Hunar.AI’s Voice AI Speeds Up Frontline Hiring, Cuts Recruitment Time by 75%

Hunar.AI is using Voice AI to help Indian employers handle large-scale frontline hiring faster. The Bengaluru startup says its platform can reduce hiring cycles by up to 75%. Customers also report 2x better conversion rates. Across users, the time for hiring, onboarding or engagement workflows has dropped by 90%, while overall workforce productivity has risen by about 25%.

Small and medium businesses have been quick to try Hunar.AI’s self-service HR platform. More than 100 SMBs have already set up over 1,000 AI agents for HR tasks. These agents conduct thousands of candidate conversations every day. They work across multiple stages, from first contact to later engagement, aiming to keep processes consistent and scalable for frontline roles.

Hunar.AI Voice AI adoption and conversational AI HRs

Krishna Khandelwal, Co-founder and CEO at Hunar.AI, describes strong interest in the Voice AI tools. "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.

Khandelwal says the different ways customers apply the system have been especially reassuring. "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." Hunar.AI believes this spread of use cases shows how voice-led HR workflows can scale across industries.

Hunar.AI Voice AI technology, frontline recruitment and market context

Hunar.AI was founded in 2022 by Shantanu Bhattacharyya and Krishna Khandelwal in Bengaluru. The company says its AI agents have already handled more than 10 million candidate interactions. Hunar.AI has raised $1.78 million across two funding rounds and reports a market valuation above Rs 100 crore. The platform supports end-to-end frontline recruitment, from hiring and onboarding to managing, engaging and retaining staff.

Hunar.AI’s Voice AI works across voice, WhatsApp and chat channels to reach frontline workers. The system supports multilingual communication, helping employers engage a broad, diverse workforce. Candidates can interact in local languages using regular phones or messaging apps. This structure is meant to reduce friction during hiring and decrease drop-offs, especially for roles with high churn and demanding schedules.

CTO and Co-founder Shantanu Bhattacharyya notes strong traction in regional languages. He tells Fortune India that nearly 40% of all 'Voice AI' calls on Hunar use neither Hindi nor English. The agents can speak over 20 languages, including Hindi, English, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati and Tamil, and can manage mid-conversation code-switching between languages.

Bhattacharyya highlights how Hunar.AI Voice AI evaluates callers during conversations. "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." These signals guide screening, assessments and training, while keeping processes consistent across different roles and locations.

The Voice AI layer is built for real-world phone environments rather than controlled spaces. Hunar.AI stresses production-grade capabilities such as acoustic robustness for noisy phones and support for varied accents. The system handles interruptions, keeps contextual memory across many conversational turns and uses reliable voice-activity detection. Together, these features aim to make interactions feel natural while staying machine-driven.

Indian HR teams often struggle with skills gaps, low engagement and high retention costs, especially among frontline workers. Many still depend on manual, phone-based or paper-heavy hiring methods, slowing recruitment and affecting business output. As the global market for training frontline workers grows from about $22.3 billion in 2023 to a projected $66.8 billion by 2030, platforms like Hunar.AI are positioning Voice AI as a scalable way to manage hiring, training and ongoing engagement.