rely on NorthStarz.ai to screen for critical soft skills before hiring at scale, across high-volume functions.
Avinash says, “AI adoption matures, more profiles would be added to their systems. So, yeah, I mean, we are seeing an upwards tick in the number of companies who are now willing to come and adopt AI or at least evaluate it and find out how it can help them.”
Avinash says, “The product follows a pure freemium model. Anyone who visits our portal gets one free job listing per month. Beyond that, we charge based on the number of completed interviews. We only bill for completed assessments on our platform.”
From Python to Go (Golang) - Meeting performance demands
NorthStarz AI was built before generative AI became widely accessible, and with no reference architecture in sight, the team had to build everything from scratch, where every component of the assessment engine was shaped through trial and error.
With no existing datasets of interview responses to draw from, the team spent two years manually conducting and processing interviews to train their models and get them production-ready.
“We had to write our machine learning algorithms from scratch. This was something unique because nobody else had done it in the world. Nothing like this existed as a reference to us.”
“Python has been shouted out as the language for data engineers, which is incorrect. We find fewer candidates who are experts in Go, so we often have to train them ourselves.”
Tracking the shift from general-purpose to specialised and autonomous AI
“You see, companies build their own AI models on their internal data, which is fit for their use. For example, Accenture is building its own AI model. JP Morgan is building their own AI model. Apple is building its own AI model. These are primarily models that are being built to help these companies succeed by leveraging the data that these companies have generated within their lifespans.”
“What happens is that the responsibility to generate output from multiple sources ends up on human beings. And human beings are not always the best when it comes to reporting. These agents can be taught how to identify flags, how to spot opportunities, and how to flag concerns, and they will do it in their rawest and sharpest form, which human beings cannot.”